VIII.
Pewsey's reply came on cream paper with a seal that looked as if it had been pressed by a man thinking of other seals he preferred. Sir Ridley read it aloud in the library with Leonora present, because secrets had already done enough damage for one month.
Ashbrook — If you mean to keep a sentimental souvenir of the Peninsula in your yard and call it honour, that is your affair. If your daughter means to make a public tenderness of it, that becomes mine, and the parish's. I withdraw my addresses. I do not withdraw my eyes. — A.P.
"He writes like a man who has practiced being wounded," Leonora said.
"He writes like a man who intends to be believed," Sir Ridley answered. He fed the letter to the fire. The seal blackened and slumped. "We will give him nothing theatrical. Theatricality is his food."
The cottage at the lane end had stood empty since old Gaff the under-gardener died of a winter cough. It had two rooms below, a sleeping loft, a hearth that drew when the wind was kind, and a patch of ground where gooseberries had gone wild. Raff moved into it on a Monday with his chest and his prayer book and a secondhand table Mrs. Glynn found in the attic. Leonora did not help him move. She stood in the lane with Jemima and watched the door accept him, and the watching felt more intimate than any closed tack room had been.
"It is small," Jemima observed.
"It is his," Leonora said. "Small and his is larger than grand and borrowed."
Raff's new title—head of the horses—meant less to the yard at first than the cottage did. Titles could be mocked. A roof with a door that locked could not. Burl scratched his head and decided the world was strange. Hobb spat less. Deane, corrected in private by Sir Ridley with a coldness that left him pale for days, treated Raff with a brittle courtesy that was almost worse than contempt and then, slowly, with something nearer ordinary fear of a man who had the master's ear.
Leonora walked to the lane in daylight. Mrs. Glynn knew. Sometimes Mrs. Glynn came as far as the gooseberries and sat on the stile with her knitting, a chaperone made of wool and iron. Under those conditions Leonora and Raff learned a different language: not the fever of stolen minutes, but the slower grammar of people deciding whether they could bear each other's mornings.
He showed her how to tell a horse's age by its teeth, and laughed—rare, startling—when she got it wrong and insisted the mare was lying. She brought Cowper from the harness cupboard into the cottage and read aloud while he mended a length of rein, her voice making gardens in the air above a room that smelled of woodsmoke and leather. Once his hand brushed hers as he took a cup of tea from her. Neither of them pretended it had not happened. Neither of them hurried it into more than it was.
"I used to think love was a cliff," Leonora said one afternoon, while rain stitched the windows. "You fell or you did not."
"And now?" Raff asked.
"Now I think it may be a lane. You walk it. You see whether it goes where you can live."
He nodded, considering. "My father walked lanes that ended in the sea. He still said a man ought to know the ground under him before he called it fate."
"Did he talk much? At the end?"
"Enough." Raff's gaze went to the fire. "He said Ashbrook would either be a gentleman or a disappointment, and that both were useful to know. He said I was not to hate a man for forgetting; forgetting is how soldiers sleep. He said I was not to adore a man for remembering; remembering is how soldiers go mad. He said I was to look, and then choose."
"And have you chosen?"