Annabelle kept her eyes forward as they passed him, afraid to look either left or right. Six steps. Eight.Ten. Then, because she could not help it, she turned.
He had not moved from the pavement and was watching them go. His hands were at his sides, and his jaw was set, and his face, at this distance, gave her nothing at all.
Of course. What else had she expected? She turned back around and walked.
The market ran along both sides of the lane near Craven Street: a fruit seller, a ribbon stall with bolts wrapped in brown paper, a woman with pressed flowers in small frames, a barrow of household tools that had also, through some logic of its own, accumulated three copper warming pans and a set of ornamental tongs. A man sold chestnuts from a brazier at the corner, and the smell of them carried down the lane in the grey morning air.
Helena went straight to the ribbons.
“This green,” she said, holding a bolt up toward the grey sky. “Or this one.” She held up a second, a shade darker. “I am trying to decide whether I want to look like spring or like a hedge.”
“The first one,” Annabelle said.
“You didn’t look.”
“The first one is always better.”
Helena put the darker green back. “That is a philosophy, not an answer.” She unrolled a length of the lighter shade across her wrist. “What do you think of this with ivory? My new morning dress has ivory trim and Mama says it will clash, but Mama said the blue pelisse would clash with everything and I have worn it three times this week without incident.”
“It won’t clash.”
“Are you looking at it?”
“No.”
Helena rolled the ribbon back onto the bolt and set it down. She looked at Annabelle. “You are ruining your own disposition, Annabelle. Do not be such a spoilsport.” she said.
Annabelle sputtered. “A spoilsport?”
“Yes, a spoilsport.” Helena insisted, not backing down. “I brought you here so you would forget that infuriating husband of yours for a while, and you are not even trying.”
It…it wasn’t as though it was easy to forget the stone-cold expression on his face, either. He had not even tried to stop her from leaving.
She had not expected him to soften in the middle of Craven Street. She had not expected anything, which was not entirely true—she had expected, if she was being honest, somethingother than that particular flatness. Some acknowledgment in his expression of the week that had passed between them, of what had preceded it. But his face had been entirely still, and she had turned back around, and that was that.
Seven days in the same house with their dinners served at the same table, and their candles snuffed at approximately the same hours, and they had arrived here. Two people who asked after each other’s health on the pavement and called it a conversation.
Jameshadnoticed. He had said so, four days into it, at supper—seated beside Annabelle with his soup spoon in hand and his eyes on the empty chair opposite, and then on her: “Uncle Dominic’s chair has been empty since Sunday. Is this the arrangement now?” She had told him no. She did not know whether that was still true.
She stopped at a stall of small decorative pins and trinkets.
Helena had already moved three stalls further on. Annabelle was alone at the table with its rows of small things, none of which she particularly needed, and the anger that had been building since Tuesday came in now in a way it had not been able to when she was in Helena’s morning room, arranging her voice as precisely as she touched pianoforte keys.
She was hiswife. In the complete sense of that word. She had lain awake in the dark and counted his breathing when he woke from the nightmare. They had already lain with each other. Several times!
Did he not want even that from her now? Not the conversation, not the proximity, not the other things that living in the same house had gradually and quietly become?
The thought arrived at the base of her throat and stayed there, hot and unmanageable. Was she so entirely dispensable?All of it?If she actually left now, would he truly not care?
She had not asked for a declaration. She had not asked him to become a different man. She had asked one question, received an answer she disagreed with, and gone. And apparently that was sufficient reason for him to absent himself so completely that even a week later, faced with her on a pavement twenty feet away, he could produce nothing more than: I am glad to hear it.
She moved along the stall without purpose. A tray of enameled pins. A set of glass buttons. A row of small brooches arranged on a length of dark velvet.
She stopped.
The brooch at the center of the row was a small thing: a cheap silver setting, the stonework simple, the stone itself a piece of paste glass not much larger than a coat button. The glass was blue. A clear, sea-glass blue—pale and transparent, shot through with its own light even in the grey of the morning.
She picked it up, set it back down…and picked it up again.
