Page 79 of Ordered Home for the Holidays
She pushed the thought away, as she had a thousand times before. There was no room in her life for such things. Not now. Perhaps not ever.
Unable to think of anything to say, she rose. “I should find my children.” She left without looking back.
***
The girls ate their supper early in the nursery. Pearl had become used to eating with them at home, but here she ate with the duke and dowager duchess, then joined the duke in the drawing room after. The duchess retired to her bedchamber.
Pearl hovered by the window, hands folded at her waist, unsure if she should stay or retreat. Was he entertaining her as a host must, or did he desire her company?
Victor stood by the fireplace, one hand on the mantel, his body outlined by the restless play of the flames. “Will you join me?” he asked, gesturing to a pair of low chairs drawn close to the hearth.
Pearl hesitated, then moved with what felt oddly like surrender. She crossed to the chair he indicated and sat, arranging her skirts with more care than was strictly necessary.
Victor poured two glasses of brandy from a cut-crystal decanter, then offered her one. She took it, the weight and heat of the glass unfamiliar in her palm. She hadn’t drunk spiritssince before Percy died. The taste now seemed both alien and intimate, like a language she had once spoken fluently but had since forgotten.
“Thank you,” she said, and heard the stiffness in her own voice.
Victor lowered himself into the chair opposite, legs sprawled, one foot angled toward the fire. For a long moment, neither spoke. The silence wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t comfortable either. It was the silence of people who once knew each other’s secrets, but now found themselves strangers to their own impulses.
At last, Victor broke the spell. “You look well, Pearl. I hope you don’t mind the observation.”
She shook her head, unsure how to respond. She hadn’t looked at herself in a mirror for longer than was necessary in months. She still wore her mourning, but the gray and black no longer felt like armor. More like skin. “And you,” she said, searching for the appropriate compliment, “seem… content here.”
He snorted, a sound that might have been laughter. “Content is not my natural state. I’m told it makes me appear dull.”
Pearl sipped the brandy, surprised by its sudden, medicinal burn. “I don’t think anyone would accuse you of dullness, Victor.”
He looked at her then—really looked—and the force of it made her inhale, sharp and involuntary. His eyes, brown and gold in the shifting firelight, seemed almost liquid.
“I am not what I was,” he said. “That’s all.”
She wanted to protest, but the words would not form. Instead, she watched the way his hand curled around the brandy glass. She remembered with a lurch how those hands had once lifted her onto a horse, how they had once, long ago, smoothed alock of hair from her forehead during a summer fever that nearly killed her.
She felt herself flush and forced her gaze back to the fire.
“Do you have plans for the new year?” he asked.
Pearl considered the question. “I thought perhaps visit my brother, though he is so changed by his new position as a vicar that I hardly recognize him anymore.”
Victor’s mouth twisted. “Men are always improved by an upturn in fortune. Or so they believe.”
Pearl smiled, the expression unfamiliar on her face.
The fire snapped and resettled, throwing up a waft of scented smoke. Pearl, normally so attuned to the temperature of a room, felt none of the cold. Instead, there was a prickling under her skin, an awareness of herself as a physical thing, vulnerable and, in this moment, acutely alive.
She risked a glance at Victor. His face was angled away, lit from below by the embers, so that his jaw seemed carved from something older than bone. There was gray at his temples now, and the lines at his eyes had deepened into permanent creases. But the overall effect wasn’t of decline, but of concentration, distilled, not diminished.
“Are you happy, Victor?” she asked, surprised at the boldness of her own voice.
He didn’t answer immediately. When he did, it was with a kind of measured honesty that made her ache.
“I am… accustomed. To solitude. To the routines of this place. Sometimes I think that is all happiness amounts to—the absence of interruption.”
Pearl stared into her glass. “I used to believe happiness was a matter of choosing well.”
“And now?”
She hesitated. “Now I think it may be nothing more than luck.”
