The door opened, and Lady Cecilia Hartley, Countess of Wyncombe, came in out of the cold with a shawl over her head and a book under her arm, smiling as though she had been caught doing something she ought not.
"Am I late, Mr. Hale?"
"You are exactly on time, my lady. The orchid is the one who is late."
She laughed.
It was a short, startled laugh, the laugh of someone who has not used it much lately and is surprised to find it still in working order. Samuel had noticed that about her from the very first morning. She was twenty-three, a baronet's daughter from Shropshire, married a year and a half to a man who spoke to her at dinner about the weather and the price of wheat. She walked through Wyncombe's great rooms like a guest who had been told not to touch anything. But in the glasshouse, among the damp leaves and the smell of earth, she laughed.
"I have brought the notes," she said, holding up the book. "I copied the whole of Mr. Sweet's treatise on temperature. The thing is, I do not think he is right about the night heat. I think he is far too cautious."
"I think so too, my lady."
"Then why does the book say it?"
"Because the man who wrote it never lost a plant at three in the morning, and I have."
She sat on the upturned crate that he had set out for her weeks ago, without remark, and opened the book across her knees. And for the next hour the Countess of Wyncombe and her head gardener argued, quietly and happily, about the correct temperature for a flower that no one else in England had ever seen.
Neither of them noticed that the sun had cleared the beech wood, or that a man on a tall grey horse had stopped on the rise above the glasshouse, and was watching them through the glass.
Chapter Two: The Earl Comes Home
Lucian Hartley, fifth Earl of Wyncombe, had not intended to come home early.
Parliament had not yet risen. There was a bill on the Corn Laws to be argued, and a dinner at Lord Liverpool's to which he had been invited, and a hundred small obligations that a man of his rank was expected to discharge in London in the month of June. But the roads had been dry, his business had finished sooner than expected, and he had found himself, to his own surprise, ordering the carriage at midnight and driving through the dark toward Hampshire as though something were pulling him by a rope.
It was a feeling he did not examine. Lucian was thirty-four, tall, dark, and handsome in a stern, unyielding way, the way a cliff is handsome. He had been raised by a father who regarded affection as a sort of weakness, like a limp, to be hidden from company. He had learned very early that a man of his position showed nothing. He had learned it so thoroughly that when, eighteen months ago, he had married Cecilia Fairchild at her father's insistence and his own late mother's quiet wish, he had stood at the altar feeling nothing at all, or what he told himself was nothing.
Then she had looked up at him through her veil, and he had felt something move in his chest like a key turning, and he had spent every day since pretending it had not.
He did not know how to talk to her. That was the whole of it. He would come into the drawing room intending to say something kind, and he would hear his father's voice come out of his own mouth: The roads are poor. The wheat is thin this year. And she would smile politely and say, "Yes, my lord," and the light in her face would go out like a candle behind a screen.
So he had gone to London. It was easier.
Now it was seven in the morning, the grey horse was blowing steam, and he was sitting on the rise above his mother's glasshouse because his wife was not in the house. Her maid had said she had gone out walking. She had been going out walking, the maid said, nearly every morning since March.