He is exactly what I expected, she said at last, and nothing like what I imagined. Her mother waited. He is guarded. He has built something very careful around himself and lives inside it quite comfortably.
I don’t think he knows how to want something openly without immediately building walls around the wanting. Most men of his age don’t, her mother said practically.
I know. Ada’s voice was thoughtful. I just wonder if he’s already decided the answer is no before he’s let himself understand what the question is.
Her mother looked at her daughter, 20 years old, with 10 years of careful patience behind her, and a particular quality of resolve that had always been in her, even at 10, even in nightgowns in cold corridors, and said nothing.
Sometimes silence is its own kind of answer. Meanwhile, a young viscount named Hereford had decided to stop being cautious. Lord Edmund Hereford was 28, handsome in an uncomplicated way, with a pleasant estate in Shropshire and a temperament that could be described, charitably, as straightforward, and less charitably, as simple.
He had admired Ada from a distance for the first weeks of the season and had spent the last 2 weeks moving steadily closer. By the 9th of June, at the Greystone card party, he had made his intentions clear enough that Ada could not have misunderstood them.
He sat beside her at the card table for 3 hours. He was attentive, amusing, interested in her opinions, and notably unafraid of saying directly what he meant. Ada liked him, genuinely.
He was easy in a way that Maximilian was not. He offered warmth that didn’t have to be excavated from beneath years of carefully constructed distance.
Maximilian arrived late to the card party and registered the situation in approximately 30 seconds. He had never been a jealous man. This was his considered view of himself, based on 40 years of not having felt it.
He discovered, standing in the doorway of the Greystone card room, watching Lord Hereford lean toward Ada to say something that made her laugh, that his considered view had simply been waiting for the appropriate stimulus.