"He is worth," she said, "a very great deal." "I'm aware that Dukes generally are." "Eleanor." The name came out sharpened. "Do not be clever with me. I am trying to help you." "You are trying," Eleanor said carefully, "to see whether there is something here that benefits the household." The silence confirmed it more completely than agreement would have.
Eleanor looked at her stepmother, at the careful hair and the good dress and the eyes that were always measuring, and felt something old and tired move through her chest. Not anger. Something quieter than anger. The specific exhaustion of being assessed by people who only looked at you when they thought you had become useful. "There is nothing to report," Eleanor said. "We have spoken at several gatherings." "He is well-read and occasionally infuriating." "That is all."
Mrs. Aldridge studied her for a long moment. Then she smiled, the thin, patient smile of someone who had decided to wait. "Of course," she said. She left shortly after. Eleanor stood at the parlor window and watched the carriage pull away and felt the morning settle back around her, quieter and slightly soiled.
Rosie appeared at her elbow. "Was she being awful?" Rosie asked. "She was being herself," Eleanor said. "Same thing," said Rosie. Eleanor almost laughed. Almost.
She almost did not go to Lady Morfield's dinner. She stood in front of her wardrobe for 20 minutes on the evening of it, in her second-best gray dress with her hair half arranged, and had a completely honest conversation with herself about what she was doing. She was not in love with him. He was interested. Unexpectedly, inconveniently, persistently interested. In the way he listened, which was entirely rather than partially. In the way he disagreed with her without dismissing her, which was rarer than he probably knew. In the small fracture she had seen in his composure in the conservatory. The confession that he had hoped, that single word that had cost him something and then offered anyway.
She was interested in a man who had closed himself like a house after loss, and was, she suspected, only just beginning to wonder whether the windows could be opened again. That was not love. That was attention. Care. The beginning of something that had not yet declared itself. It frightened her considerably. Not because of him. Because of what it would require of her. To be seen fully by someone whose opinion she had already begun to value. To stop being clever and defended and self-sufficient, thank you, and admit that she wanted something she hadn't planned for.
She finished her hair, went to the dinner. He was already there when she arrived. She saw him across the room before he saw her, which gave her approximately 4 seconds of private honesty. 4 seconds in which she could not arrange her face or her posture or her feelings, and simply had to experience the fact of him standing there, talking to Lord Morfield, slightly apart from the general crowd as always, and the way something in her chest moved toward him the way a plant moves toward light. Involuntary. Structural. Then he looked up across the full width of Lady Morfield's drawing room, past the candlelight and the conversation and the elaborate social machinery of a London dinner party, he looked at her. And he looked relieved. Not dramatically, just a small, quiet easing in his expression, the way a room feels when someone opens a window. As though he had been waiting and was glad the waiting was over.
Eleanor felt it from across the room. She found her seat. He was placed three people down on the opposite side, close enough that she was aware of him throughout every course, far enough that conversation was impossible except in the brief movement between dining and the drawing room. It was in that movement that Lady Morfield, with the satisfaction of a woman who had planned this precisely, briefly disappeared into a side conversation and left them standing together in the corridor.
It was perhaps 30 seconds, perhaps slightly more. "Miss Calloway," he said. "Your Grace." "You came," he said. The observation was simple, but his voice carried the same weight as the word "hoped" in the conservatory, and she recognized it now. "I was invited," she said, lighter than she meant it. "You declined the last three invitations," he said. She looked at him. "You noticed that." "I notice most things that concern you," he said, quiet, even, not a declaration, more like a fact he had decided she deserved to know.
The corridor was warm. Somewhere behind them laughter broke and resettled. The candlelight moved. Eleanor held very still. She was aware of the exact distance between them, close enough that she could see the slight tension at his jaw, the careful control of a man holding something in with deliberate effort. His hands were at his sides. So, she had noticed before that he was always still, but she understood now that it was not coldness. It was the stillness of someone who moved carefully because they knew the weight of what they were carrying.
"James," she said. It came out before she decided to say it. His given name, which she had no right to, which she had never used. It simply arrived on her tongue as though it belonged there. He went very still. Not the careful stillness, something different. Something that was the opposite of stillness in that it was entirely alive. He looked at her. She looked back. Her heart was misbehaving in a way she found completely unreasonable. The corridor was too warm. The candle nearest them threw gold across the side of his face.
She was thinking, without meaning to, about the conservatory and the rain and the orchid opening and how small the word "yes" had been and how much it had cost. And she was thinking about how it would feel to stop being careful, to step across the narrow remaining distance and "Morfield is summoning us," he said. Very quietly. She became aware, distantly, of the sound of Lady Morfield's voice from the drawing room. He stepped back. Just slightly. The space that reopened between them felt colder than it had any right to feel.
"Yes," she said. And then, because the corridor was ending in the moment with it, and because she was tired, deeply, structurally tired, of pretending, "I'm glad I came tonight." He looked at her for one long moment. "So am I," he said. They walked back into the drawing room, separately, correctly, with appropriate distance between them. Rosie, had she been present, would have been insufferable about it.
Eleanor spent the remainder of the evening in perfectly composed conversation and went home at half past 10:00 with her coat drawn tight and her thoughts considerably less orderly than her appearance, and sat in the kitchen with cold tea and her notebook and did not write a single thing about plants. She wrote his name once. In the margin. Small. Then she closed the notebook. But she did not cross it out.