Maybe Frances would; maybe even today. Maybe even now happiness had marched into the morning room, all abashed pride, and laid itself at her feet.
The idea of such devotion was as bewitching and unlikely as borrowing the Crown jewels for a breakfast at home.
As Caroline stretched out on her bed and let the cool solitude soothe her, she could almost feel that she really was happy for her cousin and not envious at all.
Sixteen
“Come in,” Frances said in response to Henry’s knock at the half-open morning room door. “I can’t think what I did with your mistress’s bill. Do you have a copy with you?”
Her back was to Henry as she shuffled through a stack of papers atop a small saber-legged mahogany writing desk. Against the background of the rich orpiment-yellow walls, her coiled hair shone with the dark luster of Van Dyke brown pigment.
The sight of her heartened him, banishing a little of his apprehension. “Yes, mum. Seven hundred yards of silk and five thousand buttons,” he said in a nasal impression of a clerk.
Frances froze, then turned slowly to face him. “Good lord,” she said. “You’ve billed me for goods enough to dress every maiden making her come-out this year.”
“I take it you were expecting someone else?”
Her cheeks bled warm, and she hastily turned and shoved her papers beneath a blotter before facing him again. “Well, yes. Caroline’s modiste made her a very special gown for Lady Applewood’s next ball. I know it’s unfashionable to pay one’s bills promptly, but I think it the right thing to do. Only you are clearly not a modiste’s assistant.”
“Clearly not.”
She looked rather at a loss. “Ah… did you come to see Caro?”
“I’ve seen her already.”
Now she looked still more confused. “Do you need something from me, then? Tea or secret advice or… something I’m apparently not thinking of?” She trailed off, then crossed her arms as though warding off a chill.
Her gown was an unadorned Prussian blue, spare and dark. It reminded him of the Blue Room, of the quiet freedom therein. Maybe he could recapture that feeling with her.
Of course, no capture was ever easy or without casualty.
“I only need a listening ear,” he answered. “If you’ve the time.”
Lips parted, she stared at him for several seconds. “Yes. Certainly. Do come in.”
Frances spun the chair at the writing desk to face him and perched upon the end, watching him warily. And why shouldn’t she be wary of him? He walked through the doorway only to prowl around the furniture with the nervous energy of weeks of pent-up secrets, years away from intimacy with a woman.
Finally he sat on a sofa, a green scroll-armed affair that Bart would probably deem all the crack. “Look.” He stood, then sat down at the other end so he’d be closer to Frances. “Look, there’s something very particular I need to tell you, and I’m anxious that I not be interrupted. Would you be willing to lock the door?”
Her brows knit, but she nodded. Retrieving the key from a compartment in her littered desk, she went to do as he’d asked.
“You sound rather dire, Henry.” She reseated herself on the sofa with him rather than her chair, a small gesture of closeness that heartened him. “Is everything all right?”
“As much as it was the last time we saw one another.”
“That’s cryptic and not especially comforting,” she said.
He managed a smile. “I’m not here to comfort you. Nor to be cryptic. I need to tell you the truth about me.”
She blanched, the sickly pale of bismuth white pigment when exposed to sulfur. “The truth.”
This was not a good beginning; he hadn’t even told her anything yet and she looked horrified. “Yes, the truth. Perhaps you’ve heard of it,” he said a little more sharply than he’d meant to.
“Yes.” Her chin lifted, her shoulders pulled stiffly back. “Of course. I’m just surprised by the need for secrecy.”
“Ah.” His left hand found the cuff of his right sleeve and picked at the hem. “Well, I actually mean to do away with secrecy, at least with you.”
He pulled in a deep breath, feeling his chest expand within the binding layers of shirt, waistcoat, coat. “You once asked me if I wished to discuss the injury to my right arm. I think it’s time I do. You see, if you don’t know the truth about me, we’ll always be separated by it.”
This was rather a bold statement, which he amended when her eyes widened. “Everyone, I mean. I’ll be separated from everyone. Secrets separate everyone.” He pressed his lips together so he’d stop blurting things out.
She watched him with her Bossu-Wood eyes, all green and brown and still so wary. Her spine was straight as a tree, and her fingers were as tightly laced together as twigs in a nest. “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” she said at last. “If you feel you must tell me something, I’ll be honored by the confidence.”
“You’re very kind,” he murmured.
“Not really.” She managed the first real grin he’d seen since he entered the room, and her poker-stiff shoulders relaxed a bit. “Just dreadfully curious. Ah… did you already tell… whatever you’re going to tell… to Caroline?”
“No.” His head snapped back. “No.” There was no place for Caroline in this room; he’d locked the door against her. Against the rest of the world. “I want to tell you. You have a gift for taking me as I am. That’s more important than anything Caro could write in a letter.”
Her cheeks flushed rosy, her lips parted. “You—choose me? Not the letters?”
“Not the letters,” he confirmed. “I’ve already explained things to Caro.”
Frances’s eyes widened; she looked as flushed and glowing as though she’d just been tumbled. A shaft of desire speared through the coils of tension, of worry, of lasting shame that kept Henry tightly wound. In the Blue Room, he’d touched her; he’d brought her close. Thus alone, maybe he could do that again.
Of course, that all depended on what she thought of him when he was done. But he knew it was time to tell her. It was a certainty in his gut, like knowing the right instant to pull the trigger on a pistol.
“And now I need to explain things to you.” He took a deep breath. “At Quatre Bras. That’s where my arm was hurt.” No, no sense in cloaking the truth in smooth words. “That’s where I lost the use of my arm. I won’t ever get it back.”
He studied the back of his left hand, still sun-browned from months campaigning across the Continent. Frances’s pale fingers reached for his and interlaced with them. “I know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
“It might when I tell you how it happened. You know I was a captain at the time.”
“Yes.”
“A privilege of being an earl’s son. I was able to buy my way into the army and take a position of leadership much more quickly than if I’d been poor.”
“The son of an innkeeper, for example,” she said. “Such as my first husband. That’s no matter either, Henry. Your rank is your good fortune.”
“Your first husband was a—” He cut himself off at the sight of her startled face, returning his gaze to the slender anchors of her fingers.
He hadn’t known that about her, that she had married far below her birth. It seemed he wasn’t the only one with secrets, though judging from the expression on her face, she hadn’t meant to reveal hers.
He had vowed to bare his today; maybe in time she would return the favor.
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “As you said, my rank was my good fortune. My father died when I was just a boy, but he left money for me to purchase a commission, though my mother would not permit it while she was alive. Jem didn’t want me to go to war either, which only made me more determined. I was stubborn. I wanted to make my own way.”