The days following the walk had a different texture, and I had been making a studious effort not to examine why.
Nothing had been said. Nothing agreed, nothing named. And yet my awareness of him had altered in a way that resisted the usual management — which was, I acknowledged with the mild exasperation of a woman who already had rather a great deal to manage, extremely inconvenient timing.
The thing was — and I found myself returning to this with the compulsive thoroughness one applies to an argument one cannot quite resolve — he had been doing it the entire time.
He had been coming to the Lancaster house for years, ostensibly on business with Lady Audrey. And I had been, in that capacity, the governess — present in the margins of every visit, invisible in the particular way that household staff are invisible: not unseen, precisely, but not addressed.
There had been an incident, some years prior, involving a broken Meissen figurine and Lady Audrey's conviction — not without foundation — that it had been my fault.
She had been in the drawing room, mid-sentence in a thorough expression of her views, when Damian remarked, with the casual certainty of a man stating an obvious fact, that he had been standing near the mantelpiece himself earlier that afternoon and the figurine had already been unstable.
He had not looked at me when he said it. He had not made anything of it afterward. He had simply said it, conversationally, moved on, and Lady Audrey had rearranged her conclusions with the grudging efficiency of a woman who could not dispute a witness of his standing.
I had filed this under inexplicable good fortune at the time.
I was now revising the filing considerably.
The more vexing question — and I had been circling it for four days without landing anywhere useful — was why.
Not why I was paying attention, which had the partial explanation of proximity and consistency. But why he was.
A general of considerable standing did not compile schedules and defend Meissen figurines and position himself between people and traffic out of simple courtesy. Courtesy was a card one sent. What he was doing had a different quality entirely, and I could not, with my current information, determine what that quality was.
I had considered asking him directly. I had dismissed this on the grounds that the question required a context I was not prepared to provide, and that the answer might constitute information I was not yet certain I wished to have.
Which was, I was aware, an extremely inefficient approach to a piece of data that was occupying a considerable amount of my available cognitive territory.
Four days after the walk, there was a court reception.
Lord Elliston found me near the east window with the unerring instinct of a man who has identified a receptive audience and intends to make thorough use of it.
"Your Highness." He bowed with the warmth of a man who has been waiting several days for an unguarded moment and is delighted to have located one. "I was hoping I might have occasion to — the eastern fields, Your Highness. Rather remarkable yield this season."
"Indeed," I said. "What accounts for it?"
This was, I would come to understand, precisely the wrong question to ask Lord Elliston if one had anywhere else to be within the following forty minutes. His face illuminated with the specific joy of a man whose favourite subject has been directly invited.
"The drainage improvements," he said, with the conviction of a man delivering news of great moment. "We rerouted the eastern channel entirely. The differential between the south and east fields was remarkable. Quite remarkable."
"How gratifying," I said. "And the western approach?"
"Ah," he said, and drew breath.
I became aware, in the interval between Lord Elliston drawing breath and deploying it, of Damian across the room.
He was speaking with Lord Ashby and Lord Pemberton and two others — the specific cluster of senior nobles I had been wanting him to cultivate, as it happened, for reasons I had outlined in a briefing note last Tuesday. He was, I noted with a precision I immediately regretted, an entirely different version of himself.
Warm. Effortless. Lord Ashby said something and Damian laughed — low, brief, entirely unperformed, the laugh of a man who has forgotten for a moment to be anything other than himself.
I had assumed, without examining the assumption, that his composure with me was particular to me. That the specific quality of his restraint — the care he took, the attention he offered without performance — was a thing reserved. Mine.
The discovery that it was a choice, that the warmth existed in full and was simply rationed, produced in me a feeling I catalogued with the thoroughness of a woman who suspects a thing is significant but would prefer to manage the significance at a later and more convenient hour.
More interesting than if it had been specific. And considerably more complicated.
"—the east wing," Lord Elliston was saying, "has been rather troublesome since the renovations."
"Indeed," I said. "How vexing."
He appeared gratified. I appeared attentive. We were both performing, and only one of us knew it.
Damian inclined his head slightly as Lord Ashby continued speaking — the particular inclination of a man listening properly rather than waiting to speak. I had observed this quality in him during briefings. It was, apparently, consistent regardless of the audience. His shoulders were at ease in a way they were not during council sessions. His hands were still.
I became aware I was cataloguing his hands again.
"—and the western channel," Lord Elliston was saying, "presented rather a different set of challenges, as I'm sure Your Highness will appreciate—"
"Entirely," I said, returning my gaze to Lord Elliston with the attentiveness of a woman who has been listening carefully throughout and has simply been looking in the wrong direction for the past thirty seconds.
He appeared gratified. "The key, I have found, is the gradient."
"The gradient," I agreed.
Damian laughed again — a different one this time, quieter, produced by something Lord Pemberton had said. I did not look. I was extremely occupied with the gradient.
Then Edward appeared at my elbow.
He had the quality of a man who has rehearsed his approach and is now second-guessing the rehearsal — softer than I had previously encountered him at court, the practiced ease absent, something more genuine in its place.
"Your Highness." He paused in the way of a man who has several available sentences and is uncertain which one to deploy. "Are you well?"
"I am extraordinarily well," I said. "Thank you for enquiring."
He absorbed this — a man accustomed to warmth encountering its considered absence and recalibrating, which was an education I had not designed but was not unhappy to be providing.
"I am glad of it," he said quietly. "Truly."
I looked at him for a moment. Edward without the practiced ease was a more legible person than the one I had loved — legible, and somewhat less interesting, which told me something about what I had been loving and what I had been imagining, and I was not certain the proportions reflected especially well on either of us.
"I believe you," I said, and excused myself.
I did not look for Damian as I crossed the room. I was aware of him regardless — still with Lord Ashby, still inclined at that angle, hands still — in the peripheral manner that had been developing since the walk and showed no inclination to cooperate with any of my management strategies.
Tomorrow, I decided. The same decision I had reached the previous evening, which suggested it was accumulating rather than resolving.
I collected a glass from a passing footman and applied myself to the room.
It was at least something I could address directly.