Chapter One

“That will be Farenwoode ahead, miss.”

Clara Ellsworth followed the driver’s nod through the smeared carriage window, and her first sight of the house she was to call home undid something she had spent the whole long journey holding together. The manor rose out of the Yorkshire dusk like a thing grown from the land rather than built upon it, all grey stone and mullioned glass, with towers that reached toward a sky going violet at its edges. It was beautiful in the way that cliffs were beautiful, or weather. One did not warm to such a place. One only stood very small before it and hoped to be permitted to remain.

She tightened her grip on the single travelling case that rested upon her lap. Everything she owned in the world was inside it now, which was a thought she had learned not to dwell upon, for it had a way of stopping her breath if she let it. Six months ago, she had possessed a home, a mother, an observatory in which the two of them had passed every clear night the sky allowed. Six months ago, she had not known how a household could be dismantled and carried out the door by strangers, the bookshelves emptied, the brass instruments wrapped in sacking and borne away to settle the debts of a dead man. She had stood in the cold of the front hall and watched it go, and she had not wept, because weeping changed nothing and an audience of bailiffs deserved none of her grief.

She had survived that. She could survive being looked at by a house.

The carriage drew up before the great oak doors, and the doors opened before the wheels had wholly stopped, which told her she had been watched from some window for the length of the drive. A woman stood upon the step. She was perhaps fifty, with hair the colour of iron filings drawn back without a single ornament, and a gaze that travelled over Clara’s plain grey travelling dress, her worn half-boots, and the brown hair already escaping its careful pins after a day on the road, and arrived at its conclusions without troubling to share them.

“Miss Ellsworth.” It was not a question. “I am Mrs Hutchins, the housekeeper. Her Grace is expecting you.”

“Thank you.” Clara stepped down on legs stiff from sitting and made herself meet the assessing grey eyes squarely, because a person who looked away first was a person who had decided she deserved to be looked down upon, and Clara had not yet decided any such thing about herself. “I am much obliged to Her Grace for receiving me so late in the day.”

“Her Grace keeps her own hours.” Mrs Hutchins turned without further comment and led the way inside.

The hall was marble and silence. Their footsteps rang up into a darkness where Clara supposed there must be a ceiling, though she could not see it, and the candles in their sconces did little more than mark the distance one had still to walk. She followed the straight grey back of the housekeeper through a corridor hung with portraits whose painted faces watched her pass with the same incurious thoroughness as the living woman ahead, and she kept her chin level and her step even, and she thought, with a small private steadiness that her mother had taught her, that the stars above this roof were the same stars that had hung above her own.

Mrs Hutchins opened a door upon a drawing room decorated in blues and silvers, every cushion placed as though measured, every surface gleaming, and not one thing in it that suggested a person had ever sat down to be at ease. “You will wait here. Her Grace will receive you presently.”

The door closed. Clara did not sit.

It would have been the natural thing, after such a journey, to sink into one of the silk-covered chairs and let the ache go out of her back, and that was why she remained on her feet in the centre of the cold and lovely room. She had learned a great deal in six months about the difference between being a guest and being a charity, and she did not intend to be discovered too comfortable in a house where her comfort was nobody’s concern. So she stood, and she folded her chilled hands before her, waiting until, presently, the door opened a second time.

The Dowager Duchess of Farenwoode entered as if the room had been arranged expressly for her arrival, which, Clara thought, it very likely had. She was tall and held herself taller, gowned in lavender silk that whispered with each unhurried step, her silver hair dressed to perfection, and her grey eyes, a clear, cold, deliberate grey, came to rest upon Clara with an attention that left nothing unexamined.

Clara sank into a curtsy that was as deep as it ought to be, and not one degree deeper.

“Miss Ellsworth.” The Dowager seated herself, arranged her skirts, and did not invite Clara to do the same. “You are younger than I had supposed.”

“I am three-and-twenty, Your Grace.”

“Hm.” The faint sound seemed to set the fact aside for later consideration. “You understand the nature of the position you have come to fill?”

“I believe so, ma’am. I am to be your companion.”

“You are to make yourself useful,” the Dowager corrected, kindly enough, but with the air of a woman who preferred a thing named correctly from the outset. “You will assist me with my correspondence, which is considerable. You will read to me in the evenings, for my eyes tire sooner than they once did, though I should be obliged if you would not mention that to anyone. You will provide company through the hours of the day when company is wanted, and you will know, I trust, when it is not.” She paused. “You come to me in reduced circumstances, I understand.”

It was very delicately done. Clara felt the point of it go in all the same.

“I do, ma’am.”

“Then we understand one another, and there is no need to dwell upon it.” The Dowager’s gaze flicked once more over the plain grey dress, and softened by a single degree, which stung worse than the coldness had. “You will be treated fairly in this house. I do not promise warmth, Miss Ellsworth. I have not a great deal of it to spare. But I am not unjust. See that you give me no cause to be.”

“That is very kind of you, Your Grace.” The words came out steady. Of late, Clara had a great deal of practice at sounding grateful for things that cost her something to receive.

The Dowager inclined her head, satisfied, and rose. “My son resides at Farenwoode, but you need not concern yourself with him. He keeps to himself, and has done these four years, since the death of his wife. You will rarely see him, and you will not seek him out.” She drew on a pair of fine grey gloves, finger by finger, and added, as though it were of no consequence, “We shall have a guest before the month is out. Lady Honoria Vane, the daughter of the Earl of Hartwick. A young woman of excellent sense and breeding, and I have every expectation that she and my son shall suit. You will make yourself agreeable to her when she comes.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Mrs Hutchins will show you to your room.” And with that, the Dowager Duchess swept from the chamber, leaving behind the faint scent of orris root and the understanding that Clara Ellsworth’s purpose in this house had been weighed and found sufficient.

Clara let out a slow breath in the empty blue room, and let herself feel, for three heartbeats and no longer, how far from home she was.

***

The chamber she was given lay in the servants’ wing, narrow and plain, with a single window, a bed that did not quite fill its frame, a washstand, and a chest for the contents of her case. It was clean, and it was warm enough, and Clara had learned the great lesson of the poor, which was that clean and warm were large things, to be received with proper thankfulness. Her supper came up on a tray: a cut of cold mutton, bread, a little cheese, plain fare but honest, and more than she had eaten some evenings in the last half-year. She sat upon the edge of the bed and ate it alone, and listened to the great house settling around her in ticks and sighs, and told herself that she had landed on her feet, which was nearly true, and ought to have been comforting, and was not.

When the tray was cleared, she lay down, and could not sleep.

It was the sky that kept her wakeful. The night had cleared entirely while she ate, and through the small uncurtained window, she could see a depth of stars such as she had not known since leaving her mother’s house. The Yorkshire air was cold and dry, and gave up its stars generously; and there, above the dark shoulder of the moor, hung the whole quiet, glittering company of them, as constant and as familiar as the faces of friends.

The stars will always be there, her mother had told her in those last, terrible, fevered days, the words coming thin between cracked lips. Even when I am not. Look up, Clara, and remember: you are part of something vast, and beautiful, and far larger than any grief.

She had not been able to look up, those first weeks. It had hurt too much, like pressing upon a bruise. But now, lying in a stranger’s house at the edge of the world, she found that she wanted to. The wanting had crept back into her without permission; and so she rose, drew her shawl about her shoulders, and went out into the night.

The garden behind the house gave way to rough ground, and then to the open dark. The cold was clean and sharp, and smelled of heather and wet stone. Clara walked a little way with her face turned up, naming what she saw out of old habit and older love; and it was as she lowered her gaze to find her footing that she saw the building on the hill.

It stood apart from the house, low and round, and crowning it was a shape she would have known anywhere on the earth. A dome. A dome with a long seam down its side where it might be opened to the sky.

An observatory.

I should turn back, she thought, even as her feet found the path. I have no right. I was warned in plain words to keep to my place.

But grief was a poor respecter of warnings, and longing a worse one, and there was a pull upon her in that moment stronger than caution and stronger than sense, the pull of the one thing in all the world that had never once failed to make sense to her, and so she climbed the hill with her heart beating high in her throat, and she put her hand to the door, and the door was unlocked, and it gave.

Inside, the dark was different, closer, scented with brass and oil and old wood, and when her eyes adjusted, she stopped breathing altogether.

The telescope stood in the centre of the floor beneath the open seam of the dome, and a shaft of starlight fell along its length, and it was magnificent. It was beyond anything her mother had ever owned or hoped to own, a long gleaming body of polished brass upon a mount so fine that Clara, who knew exactly what she was looking at, felt tears prick hot and sudden behind her eyes. Her mother would have wept to stand where she now stood. Her mother would have laughed aloud with the joy of it.

She crossed the floor without deciding to, and she lifted her hand, and she let the very tips of her fingers come to rest against the cold brass with the lightness one gave to a sleeping child, or to something holy, barely a touch at all, only enough to know that it was real, that the stars she had thought lost to her were after all still within reach of her hand.

“And who,” said a voice behind her, low and hard and cold, “gave you leave to be in my observatory?”

Chapter Two

Cedric Fairfax climbed the hill to his observatory as he did on every clear night, which was to say like a man going to the one place in the world where the dead did not follow him quite so closely.

It was a strange thing to have learned about grief, that it kept to certain rooms. Eleanor was everywhere in the manor below: in the morning parlour where she had liked to sit, in the long gallery where her portrait hung beside his own, in the very silences of the place, which seemed always to be the silence of a question she had asked him once and he had failed to answer.

But she had never cared for the stars. She had thought his observatory a cold and tedious folly; and so she did not come here. Here, beneath the open seam of the dome, with the whole indifferent universe wheeling overhead, the band about his chest would loosen by a notch, and he could draw a breath that did not taste of guilt.

The sky asked nothing of him. It did not require love. A man might give it his whole attention and never once be found wanting, and that, to Cedric, was very near to peace.

So he came to the door expecting darkness, quiet, and the cold, familiar comfort of being alone. Instead, he found the door ajar and a figure standing at his telescope, one hand laid upon the brass.

The anger came up in him fast and complete, as it always did now: a thing he had stopped troubling to govern because there was so little left in his life worth governing it for. This was his. This one place, this single acre of his existence that he had not surrendered to duty or to ghosts. And someone had walked into it as though it were a public garden.

He opened his mouth to say something that would send the intruder fleeing into the night, and then he saw how she was touching it.

She was not handling the instrument; not turning it, or peering through it, or pawing at the fine adjustments as some curious fool might have done. She had laid only the tips of her fingers against the casing, the lightest possible contact: the touch a person gave to a thing revered, and dared not presume upon. And her face, in profile against the starlight, stopped the words in his throat. There was longing in it, naked and unguarded, grief and wonder together; and for one disordered instant, he felt as though he had walked in upon something far more private than a trespass.

She is looking at it, he thought, against his will, the way I look at it.

He did not want to have thought it. So he made his voice as cold as he could make it, which was cold indeed, for he had had four years’ practice.

“And who,” he said, “gave you leave to be in my observatory?”

She spun towards him with a small cry, one hand flying to her chest, and the colour went out of her face. He had that effect on people now, and had long since ceased to regret it.

She was not beautiful. He registered that much in the dimness: pleasant enough features, brown hair coming loose from its pins, nothing a man would write a sonnet to. But her eyes, when they found his, were wide and dark and remarkably steady for a woman who had plainly been frightened half out of her wits. She did not look away from him, and that he had not expected.

“Forgive me.” Her voice trembled, but she did not let it break. “I am Miss Ellsworth, the Dowager’s new companion. I… I saw the dome from the garden, and I could not…” She stopped, gathered herself, and began again more plainly. “There is no excuse. I trespassed. I am sorry for it.”

“This is private ground.” He came no farther into the room, only stood in the doorway and let the cold of him fill it. “No one enters here. Not my mother, not my servants, not my oldest friend. You will leave, and you will not come here again.” A beat. “I trust I make myself understood.”

“Perfectly, Your Grace.”

He had expected tears, or pleading, or the oily contrition of a servant terrified for her place. He got none of it. She lifted her chin, a small, deliberate motion, pride pulled up out of fear like a flag run up a pole, and inclined her head to him with a dignity that ought to have been absurd in a companion caught where she had no business to be, and was not absurd at all. Then she walked towards the door, towards him, for he had not moved out of it.

She had to pass close to do it. Close enough that he caught the scent of lavender, and beneath the lavender something warmer, something living; close enough that he saw, as she drew level with him, the flecks of gold scattered through the dark hazel of her eyes. He thought she would go by him without another word.

She paused instead, and looked up at him.

“Your telescope is magnificent,” she said quietly. “I have never seen its equal. My mother would have wept to use such an instrument.” Something moved across her face when she said mother, there and gone, a grief held under such firm command that it was worse to witness than open weeping. “Goodnight, Your Grace.”

Then she was past him and gone, out into the dark, her shawl pale for a moment against the night and then swallowed by it.

Cedric stood where she had left him, acutely and ridiculously aware of the patch of air she had occupied, which seemed still to hold the warmth of her.

She knows telescopes.

The thought arrived uninvited and would not be dismissed. She had not said it as a polite compliment. She had said, I have never seen its equal, noting its quality with the eye of someone who understood what she was looking at. And when she had said that her mother would have wept to use it, he had heard no flattery in the words. Only the plain speech of someone who had stood at an eyepiece on a cold night and felt the universe open over her head, and had loved it, and had lost it.

He told himself, very firmly, that she was nothing to him. A trespasser. His mother’s hireling. A young woman of no consequence to him, whom he would do well to forget, and would.

But when he climbed at last to the eyepiece and bent to his night’s work, the figures would not order themselves, and the careful columns of his observations swam before him, and what rose instead in the dark behind his eyes was the steadiness of a frightened woman’s gaze that would not drop from his, and the way her voice had warmed and broken upon a single word. He gave it up before midnight, which he had not done in four years, and went back down the hill to the house with the dead in it, unsettled in a way he had no name for and no wish to find one.

***

Clara woke before the light, as she always did, and for the length of one merciful breath, she did not remember anything at all.

Then it came back, the whole weight of it landing at once: her mother gone, the house sold, and a stranger’s grey eyes in a doorway, and a voice that could have frosted glass telling her she would not come again. A man whose presence filled the room until there seemed no air left for anyone else.

She pressed her palms over her eyes as though she might press the memory out, and found that she could not. Her skin prickled all over again at the recollection of standing so near to him that she had seen the pulse beat in his throat. She had insulted his solitude and complimented his telescope in the same breath, and she could not, for the life of her, decide which had been the greater folly.

She rose, washed, dressed, and went down to do her work, because work was the one reliable cure she knew for thinking about things she had no business thinking about.

The Dowager was already at her writing-desk when Mrs Hutchins brought Clara to the sitting room, a handsome chamber that caught the morning sun and was, Clara noted, a good deal warmer in its furnishings than the drawing room in which she had been received. A drift of correspondence lay across the desk in untidy heaps, and the Dowager regarded it with the expression of a general surveying a field she had no intention of crossing herself.

“You may begin with these,” she said, without preamble. “Invitations to be declined go in that pile. Tradesmen’s accounts in that one. Anything from my sister Augusta you may give directly to me, that I may have the pleasure of not answering it. Can you write a fair hand, Miss Ellsworth?”

“I believe so, ma’am. I kept my mother’s accounts and her correspondence both, these six years.”

“Did you?” The Dowager’s pen paused. “A gentlewoman keeping her mother’s accounts.”

“We had no one else to keep them, ma’am.”

It was said simply, with no bid for sympathy, and the Dowager looked at her for a moment with something that was not warmth but was at least attention. “Hm,” she said, and returned to her letter, and Clara settled to the heaps of paper and found, within the half-hour, that her hands knew the work even when her mind insisted on wandering up a dark hillside where it had no business to go.

“You will dine with us this evening,” the Dowager said presently, not looking up. “My son joins the table tonight. He does so but seldom, and you had as well be presented to him properly, since you are to be a fixture in the house. You will wear whatever is your best. And, Miss Ellsworth,” now she did look up, her grey eyes level, “you will not chatter. My son has no patience for it, and neither, I confess, have I.”

“I shall be as silent as the furniture, ma’am,” Clara said, and had the small private satisfaction of seeing one corner of the Dowager’s mouth twitch before it was sternly recalled to order.

Properly, she thought, bending again to the letters. As opposed to last night, when I was a trespasser at his telescope, and he ordered me out of his life.

How very properly we shall be introduced, the Duke and I, as though I had not already been turned out of his observatory in disgrace.

She drew a fresh sheet towards her, dipped her pen, and resolved with great firmness to think no more about it.

She thought of very little else for the remainder of the morning.

***

In the afternoon, her duties done and the light still good, Clara went out walking, because the house had grown too small for the size of her own thoughts and the moor was the largest thing she had ever seen.

It was a stark country and a beautiful one, all rolling heather and grey outcrops of stone, with sheep scattered like dropped pearls across the distances and a sky so vast it seemed to press the breath gently out of her. She walked until the manor was a grey shape behind her, and then she found a low drystone wall warmed by the thin sun, and she sat down upon it, and at last she let herself feel what she had been holding off since the carriage first turned in at the gates.

She did not weep loudly. She had never been a loud griever. She only sat with her hands folded in her lap and let the tears come and go as they would, and she thought of her mother saying you are part of something vast, and beautiful, and she looked up at the great pale daytime sky where the stars still hung, unseen but not absent, and she let herself believe it for a little while, because believing it was easier out here than it was within four walls.

“I do beg your pardon. I had no notion anyone was about.”

She turned, hastily wiping her cheek, to find a gentleman halted a few paces off, his hat already in his hand, every line of him suggesting genuine dismay at having intruded.

“I fear I have startled you,” he said. “Forgive me.”

He was perhaps thirty, of middling height, with warm brown hair and an open, ruddy, good-humoured face that looked as though it smiled a great deal more often than it did anything else.

“Edward,” he added, with a small bow. “Lord Hale, strictly speaking, though I beg you will not stand on ceremony. I am from Hale Court, the next estate but one, and the barony along with it.”

Then, as if realising that this did not quite account for his presence, he added, “His Grace and I are old friends. Or as old as friendship may be with a man who discourages the habit. That is how I came to hear of you, I confess. And you, I think, must be the new companion my friend’s mother has taken on.”

“Forgive me,” he added. “News travels in these parts faster than the post, and there is precious little of it, so we make a great feast of what there is.”

His smile broadened, without malice.

“You need not own to having been crying, Miss—?”

“Ellsworth.” She found, to her own surprise, that she was nearly smiling back. “Clara Ellsworth. And I shan’t own to it, my lord, since you are kind enough not to press me.”

“There, we shall be friends, then, for I cannot abide a person who presses.” He settled himself companionably upon the far end of the wall, at a proper distance, and looked out over the moor as if to spare her the discomfort of being looked at. “It is a melancholy sort of grandeur, is it not? I find it suits some moods admirably and others not at all. How do you find Farenwoode, Miss Ellsworth? Speak honestly. I am the soul of discretion, whatever you may have heard.”

“I find it very large,” Clara said, “and very cold, and very beautiful, in roughly equal measure.” She hesitated, then ventured, because there was something in his easy warmth that drew honesty out of her, “And I confess I have not yet learned how I am to fit inside it.”

“Ah.” His face softened. “No. Well. It is not, perhaps, a house that goes out of its way to make a person feel they belong.” He turned his hat in his hands. “I have known it a great many years. Cedric, His Grace, and I were at Oxford together, you understand. There was no merrier fellow in the whole university, whatever you may think to look at him now.”

“I have not had the honour of looking at him at all,” Clara said, which was a lie, and a small flush of shame went through her at how easily it came. To cover it, she added, truthfully, “I am told he keeps to himself.”

“He keeps to himself the way a man keeps to a sickbed.” Edward’s voice lost its lightness; the worry beneath it showed through plainly. “His wife died, you will have heard, four years past, and their child with her. He has not been the same man since. He has shut every door he owns and dared the world to knock, and the trouble of it is that I am very near the last fool still knocking.”

He caught himself, and gave a short, rueful laugh.

“Forgive me. I have no business unburdening myself to a lady I met three minutes ago over a stone wall. It is only…” He looked at her, and something thoughtful came into his pleasant face. “It is only that I have sometimes wondered whether what he wants is not gentleness, of which everyone offers him a surfeit, but someone who will simply speak to him as though he were an ordinary man, and not a tragedy with a title. Someone who does not tiptoe.”

“That seems a great deal to ask of any one person,” Clara said softly.

“It does, rather.” He smiled again, the cloud passing. “Pay me no mind, Miss Ellsworth. I am forever arranging the happiness of people who have not asked me to, and—”

He stopped, his head turning. Across the moor, faint at first and then unmistakable, came the sound of hoofbeats, the steady drumming of a horse ridden hard and well. Clara turned with him and saw, breaking over the crest of the rise against the wide pale sky, a rider all in dark upon a great black horse, coming on at speed, straight towards them.

Chapter Three

“Ah,” said Edward, coming up off the wall with his whole pleasant face opening into delight. “Now there is a piece of luck. That, Miss Ellsworth, is the very man we were speaking of.”

Clara had already understood it, in the way one understood a thing in the body before the mind consented to it. The dark shape on the dark horse came on across the heather, and as it neared it resolved itself into a gentleman of perhaps two-and-thirty, of no more than middling height yet built so that the eye did not think to call him anything but large, with shoulders that strained the good cloth of his riding coat and a seat upon the great black animal so easy and so absolute that horse and man seemed to share a single will between them. His hair was dark and worn longer than fashion allowed, and the wind had thrown a lock of it across his brow. His face, sharp-planed and severe in the clear afternoon light, was the face that had ordered her out of his observatory not twelve hours before.

It was, she thought with a kind of helpless dismay, an extraordinary face. Severe and cold and proud, and beautiful in a way that had nothing whatever to do with kindness.

Why, she demanded of herself, should the sight of a man who dismissed me without a particle of courtesy set my heart hammering against my stays like a thing trying to escape? She had no answer that did her any credit, and so she straightened her spine, and folded her hands, and prepared to be introduced to a stranger she had already met.

He drew rein a few paces off. His grey eyes went first to Edward, with something in them that was nearly ease, and then they found her, and the ease went out of them and was replaced by a flat, guarded wariness that told her plainly he had recognised her too.

“Hale.” His voice was as she remembered it, low and level and without warmth.

“Cedric.” Edward’s grin was undimmed by the chill of the greeting; he had clearly weathered a great many such greetings and intended to weather a great many more. “You find me playing the gallant. I have just had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Miss Ellsworth here, your mother’s new companion. We have been putting the world to rights over this wall for a little while, and I find her excellent company. Miss Ellsworth, allow me to present the Duke of Farenwoode.”

Clara curtsied. “Your Grace.”

For the length of two full breaths the Duke said nothing at all, and Clara stood beneath the weight of his regard and waited, with her pulse loud in her ears, for him to remark that he and Miss Ellsworth were not, in fact, strangers, that he had found this same young woman with her hand upon his telescope at midnight and turned her out into the dark. One word would do it. One word, and she would be, in Lord Hale’s kind eyes, a trespasser caught where she had no right to be.

He did not say the word.

“Miss Ellsworth,” was all he said, with the smallest inclination of his head, and the relief that went through her was so sharp and so disproportionate that she had to look down at the heather to hide it.

“You ought to show her the observatory. I have a suspicion Miss Ellsworth may appreciate it more than most. She strikes me as the sort of lady who looks up, not down.”

The Duke’s gaze had not left Clara’s face. She felt it as one felt the sun through a window, a pressure with warmth somewhere inside it, and she made herself lift her chin and meet it rather than shrink from it, because shrinking was a habit she had sworn never to fall into however poor she became.

“My observatory is private,” he said at last, and his eyes did not move from her while he said it. “I do not give tours.”

“No,” Edward agreed cheerfully, as though the Duke had said something quite charming, “you never do. One lives in hope.” He tipped his head, considering his friend with an affection so plain and so unembarrassed that Clara felt almost an intruder upon it. “Do you know, there was a time this man would have had the dome open and the lamps lit and half the county dragged up that hill by the coat-collar before you could say Saturn, only to make them look at a ring of light through a glass and own it the finest thing they had ever seen. He was insufferable about it. I have stood shivering on that hilltop at three in the morning more times than I can number, Miss Ellsworth, purely because he could not bear that anyone should sleep while there was a comet to be admired.”

Something crossed the Duke’s face at that, not a softening but the memory of one, the ghost of an expression a younger man might have worn, and was gone before Clara was sure she had seen it.

“That man,” he said, “was a fool, and is dead. You will excuse the lecture, Hale. You have heard it before.”

But there was no true edge to it, and Edward only laughed, as a man laughed who had decided long ago not to be wounded. He turned the talk away, with the practised grace of long friendship, to some matter of a boundary ditch and a tenant’s complaint, and the two men spoke of it for a few minutes while Clara stood by, grateful to be, for that little space, beneath no one’s notice at all.

She watched them as they talked, the warm open man and the cold closed one, and thought that she had seldom seen friendship asked to do such heavy labour, nor seen it shoulder the work so willingly.

Presently Edward recollected an engagement. “I am promised at the vicarage. I told Miss Bradley I would look over her father’s accounts; the dear man cannot add two figures without arriving at a third by some private arithmetic of his own. Miss Ellsworth, it has been a genuine pleasure. I hope very much that it is the first of many.”

He swept her another bow, clapped his friend once upon the boot in farewell, and rode off whistling towards the village.

And then there was only the moor, and the wind, and the Duke of Farenwoode looking down at her from the back of his great black horse; and Clara left alone with the silence he had left between them the night before.

***

Cedric knew that he should ride on.

There was nothing simpler in all the world than to give the woman a curt good-day and put his heels to Hector and be gone, and he had spent four years perfecting that economy of withdrawal, the art of removing himself from a conversation before it could become a connexion. He had driven off better men than ever stood in his path today with no more than a cold word and a turned shoulder. Edward alone had proved too stubborn to take the hint, and Edward was the exception that he permitted himself, the one thread he had not been able to cut.

He did not ride on. He sat his horse and looked down at her, and found himself oddly reluctant to do the easy thing.

She was a small figure from where he sat, slight against the great emptiness of the moor, and the wind was busy in her hair, pulling loose the strands her pins had failed to hold, so that a soft brown coil of it lay against her cheek and another lifted and fell at her temple. He noticed it, with an attention that irritated him, and could not for the life of him have said why the sight of a woman’s windblown hair should be a thing his eye returned to.

“Does my mother know you are out walking alone?” he asked, and heard how the question came out, less cutting than last night, which displeased him, for he had not given it leave to soften.

Up came the chin. He had begun, he realised, to expect it.

“Mrs Hutchins gave me leave to walk when my duties were done, Your Grace.” Her voice was composed, and there was something at the back of it, some glint of dry awareness, that was very nearly the beginning of impertinence. “I have done nothing wrong. Not, at any rate, this time.”

It was a hit, and a clean one, and he was so unaccustomed to being needled that for a moment he scarcely knew what to do with the sensation. It was not unpleasant. That was the worrying part of it.

“The moor is not as safe as it looks to a stranger’s eye,” he said, retreating into instruction, which was solid ground. “There are bogs out past the standing stones that will take a sheep down whole, and they do not announce themselves. Until you have learned the safe ground, you would do well to keep nearer the house.”

“You need not trouble yourself on my account, Your Grace.” She said it gently enough, but she said it without an instant’s hesitation, and she did not lower her eyes. “I am quite capable of looking to my own safety. I have managed a good many things harder than learning where the ground will hold me.”

A good many things harder.

He turned the phrase over against his will, the way he turned over a column of figures that would not balance. It had been said without the smallest bid for pity. Indeed, she had seemed to regret it the moment it was out, as though she had let him see further into her life than she had intended, and that very absence of self-pity told him more than a flood of confidences could have done. He knew something of what it cost to carry hard things and say nothing of them. He had not supposed that a woman of three-and-twenty in a plain grey gown might know the same.

Is that concern in you, then? he asked himself, with a sort of inward incredulity. Concern for a hired companion you met by trespass and meant never to think of again? Or are you merely safeguarding your mother’s household against the inconvenience of having one of its members disappear into a bog?

He could not honestly answer it, and the not-knowing was itself a kind of alarm, for Cedric Fairfax was a man who prided himself on knowing the precise shape and cause of everything that moved within him.

The wind gusted between them and loosened her hair completely at one side. She lifted a hand to it without looking away from him, and the low light slid across her face and caught in the steady hazel of her eyes, and he found—he, who had not wanted anything in four years—that he did not want the moment to end, and could not have said what he wished to put in its place.

The silence held a beat too long for two strangers upon a public path. He was aware of it, and aware that she was aware of it, and aware that neither of them moved to break it, which was the most disquieting thing of all.

“You should go in,” he said abruptly, “before you take cold.”

He gave her no chance to answer. He touched his heel to Hector and brought the horse forward, passing her closely as he went, closer than he need have done, perhaps closer than was wholly proper. The great warm bulk of the animal stirred the air about her and set her skirts moving against her ankles, and he caught again, even from the saddle, that faint trace of lavender that had followed her out of his observatory the night before.

For one suspended instant, as he drew level, her upturned eyes met his and held, and whatever passed between them he refused to name. It struck somewhere deep within him, like a single low note left to tremble in the air.

Then he was beyond her, and the moor opened before him, and he rode.

He did not look back, because looking back was the sort of thing he no longer permitted himself. But the trouble rode with him all the same, three plain facts laid out in his orderly mind like figures in a column that would not, however he added them, come to the sum he wished.

He had said nothing to Edward of the trespass, when a single word would have rid him of her. He had warned her of the bogs as though her safety were a thing that touched him. And even now, with the wind in his face and the house falling away behind, he was unable to stop seeing the colour the light had made of her eyes, and asking himself, with a coldness that for once gave him no comfort at all, what manner of woman could unsettle, in a day and a half, the silence it had taken him four years to build.