Page 85 of Duke of Sapphire

Henry stood. He looked at the chaise.

“I am aware of that,” he said.

“Then why⁠—”

“Because the distance is the point.” He said it quietly. Not roughly. Just plainly, the way he said things when he meant them entirely. “I am choosing it because the alternative is something I do not trust myself to remain indifferent to.” He met her eyes. “I would rather be uncomfortable than dishonest.”

Charlotte was very still.

She looked at him for one long moment, and he did not look away, and whatever she found in his face she kept to herself.

“Good night,” she said.

She took the bed.

Henry lay down on the chaise. It was, as advertised, the length of a large dog. It was not comfortable. The fire had dropped to embers.

The chaise creaked once as he settled onto it.

Then the room went silent.

He was gone. The room was grey with early light, the chaise folded back into something approximating its original arrangement, and the only sound was the low settlement of the fire, which had burned through the night and was now little more than banked ash.

Charlotte lay still.

She had slept well. That was the first thing she noticed, and she noted it with a faint, private bewilderment, because she had not expected to. She had expected to lie awake listening to the silence from the other side of the room and cataloguing the things she probably ought not to have said. She had instead slept straight through without dreaming.

The second thing she noticed was the evergreen.

It was on the pillow beside her. A small sprig of pine that had been carefully gathered, the needles still cold to the touch when her fingers found it before her eyes had fully adjusted to the light.

He had gone out before the inn had stirred, while the sky was still the particular blue-black of pre-dawn, and he had walked the Biggleswade countryside, which offered almost nothing of interest to a man used to the Scottish Highlands, and he had come back with the only thing it had to offer.

And left it. Without a note. Without explanation. Simply placed it there, on the pillow beside her, with the care of someone who had not wanted to wake her and then gone again.

Charlotte lay still and looked at it.

She had been assembling the evidence for some time now. Not deliberately. She had not set out to build a case. The pieces had simply arrived, one by one, and she had found herself holding them.

The first piece had come on the road north. The first journey, not this one. A coaching yard somewhere outside of Leeds, and a hired man who had made an observation about traveling alone that had been, to put it charitably, unwelcome. She had been managing it. She had been perfectly capable of managing it. And then Henry had been there, simply, entirely there, placed between her and the man without raising his voice or making any particular business of it. No announcement. No performance. He had just moved.

She had thought, at the time, that it was instinct. The reflex of a man with a powerful sense of propriety and a general intolerance for the badly behaved. She had filed it under useful travel companion and moved on.

The second piece had come at the coaching inn. Her ankle, and he had tended to it with utmost care. He had not made her thank him. He had not made anything of it at all.

She had filed that under efficient and moved on.

Charlotte turned the evergreen between her fingers.

Watch what he does.

Lavinia had said it in the drawing room at Evermere with the calm certainty of someone passing along a thing she had needed to learn herself before she could offer it to anyone else. Not listen to what he says. Not be patient while he finds the words.

Watch what he does.

CHAPTER 24

“Isaw them,” the shepherd said. “Clear as I’m seeing you now.”