Perhaps he’d gone to sleep.
She listened to the silence for a time.
On a surely irrational impulse, she slid out ofher bed, and gently moved the little porcelain vase stuffed with blossoms from the desk to the floor.
And then she climbed up on the chair, gingerly. She spent a moment balancing, to make sure it could hold her weight. And then she took a step up onto the desk. Which brought her face just a little closer to the ceiling.
And she listened.
She just wanted to see if she could hear him breathing.
One could lead a horse to water but not compel it to drink; likewise, one could put a quill to paper, but not compel it to write. Kirke had inked up just the same, hoping tonight would be the night.
He moved the quill aimlessly in absent, wavy lines across the foolscap. Thinking, but not of his speech.
He’d never anticipated that he’d tell his oldest, darkest, most painful secret in broad daylight, in a sweetly blooming garden near the docks, to a clear-eyed girl more than a decade younger than he was. He’d felt a trifle unsteady since, a bit as though a fever had broken. He wasn’t certain if he felt lighter, or freer, or just odd: it was a weight he’d borne so long, it almost felt as though it had affected his very posture. How would Atlas have felt if someone had lifted the world from his back? Grateful, or resentful of a loss of his purpose? Would he need to seek new meaning?
He’d told her in the spirit of honesty, to release the two of them from their feverish dalliance. To convey to her why it needed to end.
But he’d also told her because he wholly trusted her more than any other person he knew.
This realization shook him almost as much as telling her had.
He knew it was often impossible to trace an origin of a belief in something, whether it was in genies, ghosts, God, or the Whigs’ chances of ever having a majority in Parliament. Was one born with a predisposition to a belief? Or was it shaped by circumstances? Instilled by upbringing? He’d told Keating that people’s habits tend to mutate in unusual ways when they didn’t have a useful occupation.
And maybe his useful mutation was just precisely what she’d suggested: the injustice done him—his lover and child and his right to be a father taken from him—had essentially forged him into what he was today. A justice seeker. A protector of innocents. That Catherine had indeed seen what happened to him as an injustice—that she hadn’t looked at him with horror or judgment, but with compassion—had been a revelation, and he was reluctant to accept the unexpected grace of this. No part of him was yet willing to believe he deserved it.
She was giddy with plans for the party at Lady Wisterberg’s; he’d overheard her discussing them in the sitting room. The party to which Lord Vaughn had also been invited. And now he realized part of the unsteadiness he felt was anticipation: soon enough some young man would claim her.
He had tried more than once to imagine what life would be like when that day came. But his mind encountered only blankness. As if the story of his life simply ended there.
He deliberately thought of it now, rehearsing for devastation. His heart obliged him, turning over hard in his chest. It felt like a jagged rock.
His quill screeched across the foolscap and he nearly fell out of his chair at the sound of an apocalyptic crash below.
Catherine yanked open her door at the sound of thumping.
Dominic’s fearsome expression evolved into what looked like knee-buckling relief when she appeared. He flicked a swift inspecting gaze over her.
He was breathing like a bellows, and he looked ready to slay marauders.
“Dear God, did you break any bones?” he said.
“Oh—no—oh my goodness—I’m so sorry to disturb you.”
He inspected her more closely, his eyes narrowed, to ascertain whether she was telling the truth.
And then there fell a little silence during which they stared at each other like awkward strangers.
Gradually, his eyes lit with amusement. “Were you cavorting again?”
She could feel herself flushing. “I was... standing on top of the desk.”
There was something about being stared at by his dark eyes that compelled the truth out of her, no matter how mortifying.
“You were... standing on the desk,” he repeated thoughtfully. “And then...”
“And then I slipped.”