"Yes."
"She wrote about everything. She wrote when I was twelve, and told me what she thought I would be reading at school. She wrote when I went up to Cambridge. She wrote when I bought my commission, and said she was afraid, and was proud, and had lit a candle. She wrote when Napoleon came back from Elba. She wrote—" His voice broke, quite quietly. "She wrote every year to say she was not angry. That it was not my fault. That she did not blame me for not writing back."
"Oh, my lord."
"I thought she had forgotten me." He said it in a tone of wondering simplicity, as a child might say it. "All my life, I thought she went away and forgot. I thought—I do not know what I thought. That there was something about me that was easy to leave."
She was on her feet. She did not know when she had risen. She crossed the room in two steps, and she did what she had not done in the library, the thing she had been wanting to do for a month: she took both his hands in hers, the whole one and the ruined one, and held them tight.
"There was never anything about you that was easy to leave," she said fiercely. "Do you hear me? Nothing. It was done to you. Not by you."
He looked down at her, and something in the grey eyes broke open.
"I should like to go to Lyme," he said.
"Yes."
"I should like to go today."
"Then we had better see about the horses," said Clara.
"We?"
"You will not travel alone." She flushed, abruptly, to the roots of her hair. "I mean, it is not my place. But it is nearly eighty miles. You are not well. And if she—if it is not what we think—" She stopped. "I should like to be there, my lord. If you will allow it."
He did not answer for a moment. He was looking at her hands, small, ink-stained, holding his own.
"I should not know how to do it without you," said Adrian, very simply.