“Lady Amelia,” came Thomas’s reminding voice.
“Yes,” she said abruptly, recalling that she was meant to answer his question. “Yes, I am. I cannot sleep when it is light out. Summers are particularly difficult.”
“And winters are easy?” He sounded amused.
“Not at all. They’re even worse. I sleep far too much. I suppose I should be living at the equator, with a perfect division of day and night, every day of the year.”
He looked at her curiously. “Do you enjoy the study of geography?”
“I do.” Amelia wandered into the study, idly running her fingers along the books. She liked the way the spine of each volume bowed slightly out, allowing her fingers to bump along as she made her way into the room. “Or I should say I would. I am not very accomplished. It was not considered an important subject by our governess. Nor by our parents, I suppose.”
“Really?”
He sounded interested. This surprised her. For all their recent rapprochement, he was still…well…him, and she was not used to his taking an interest in her thoughts and desires.
“Dancing,” she replied, because surely that would answer his unspoken question. “Drawing, pianoforte, maths enough so that we can add up the cost of a fancy dress ensemble.”
He smiled at that. “Are they costly?”
She tossed a coquettish look over her shoulder. “Oh, dreadfully so. I shall bleed you dry if we host more than two masquerades per year.”
He regarded her for a moment, his expression almost wry, and then he motioned to a bank of shelves on the far side of the room. “The atlases are over there, should you wish to indulge your interests.”
She smiled at him, a bit surprised at his gesture. And then, feeling unaccountably pleased, she crossed the room. “I thought you did not come to this section of the house very often.”
He quirked a dry half smile, which somehow sat at odds with his blackened eye. “Often enough to know where to find an atlas.”
She nodded, pulling a tall, thin tome at random from the shelf. She looked down at the gold lettering on the cover. MAPS OF THE WORLD. The spine creaked as she cracked it open. The date on the title page was 1796. She wondered when the book had last been opened.
“Grace is fond of atlases,” she said, the thought popping into her head, seemingly from nowhere.
“Is she?”
She heard his steps drawing near. “Yes. I seem to recall her saying so at some point. Or perhaps it was Elizabeth who told me. They have always been very good friends.” Amelia turned another page, her fingers careful. The book was not particularly delicate, but something about it inspired reverence and care. Looking down, she saw a large, rectangular map, crossing the length of both pages, with the caption: Mercator projection of our world, the Year of our Lord, 1791.
Amelia touched the map, her fingers trailing softly across Asia and then down, to the southernmost tip of Africa. “Look how big it is,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
“The world?” he said, and she heard the smile in his voice.
“Yes,” she murmured.
Thomas stood next to her, and one of his fingers found Britain on the map. “Look how small we are,” he said.
“It does seem odd, doesn’t it?” she remarked, trying not to notice that he was standing so close that she could feel the heat emanating from his body. “I am always amazed at how far it is to London, and yet here”—she motioned to the map—“it’s nothing.”
“Not nothing.” He measured the distance with his smallest finger. “Half a fingernail, at least.”
She smiled. At the book, not at him, which was a much less unsettling endeavor. “The world, measured in fingernails. It would be an interesting study.”
He chuckled. “There is someone at some university attempting it right now, I assure you.”
She looked over at him, which was probably a mistake, because it left her feeling somewhat breathless. Nonetheless, she was able to say (and in a remarkably reasonable voice), “Are professors so very eccentric, then?”
“The ones with long fingernails are.”
She laughed, and he did, too, and then she realized that neither of them was looking at the map.
His eyes, she thought, with a strange kind of detachment, as if she were regarding a piece of art. She liked his eyes. She liked looking at them.
How was it that she had never realized that the right one had a stripe in it? She’d thought the irises were blue—not pale, or clear, or even azure, but a dark, smoky shade with the barest hint of gray. But now she could see quite clearly that there was a brown stripe in one of them. It ran from the pupil down to where one would find the four on a clock.
It made her wonder how she’d never seen it before. Maybe it was just that she’d never looked closely enough. Or maybe he’d never allowed her close enough, for long enough, to do so.
And then, in a voice as contemplative and muted as hers surely would have been, had she had the nerve to speak, he murmured, “Your eyes look almost brown just now.”
Amelia felt herself jolted back into reality. And she said, “You have a stripe.”
And promptly wanted to flee the room. What a pea-brained thing to say.
He touched the bruised skin of his cheekbone. “A stripe?”
“No, in your eye,” she clarified, because it wasn’t as if she could take the comment back. She might as well make her meaning clear. She motioned awkwardly in the air with her right hand, darting forward as if to point it out, but then jerking back since she could not touch him, and certainly not in his eye.
“Oh. Oh, that. Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it?” He made a strange sort of face. Well, no, not really. It would not have been strange on anyone else, but on him it was. It was a little bit modest, almost a little bit sheepish, and so thoroughly and wonderfully human that her heart skipped a beat.
“No one else has ever noticed it,” he added. “It’s probably for the best, really. It’s a foolish little imperfection.”
Was he fishing for compliments? She pressed her lips together, avoiding a smile. “I like it,” she told him. “I like anything that makes you less than perfect.”
Something in his expression warmed. “Is that so?”
She nodded, then looked away. Funny how it was easier to be frank and brave when he was angry (or, she supposed, tipsy) than when he was smiling at her.
“You will find many things to like about me, then,” he said, his voice too close to her ear for her comfort, “once you get to know me better.”
She pretended to study the map. “Are you telling me you are not perfect?”
“I would never presume to say that,” he teased.
She swallowed. He was leaning far too close. He probably didn’t even notice the nearness; his voice sounded completely unaffected, his breathing controlled and even to her ears.
“Why did you say my eyes were brown?” she asked, still keeping her eyes on the atlas.
“I didn’t. I said they looke
d brown.”
She felt a completely unbecoming swell of vanity rise within her. She’d always been proud of her hazel eyes. They were her best feature. Certainly her most unique. All of her sisters shared the same blond hair and skin tone, but she was the only one with such interesting eyes.
“They looked green this morning,” he continued. “Although I suppose that could have been the drink. Another pint of ale and there would have been butterflies coming out of your ears.”
She turned at that, utterly indignant. “It was not the drink. My eyes are hazel. Far more green than brown,” she added in a mutter.
He smiled rather stealthily. “Why, Amelia, have I discovered your vanity?”
He had, not that he was going to get her to admit it. “They’re hazel,” she said again, a little primly. “It’s a family trait.”
Someone’s family, at least.
“Actually,” he said quite softly, “I was rather marveling on their changeability.”
“Oh.” She swallowed, discomfited by his gentle compliment. And at the same time rather pleased. “Thank you.” She turned back to the map, which sat, safe and comforting, on the table before her. “Look how big Greenland is,” she said, mostly because the big blob at the top was the first thing she saw.
“It’s not really that big,” he said. “The map distorts area.”
“It does?”
“You did not know that?”
His tone was not insulting. It was not even condescending, but nonetheless, she felt foolish. It seemed like the sort of thing she ought to have known. And certainly it was the sort of thing she’d like to have known.
“It comes from having to spread a spherical object onto a flat plane,” he explained. “Try to envision wrapping this map around a sphere. You’d have a great deal of extra paper at the poles. Or conversely, try to imagine taking the surface of a sphere and laying it out flat. You would not get a rectangle.”
She nodded, cocking her head to the side as she considered this. “So the tops and bottoms are stretched. Or rather, the north and the south.”
“Exactly. Do you see how Greenland looks nearly equal in size to Africa? It’s actually less than one tenth the area.”