"He may have been cold." "He has feathers," Felicity pointed out. The Duke looked at Dioynes. Dioynes looked at the pond. There was a complicated transaction occurring between the two of them, she thought.
That had been developing over five mornings and had arrived somewhere neither of them was quite willing to name. "He likes you," she said. "He sat on a bank near me." "Yes," she said. "That is how he likes people."
A pause. The October morning was cold and clear and smelled of leaf mold and distance and the faint sweetness of the willows. Somewhere on the estate a horse was being exercised, and the sound drifted across the garden in the intermittent way of sounds the wind carries selectively, as if choosing which pieces of the morning to deliver. She looked at the Duke's profile. He was watching the pond with the expression of someone who spent a great deal of time watching the pond, which she was beginning to think was not actually about the pond.
The lines of his face were older than she would have guessed from his posture. There was something in them that suggested not sorrow exactly, but the aftermath of sorrow carefully organized, the face of a man who had done significant internal housekeeping, and maintained the results with considerable discipline. "I should take him back," she said. "He'll be back tomorrow," the Duke replied. Probably a pause that had its own comfortable character.
"Miss Bramwell," he said. "Yes?" "There is, if you have no fixed engagements this morning, a view from the east terrace. It is worth seeing at this time of year." He said it with the careful precision of a man making an offer he wasn't entirely sure he intended to make and was therefore making very precisely so it could be retracted with minimal difficulty if needed. She looked at him. "I have no fixed engagements," she said. The east terrace offered a view of the valley and the beechwoods beyond.
The beeches had turned entirely to copper and gold, and the light filtered through them at that particular October angle that made the whole scene appear considered not by a painter, but by the day itself, as if the day had arranged its light specifically for this hillside. Felicity stood at the stone balustrade, gazing at it for a long moment without speaking. "Oh," she said eventually. The Duke stood a little to her left, and she had the impression, very clear, the clearest impression she had formed about him, yet that he was watching her reaction rather than the view with the particular attention of someone who has brought another person to something they love and is waiting quietly to see if that love is transferable.