Page 66

“I will explain all of it. I swear it.” Rose glanced over her shoulder at the empty lane, then at the gap in the hedge, and her whole body shrank a little. “But we cannot speak here. Not where anyone might walk past. We need somewhere private. I have taken a small house a little way outside London, and it is where I have been staying. It is not far. Will you come?”

For one second Lady Byron said nothing. Then she drew a breath, shook out her skirts, and became herself again.

“My carriage is waiting at the gate. Put your hood up and keep your head down, and walk between us.”

No one spoke in the carriage.

Lady Byron had drawn the curtains herself, and the inside was dim and close. Rose sat on the forward seat with her hood still raised and her hands knotted in her lap. Leonora sat across from her, so near that their knees almost touched. She could not stop looking. She looked at the gray at her mother’s temples, the chapped knuckles and the place at the throat of the cloak where the silver pin sat. Each time her mother glanced up, they both looked away at once, like children caught.

“You have your grandmother’s way of holding your chin,” Rose said at last, very quietly.

“Do I?” Leonora asked.

“When you are about to argue.”

“I am not about to argue.”

“No. Forgive me.” Rose pressed her lips together. “I had so much to say, and now I am afraid that anything I say will be the wrong thing.”

“ I feel the same,” Leonora said.

Lady Byron rapped on the roof. Rose leaned to the little hatch and murmured directions, a left at the toll, then a lane past a dead elm. Leonora listened to her voice for the simple pleasure of hearing it ask for something.

The house was where the terraces gave out and the road became hedgerow. It was narrow and brick, with a slate roof, one window upstairs, and a pot of lavender on the sill. Inside, the floor had been scrubbed so often that the boards were pale as bone. A blue teapot with a chipped spout sat in the middle of the table like a guest of honor.

At the foot of the stairs stood a small trunk, strapped shut.

Leonora saw it and understood. It had been packed for a long time, in case she needed to run.

“Sit, please.” Rose was moving too quickly, setting out cups, wiping a surface that was already clean. “I have only tea and bread. I did not know that I would... I would have made something...”

The cup slid from her fingers and cracked in two against the floor. She stared at it. Her shoulders began to shake.

Lady Byron removed her gloves finger by finger, laid them on the table, and picked up the kettle. In all of Leonora’s life she had never seen her touch one.

“Sit down, Rose,” she said. Her voice was gruff. “Both of you. I shall pour.”

They sat on opposite sides of the table with the blue teapot between them, and no one spoke for what felt like an hour. Lady Byron poured, but the tea was in fact dreadful. Leonora wrapped both hands around the cup as though it were something alive, wondering what to do first, or even what to say.

“Well one of you will speak within the quarter hour…” Lady Byron announced then turned to Leonora. “…or I shall begin telling Rose about the winter you hid in the linen press for an entire day, Leonora, to avoid a French lesson.”

Rose’s head came up. “She did what?”

“Sixteen hours. We searched the grounds with lanterns. She emerged at dusk, covered in lint.”

Rose laughed, a real laugh this time, startled out of her. It carried a little, bright at the top and rough at the edge, and it reached something in Leonora that she had thought lost. Her mother had always laughed like that. She had forgotten the sound until this second.

“Tell me more,” Rose whispered. She was looking at Lady Byron, but her hands had crept across the table toward Leonora’s and stopped a finger’s width short. “Tell me everything. I missed so much.”

“Why did you not come for me?”

The question left Leonora’s mouth before she had decided to ask it. It was not the one she had meant to begin with but there were too many lingering questions and she did not think small talk was the way to start.

The laughter in the room went out.

Rose closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked at Leonora steadily.

“Because I could not,” she said. “Because every step I took toward you would have been a step toward you for him as well.”