There were tables with lemonade and small plates of things that no one was really eating, and a string quartet at the far end near the roses, who played pieces that drifted pleasantly across the lawn without demanding anyone’s full attention. Maximilian found Ada near the wisteria.
She was standing with her back partly to the party, looking at the climbing plant with what he had come to recognize as genuine interest, the kind she brought to anything she examined, which was different from the performed interest most people offered to the world. Her sister was across the lawn with a group of young people.
She was alone for the first time in his memory of her, and he moved before he had decided to. Miss Pemberton. She turned. The sunlight was full in her face, and she didn’t squint against it, just received it.
And there was something in that small thing that tightened something in his chest. Your Grace. She waited. Composure perfectly intact.
He wanted to say something direct, something honest, something that would close the distance between what he knew and what she was deliberately not confirming. Instead, he found himself asking whether she enjoyed wisteria.
The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. I was thinking about the structure of it, how it climbs. It winds so tightly around whatever it clings to that after a certain point, you can no longer say which is holding which.
He looked at the wisteria. He looked back at her. That is a rather precise observation for a garden party. I am a rather precise person.
No apology in it, just the fact. They were quiet for a moment that contained, as their silences increasingly contained, a great deal that was not silence. Around them, the party moved and laughed and performed.
Neither of them looked at it. I remembered, he said. He hadn’t planned to. The words simply arrived, and he let them. October 1800, the corridor at Whitmore House. You were supposed to be in bed.
Something shifted in her face. Not surprise, the opposite of surprise. A quality of stillness that had been braced for this moment and was now meeting it without flinching.