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Her eyes widened. “But you swim …”
“As nature made me? I can contrive a costume to preserve your modesty.”
“But why?”
He needed a light answer. He had plunged in and named the thing he had been wanting for weeks. He didn’t think she’d noticed how much the prize meant to him. “Why wouldn’t I want a companion who takes pleasure in the sport I enjoy, and one who knows the conditions—tides, currents, weather signs?”
“You can’t mean it,” she protested. “It’s too much. Wholly unreasonable. A ball would inconvenience you for one night. To … alter my … daily swim for …”
He took a step closer to her. “Hah,” he said. “Women can’t manage a ball without a week of preparation followed by the event itself and its aftermath. A victory for you would mean spending hours in my company.”
“Would it?” She sounded a little breathless. “I imagined that your man, Winter, would be in charge.”
“Oh no. I promise you I know how to lose as well as win.” He watched those eyes as she did some rapid inner calculation. There was a name for that particular shade of blue, and it would come to him.
“Very well,” she said. “I will swim with you for a week, starting tomorrow. I don’t swim on Sundays, and I won’t change my time. Good day, Lord Graymont.”
Chapter Thirteen
Cordelia found her sisters sitting on the stairs when she returned. She looked up into three unhappy, accusing faces, while her brain struggled to take in the idea of swimming with Graymont.
“You went behind our backs,” Roz said. “Viola tells us you made an arrangement with Lord Graymont.”
Mir’s eyes were bright with tears. Her hands clung to the blue overdress of the gown she was altering to wear to the ball. Thankfully, Viola again looked the part of a young lady in a lavender sprig muslin gown.
Cordelia squared her shoulders. “I did speak to him privately and made an agreement with him. Our agreement depended on how … things went during this past fortnight. With this morning’s events, his lordship no longer feels he can permit us to use the courtyard for our ball.”
“You mean the scaffolding’s collapse?” asked Roz. “Viola told us.”
Cordelia nodded. “I am sorry if I misled you into thinking that having our ball at the castle was a certain thing.”
Roz stood. “Who cares! The ball doesn’t matter, anyway. Mr. Hartley has dropped Mir for Miss Cox, and there wouldn’t be anyone there of interest to me.”
“What a poor-spirited response! Really, Roz,” Viola said. “We have to do something.” She tore the garment from Mir’s hands and shook it. “Look at everything Mir has done.”
Mir looked at Cordelia. “Lady Frome offered to help, didn’t she, Cordelia?”
“She did, and we must appeal to her.” Appealing to their neighbor would be another humiliation, but really Cordelia was growing accustomed to them, breaking over her like waves in a choppy sea.
“Well, I don’t think we should give up,” Viola announced. She dropped Mir’s sewing back in her lap. “I think we should make a real push to have our ball in the castle, in our home. We have a fortnight or more, and there must be something we can do.” She looked at Cordelia.
“What are you going to do, then?” Roz asked. “Put on another absurd costume?”
*
Gray headed for the castle. He’d won. He would meet Cordelia in the morning. There would be a high spring tide at the flood coming from the southwest. Would she swim straight out from the beach and be pushed northeast by that tide? He laughed. He knew her better than that already. She would turn south into the tide, fighting it as she swam and letting it bear her back when she turned. He didn’t know how far she usually swam or whether she counted her strokes or had some other method of measuring her swim. He had to find something to wear.
In the courtyard Higson and Winter directed the men at the scaffold site while Finch stood frowning at Higson’s worktable.
“Do you have your sketchbook?” Finch asked.
“I left it on the table. It’s not here?”
Finch shook his head.
“Odd.” Gray remembered leaving it when he’d gone to inspect the water damage to the tower. Then the scaffold had collapsed. He hadn’t thought about the sketchbook again until now.
“It might be a useful place to start,” Finch said. “You have day-by-day pictures of the work.”
