“Thank you, sir.”
They went off a little ways, and Edward pushed open the window. The air that came in was cold and damp. Her mother would be horrified of a chill overtaking her, but Elizabeth breathed it in gratefully.
They had some privacy. They could speak alone in quiet voices. It seemed wonderfully illicit. Some of the others might think this had all been a ploy on her part to get Edward alone. Amy might have encouraged her to try such a trick, but she would know this was honest. Elizabeth wasn’t very good at ploys.
Edward’s concern was genuine. He did not think this was a ploy.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I was quite overwhelmed.”
“You are not wrong about the room,” Edward said. “It is more full than it appears.”
“I think that is because the personalities of you and your brothers are so very large. When you were boys your mother and father must have despaired of ever having peace again. Except—you are not truly brothers, are you?”
“How do you guess that? I know we do not favor one another, but it is very forward of you to say so.”
“I have never done a forward thing in all my life but talk to you.”
“You—your insight . . . it astonishes me.” His whole manner had stiffened.
She had never wanted to understand someone as much as she wanted to understand him. At the moment, he was building walls in his mind to keep her out.
“I am not trying to astonish, truly.”
“It makes you all the more intriguing.”
She had never before wanted to kiss someone, but she could finally see why one might want to. If she leaned in, if she put her hand on his chest—it was scandalous. She also felt that if she tried to kiss him, he would let her.
He shook his head and took a step back, and she felt as if a chasm opened between them.
“I fear, Miss Weston, that I have misled you. I admire you, but I cannot do more than that. This is for your own safety, please believe me.”
He was not lying. But he was disguising the full truth.
“Mr. Wilde—” But he had already walked away.
Amy interrogated her thoroughly.
“But what did he say?”
Heads bent together, no one could hear them. The evening was over. Elizabeth was in her coat, waiting in the foyer for the carriages to be drawn up. The brothers Wilde were nowhere to be seen.
“That this was for my own safety, and then he left. He was unhappy, I could see that he was.”
“Of course he was, to give you up. My dear, he has used you very ill, to draw you in and then drop you like . . . like a handkerchief.” She frowned at her own metaphor.
“I do not know what I did wrong. Perhaps I spoke too freely—”
“Oh, do not blame yourself. Who can understand men?”
They kissed cheeks in farewell and the Westons left in their carriage. When her father asked her how she liked the evening, she only said that she liked it well enough, but that she was tired now and didn’t want to speak.
That night, a wolf howled across the valley. She had never before heard such a sound, a plaintive cry, a heart breaking as the piercing note drew long and faded. The tenor of longing, and of uncertainty, was familiar to her. It should not have been. The sound was the frustration of someone who had been unhappily standing in close company all evening, but who no longer felt at home in the woods, either. The cry of someone who would be pleased to dance, if only he could find the right partner.
Because she had danced so much more than she was used to, because she had spoken so freely to Edward Wilde, she was feeling brave, and so she donned her coat and took a lantern and went out to the grounds of the manor.
She did not think to search so much as she meant to let herself be found. But the wolf did not cry again. “Edward!” she called out once, but her voice echoed strangely and she cringed. Perhaps she should go to the edge of the wooded park and wait for him.
Her slippers grew wet with dew, as did the hem of her nightdress. She ought to have put on better clothes; she thought her heavy coat would be enough. This was all madness—but she did not mind so much. It felt honest, in a world of pretense.