Page 38 of To Swoon and to Spar
Jane didn’t doubt it—but then she suspected that her younger days had been nothing like his sister’s. It was not that she’d been entirely friendless; while some of the girls at the finishing school she’d attended for a few years had been cruel, teasing her for her shyness and her inability to converse with ease, others had been kind enough, and there had been a regular set she’d taken her meals with, gone on occasional walks with into the nearby village. But they hadn’t had the sort of connection Penvale seemed to share with his friends—Jane was too shy to find herself easily sharing confidences—and she’d lost touch with them as soon as they left school, she being whisked away to Cornwall, the other girls going on to marry and settle down to lives of quiet domesticity. She’d never been much of a correspondent, either—the contents of a letter that were considered acceptable for a well-bred lady to pen were so tiresome and dull that Jane could not be bothered to attempt them.
She didn’t wish to admit any of this to him, so she merely shook her head.
“But your father was in thenavy,” Penvale said, sounding more indignant by the moment.
“Yes,” Jane said sharply. “Which meant that he was very rarely home to teach me much of anything.”
A brief silence fell, in which Jane could see him absorbing the picture that single sentence had painted, of a lonely, friendless childhood.
“Well,” he said, his frown smoothing away, “I shall simply have to teach you.”
“You’ll—what?” she asked. This was not what she had been expecting; she’d assumed that once she shared her lack of ability with him, he’d accept that she would not be a likely companion for sea-bathing excursions, and he’d leave her in peace.
“I’ll teach you,” he said easily. “It’s not so difficult. Children can do it.”
“I am not a child, in case you hadn’t noticed,” she informed him, sitting up in bed. “Children also crawl around in the grass and jump in muddy puddles, and I can assure you I don’t do those things, either.”
“But those aren’t useful skills,” he pointed out practically. “You live on a cliff next to the ocean—hell, it’s not evensafefor you not to know how to swim.”
“So long as I don’t plan on jumping off the cliff, I don’t see why it matters!”
“Ah, yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Since I’m the one in danger of being shoved off a cliff, it only matters that I can swim.”
“What you should really be concerned with is the thickness of your skull,” Jane muttered. “In case I am tempted to bash it in.”
The words came out suitably coldly, but beneath, she felt something bubbling within her: an almost insuppressible desire to laugh, of all things. She gazed at him, wide-eyed at this realization, and she saw that the corners of his mouth were twitching, too. Her eyes caughthis and held them, and her heart stuttered in her chest. The silence between them took on a strange, heavy quality with each moment that it lingered, and she was acutely aware of every single inch of space that separated them in that enormous expanse of bed.
He reached up his hand, and it hovered in that neutral territory between them, and just when she thought that he would reach toward her—
“Aaaaaaaaooooooooooooohhhhhhh.”
Jane and Penvale both jumped, despite the fact that Jane had been perfectly aware this was going to happen. This was the reason she had been determined to sleep in Penvale’s room, after all, rather than risk missing the carefully choreographed series of ghostly wails. But for the past few minutes, she had entirely forgotten the reason she was lying there in his bed.
“Jesus bloody Christ,” Penvale said, sitting bolt upright and shoving back the bedsheets. He sprang from bed with athletic grace and, wearing nothing but his nightshirt, sprinted across the room in three great strides, coming to a halt just before the wall opposite the bed. Head tilted slightly, he was clearly listening intently, and then he sighed, turning back to her.
“Should we… do something?” she suggested hesitantly, aware that she needed to play this very carefully indeed.
Penvale turned and regarded her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Jane suppressed the urge to fidget, wishing she could crack his head open and peruse his thoughts like the pages of one of her favorite books.
“No,” he said at last. “Let’s… go to sleep. Try to get some rest. We can deal with this in the morning.”
Jane frowned. It seemed unlike him not to wish to investigatefurther, and she knew a pang of unease deep within her—was it possible that he suspected something? Suspectedher?
He climbed into bed and reached over to extinguish the candle on the bedside table. He glanced over his shoulder at her, his expression strangely inscrutable. “Try to go to sleep, Jane—it’s too bloody late and cold to wander the halls in search of a ghost.”
“Right,” she said slowly. “You’re right, of course.” With that, she burrowed down beneath the blankets and shut her eyes tight, trying very hard to ignore the large, warm body a few inches away.
But it was not long before the wailing commenced again—not so frequent as to become predictable, that was a point she had stressed—and after an hour or so, Jane abandoned any pretense of sleep, instead lying with her arms folded neatly across the bedspread, staring up at the darkened canopy. Next to her, Penvale was silent, but it was a verywakefulsort of silence; there was no sign of the deep, steady breathing that indicated sleep.
After a while, the wailing ceased for good—it was growing late, and Jane hadn’t wanted anyone to lose a full night’s sleep over this plan, although several members of the staff had been alarmingly eager to participate—and she felt her eyes grow heavy at last. Knowing that she had several hours of uninterrupted sleep to look forward to, she burrowed even more deeply into her nest of blankets, basking in the warmth and listening sleepily to the sound of the cold wind howling outside.
This is very nice,she thought.
It might have been a minute, or an hour, or several hours later when she was awoken by the sound of a loud bang.
There was some rather creative cursing from next to her as Penvale emerged from his own pile of blankets, looking grumpy and mussedand far younger than usual. Jane stared blearily at him in the dark, shadowy room, then belatedly realized it was not merely the chill air of a room with a banked fire that was causing her to shiver—it was anactualgust of cold air. From outdoors.
Because there was an open window.
