Page 57 of Mr. Cavendish, I Presume

“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.

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