Raff looked at her then, fully, without the sideways caution he still wore like a second shirt. "I have chosen to want a life in which you are not a secret. Whether that life can be built here is a question with more than one carpenter."
She liked him most in such moments—when he refused to turn wanting into a vow that trapped them both.
At Ashbrook Place, Sir Ridley returned to his sessions and his drains and his correspondence with a man in Winchester about a boundary oak. He did not speak of Corunna at dinner. He did not ask Leonora where she had walked. But once, late, she passed the library and saw him standing with his campaign pocket-book open, and she left him to it without knocking, because some reckonings required an empty room.
IX.
Scandal, when it came, did not come as a flood. It came as a drip.
A remark at the Lydeard market about Ashbrook's new cottage. A smile at a card table in Winchester when Pewsey, asked whether he still rode east to court Miss Ashbrook, said that he preferred roads that did not end in straw. A letter from a distant cousin to Mrs. Glynn's sister, asking in the sweetest hand whether dear Leonora were quite well. Nothing actionable. Everything adhesive.
Jemima Crowle, who had extended her visit on grounds of her aunt's rheumatism and her own curiosity, took to accompanying Leonora to church with a brightness that dared the parish to speak aloud. In the pew Leonora felt eyes on the back of her neck like gnats. She held her prayer book steady. After the service the rector, Mr. Tolleson, shook Sir Ridley's hand too heartily and asked after the horses as if horses were the only safe animals left in England.
"We are becoming a subject," Leonora told Raff that evening at the stile. Mrs. Glynn's knitting needles flashed in the dusk like small weapons. "I dislike being a subject. I dislike more the idea of shrinking until I am not one."
"Then do not shrink," Raff said. "And do not swell into a defiance that feeds Pewsey. Walk the middle. Middles are hated by people who need edges to cut with."
"You have become philosophical since you got a hearth."
"Heat encourages thought," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved. "Also gooseberries. I am at war with the gooseberries. They have no respect for order."
Mrs. Glynn snorted without looking up. "Gooseberries and gentry. Same species."
On a Thursday—another Thursday, as if the week itself had a sense of humour—Pewsey found a more precise tool.
He arrived at Ashbrook Place with Mr. Samuel Keddy, attorney-at-law, a dry man with ink on his fingers and the air of someone who charged for breathing. They asked for Sir Ridley. Leonora, hearing voices in the hall, did not go upstairs. She stood in the morning-room doorway and listened with Jemima's shoulder against hers.
Keddy had prepared a paper. It concerned, he said, the possibility of alienation of affection and the quieter possibility of action for loss of marital expectation, which was a nonsense polished until it gleamed. Pewsey had been encouraged to believe himself contracted in understanding if not in law. There were witnesses to his attentions. There was the postponement. There was the public scene.
"You are attempting to frighten me with fog," Sir Ridley said.
"Fog becomes solid when a jury breathes on it," Keddy replied mildly. "We do not threaten. We invite settlement. A quiet acknowledgment that Miss Ashbrook's affections were engaged, a sum for Mr. Pewsey's wounded prospects, and a written assurance that the person Harrow will be removed from the estate. Then Winchester need never hear a word."
Leonora stepped into the hall. Jemima tried to catch her sleeve and missed.