Marianne, despite herself, felt the corner of her mouth twitch. "That sounds like an excellent use of an evening."
"It has its appeal." He looked at her properly then for the first time—not the cursory glance he'd given her when she'd first tumbled in, dripping and breathless, but a real look: assessing, faintly curious. "You don't know who I am."
"Should I?"
"Most people in this city would consider it a failing not to."
"Then I suppose I am a great disappointment to the city." She wrung a bit of water out of the end of her shawl, mostly to have something to do with her hands. "I've had a difficult evening as well, if it's any consolation. I don't suppose that entitles me to your name, though, given I never gave you mine."
"Julian," he said, and did not offer a surname, and she did not ask for one.
And something about that—the plainness of it, one name given freely between two strangers who would likely never see each other again, without the weight of a title trailing behind it—put her more at ease than anything else had all evening.
"Marianne," she said.
"Marianne." He said it once, testing the shape of it, and then looked back out the rain-streaked window as though he had not meant to say it aloud at all.
The carriage rattled on through the storm, and for a while neither of them spoke, and the silence was, strangely, not unpleasant. Marianne found herself studying him without quite meaning to: the tight set of his jaw; the way his hands, when they weren't gripping the newspaper he'd forgotten he was holding, kept curling and uncurling, as though working out some private frustration. He was, she thought, a man doing a great deal of work to appear unbothered, and doing it rather badly, at least to anyone paying close attention.
"You said you were meant to be clearing your head," she said finally. "Did it work?"