The Marquess of Her Hidden Heart: The Marquess at Vespers

The last of the October sun bled through the western windows of the gallery, staining the parquet floor in ribbons of copper and rust. Eleanor Ashworth stood before a console table of dark walnut, her gloved fingers tracing the edge of a gilt frame that held a miniature portrait of her late brother, Thomas. The painter had been generous: the jaw a touch firmer, the eyes a shade warmer, the mouth arranged in that expression of careless confidence he had worn so naturally in life. She studied it now with the critical detachment of a woman cataloguing inventory.

"Miss Ashworth."

The voice came from the corridor behind her, thin and reedy, and Eleanor did not turn at once. She smoothed a nonexistent crease from the sleeve of her walking dress and then, with the measured grace she had perfected over two London seasons, allowed her gaze to drift toward the doorway.

Mrs. Pembury stood at the threshold, hands folded at her waist in that perpetual pose of discreet servitude the woman had adopted since her husband's death. She had been housekeeper at Ashworth Hall for twenty-three years, and she wore the building into her bones: gray hair pinned in a tight coil, a black dress severe as a funeral, eyes that had learned to witness without reacting.

"Mrs. Pembury," Eleanor said. The name emerged cool, courteous, absent of warmth.

"Forgive the intrusion, miss. Her ladyship requests that you attend her in the green saloon at half past four."

Eleanor's gloved finger stilled on the gilt edge. "Requests, or commands?"

A beat passed. The housekeeper's gaze did not flicker. "Her ladyship phrased it as a request, miss."

"Then convey my acceptance, also phrased as a request." Eleanor turned back to the portrait. Behind her, she heard the soft retreat of footsteps on the marble tiles, then the closing of the door, and she permitted herself a small, private smile that held no particular affection. The dowager wished to discuss the autumn ball, no doubt. Or the family accounts. Or, more likely, some new stratagem involving Lady Caroline Beaumaris and the persistent problem of Eleanor's future.

She lingered a moment longer before the portrait. The light through the western windows had deepened, the copper taking on the bruised purple of approaching dusk, and in the changing illumination Thomas's painted face seemed to soften, to lose the rigid outline of oil and board and become something closer to memory. Eleanor had loved her brother, in the complicated, competitive way of siblings raised to measure themselves against one another. His death had been inconvenient. His death had also, in a manner she could not bring herself to examine too closely, removed an obstacle.

"Thomas," she murmured, testing the shape of his name in the empty gallery.

There was no answer, of course. There never was.

She withdrew her hand from the frame and turned toward the door, smoothing her skirts with quick, efficient movements, her mind already composing the appropriate expression of filial attentiveness for the dowager's green saloon. As she passed the long bank of windows, she caught her own reflection: a young woman of good height and better posture, hair dressed in the new, softer style the magazines had been championing, eyes the same deep gray as her brother's. The resemblance pleased her and unsettled her in equal measure.

Eleanor did not consider herself superstitious. But there were moments in the late afternoons, when the light failed and the house settled into its long, creaking evening, when the portraits along the gallery seemed to lean in slightly, and the corridors held the faint, mineral smell of stone that had never quite warmed despite centuries of hearth fires. In those moments she was not entirely certain that Ashworth Hall was glad of her tenancy.

The thought vanished as quickly as it had arrived. She had no patience for fancies. Fancies were the currency of women with nothing else to spend.

Half past four found her in the green saloon, arranged on a small sofa near the fire, a cup of China tea balanced in her palm. The dowager had not yet arrived. The room waited for its mistress in the particular hush of a stage before the principal entered: candles lit in their sconces, the ormolu clock ticking its steady, indifferent measure, the Brussels carpet immaculate beneath the claw-footed tables. Eleanor sipped her tea and watched the door.

She had been in residence at Ashworth Hall for seven weeks now, since the news of Thomas's death had reached her in Bath, where she had been completing the final month of mourning for an aunt whose passing had been, in Eleanor's private accounting, vastly more inconvenient. The elder Marquess had died in a riding accident on the estate, a fall from a horse that was, by all accounts, neither spirited nor treacherous. Thomas had been thirty-one, in apparent good health, and universally accounted a competent horseman. The accident, in short, had made no sense at all, and this absence of sense had settled over the household like a fine dust that could not be swept away.

The door opened. The dowager entered.

The Dowager Countess of Ashworth was a tall woman who had, in her youth, possessed a beauty of the sort that stopped conversations. At sixty-three, she retained the carriage of that beauty, the high cheekbones, the unhesitating gaze, the hands that moved with the slow authority of someone who had directed servants and children and the occasional recalcitrant husband for four decades. She wore black still, though the prescribed year of mourning for a son was nine months and not a day more, and she wore it in a manner that managed to be both austere and theatrical, the silk of her gown catching the candlelight in faint, funereal gleams.

Eleanor rose. "Grandmama."

"Sit, child, sit." The dowager waved one hand in a gesture that encompassed the sofa, the room, and by implication the entire enterprise of family life. She herself did not sit but moved to the high-backed chair near the hearth, lowering herself into it with the careful deliberation of a woman conscious of being observed. "You have been in the gallery."

A statement, not a question. Eleanor was careful not to react. "I went to see the Reynolds."

"You went to see your brother."

The fire crackled. A log shifted, sending a brief cascade of sparks up the chimney. Eleanor composed her features into an expression of gentle sorrow. "I do miss him, Grandmama. Every day."

The dowager's gaze rested on her granddaughter's face for a long, unreadable moment. "I imagine you do," she said at last, and the words carried a weight Eleanor could not entirely parse. The dowager lifted her own cup from the small table at her elbow, sipped, and set it down with a precise click of porcelain on lacquer. "I wished to speak with you about the autumn ball."

Eleanor had expected as much. "I am entirely at your disposal, of course."

"Naturally." The dowager arranged the folds of her gown with absent fingers. "The invitations must go out within the fortnight if we are to have any hope of a full attendance. The late marquess's affairs have, I regret to say, left the family in a position where we cannot afford to appear anything less than prosperous. The ball must be an event, Eleanor. A statement."

"Of continuity, Grandmama?"

"Of invulnerability." The dowager's gaze was steady. "Your brother left debts that would have appalled him had he lived to discover them. The estate is mortgaged beyond what any sensible man would consider prudent. The current marquess, my son-in-law, returns from Vienna within the month to take up the management of properties he has not seen in nearly a decade. We are, in short, in a position that requires the most delicate of performances."

Eleanor felt a small, cold satisfaction at the confirmation of her own private calculations. She had known about the debts, of course. One always knew, in families where money moved in audible currents. What she had not known, until this moment, was the dowager's intention to treat the information as a strategic problem rather than a source of shame. "What would you have me do?"

"Marry well, and marry soon." The dowager delivered the words with the same unhesitating directness she brought to the ordering of dinner. "Lady Caroline Beaumaris will be here for the ball. Her father has been making inquiries."

Eleanor set her teacup down. "Lord Hartfield's inquiries, or his daughter's?"

"Does it signify?"

"It might, to a man considering the offer."

The dowager's mouth curved by the smallest degree, an acknowledgment so faint that a less observant woman would have missed it entirely. "You are thinking of Lord Nathaniel."

Eleanor said nothing. The fire popped. Outside, beyond the heavy damask curtains, the first true darkness of the Hampshire evening had begun to gather, pressing against the windows like a patient animal.

"My daughter-in-law, may she rest, was not an Ashworth by birth. She was a Hartfield, which gave this family money at a moment when it most required money, and gave my son, Thomas's father, a wife he was never wise enough to appreciate. The current marquess is a Hartfield cousin. He inherits the title and the debts in equal measure, and he brings with him neither fortune nor, so far as I can determine, any particular attachment to the responsibilities he has assumed." The dowager folded her hands in her lap. "He is, however, a marquess. And unmarried."

"And you wish me to consider him."

"I wish you to consider the field." The dowager's voice sharpened by a fraction, the only indication that she found the conversation less than perfectly satisfactory. "Lady Caroline Beaumaris is a suitable match for any number of men, and her father is rich enough to make her attractive to half the peerage. You, my dear, are an Ashworth by name and by blood, and that counts for something, though perhaps not quite so much as it did six months ago. I do not presume to dictate your preferences. I merely observe that the current marquess will require a wife who understands the obligations of the position, and that an Ashworth wife would do much to repair the particular breaches my son's untimely death has created."

Eleanor absorbed this in silence. She had not, until this precise moment, seriously considered Lord Nathaniel Ashworth as a candidate for her hand. He had been a distant, vaguely inconvenient figure during her girlhood: the younger brother of the man she might have been expected to marry had the family been more sensible and the finances more robust. Thomas's death had elevated him to a position he had never sought, and his absence on the Continent had removed him from the daily calculations of the family. She had thought of him, when she thought of him at all, as a man whose problems were not her own.

Now, listening to the dowager lay out the situation with the cool precision of a chess player arranging her pieces, Eleanor began to revise her calculations. A marquess, even a poor one, was a marquess. An Ashworth by marriage was still an Ashworth. And a wife who understood the obligations of the position was, she thought, rather better equipped for the role than a Hartfield cousin raised in Vienna.

"I shall give the matter my most serious consideration, Grandmama," she said.

"Do more than consider, my dear." The dowager rose from her chair with the slow, deliberate grace of a woman who had been making exits for fifty years. "The ball is in three weeks. The invitations will go out tomorrow. By the time the current marquess arrives from Vienna, I should like to have the matter at least provisionally arranged."

"That is a very compressed timeline."

"It is the timeline we have been given." The dowager moved toward the door, her silk skirts whispering against the carpet. She paused at the threshold and turned, one hand resting on the doorframe, and for a moment the candlelight caught her face in such a way that Eleanor saw, beneath the powder and the careful arrangement of features, the ghost of the woman who had been young and beautiful and very much afraid, in this same house, forty years before. "Your brother would have managed this better," the dowager said quietly. "He would have charmed the Hartfields into lending more and forgiven them nothing, and the entire business would have been settled over a single bottle of port. You do not have that luxury. You have only your wits."

She left. The door closed behind her with a soft, definitive click.

Eleanor remained on the sofa, listening to the dowager's footsteps recede down the corridor, counting the distance until the sound faded entirely into the hush of the great house. Then she set her teacup down, rose, and crossed to the window, drawing back the damask curtain an inch to look out upon the darkened park.

The estate lay before her in the last blue light of evening: the gravel sweep, the stand of ancient oaks whose leaves had not yet entirely fallen, the long slope of lawn leading down to the ornamental lake. Beyond the lake, the parkland rose again in a gentle swell before the horizon, and there, at the crest, she could just discern the pale, angular shape of the family chapel, its small spire pricking the sky like a finger raised in warning or appeal.

Eleanor let the curtain fall. She thought of the debts. She thought of Lady Caroline Beaumaris. She thought of Lord Nathaniel Ashworth, whose face she could not quite recall, whose voice she had heard only twice in her life, and whose presence in the family had always been, for her, a kind of long, polite absence.

In three weeks, she would meet him properly for the first time.

In three weeks, she would decide whether to make him a husband or an obstacle.

The fire had burned down to a low, steady glow. The candles guttered in their sconces. Somewhere in the depths of the house, a clock began to chime the half hour, its sound traveling through the corridors and the closed doors with the unhurried certainty of a thing that had been doing this for centuries and intended to continue.

The chiming of the half hour had scarcely died away when the sound of carriage wheels on gravel cut through the evening stillness. Eleanor's hand stilled on the curtain. She had not expected anyone; the household ran on the rhythms of a country week, and tonight the family was to dine quietly, just herself and her mother, as they had every night since the news of the Marquess's return had begun to circulate among the servants.

The wheels came closer. Hoofbeats now, the jingle of harness, the heavy clop of matched greys pulling a travelling carriage up the long approach. Eleanor drew the curtain back again, and in the light thrown from the fanlight over the front door she made out the livery: dark blue, silver buttons, a crest she recognized at once.

It was not her brother's carriage. It was not Lord Nathaniel's.

It was the Dowager Countess of Ashworth's.

Eleanor felt something cold and bright flare in her chest, half warning, half opportunity. Her mother had written to London three days ago, begging an audience, and here was the answer, arriving unannounced at the very hour when the household was at its most vulnerable. A statement, if ever there was one. Her mother-in-law had timed her arrival with the precision of a general.

She let the curtain fall and smoothed the front of her gown, a simple evening dress of pale grey silk that she had thought, an hour ago, entirely suitable for a quiet family supper. Now it seemed absurdly inadequate. She was already moving toward the door when the sound of the front bell reverberated through the hall below, deep and sonorous, and she heard the shuffle of the aged butler, Peters, going to answer it.

She did not go down. Not yet. The Dowager Countess had made her entrance; now Eleanor would let her make her own way to the drawing room, and observe at her leisure who came to greet her, and how. She took up her position by the fireplace, one hand resting on the mantel, and composed her features into an expression of pleased, respectful surprise.

Voices rose from the hall. Peters, deferential. A woman's voice, lower, more authoritative, giving some instruction. Then the soft footfall of two pairs of shoes on the marble, the rustle of silk, and the drawing room door was pushed open.

The Dowager Countess of Ashworth stood on the threshold.

She was, Eleanor supposed, perhaps sixty, though the precise figure was one of those things no one could ever quite determine. Her hair was silver, dressed high and powdered faintly with grey, and her face was the kind of face that had been handsome once and had not entirely surrendered the fact. She wore black bombazine, as she always did, unrelieved by any ornament except a single mourning brooch at her throat, a small dark stone set in gold, which had belonged to her mother before her. The effect was formidable. The effect was meant to be.

Behind her, half a step back, as if uncertain whether she ought to be there at all, came a young woman Eleanor did not at once recognize. She was slight, brown-haired, dressed in a high-necked gown of dark green wool that had clearly been chosen for travelling rather than for effect. Her face was pleasant, her manner quiet, and she carried a small leather portfolio under one arm in a way that suggested she had not known what else to do with her hands.

"My dear Eleanor." The Dowager Countess advanced into the room with the unhurried confidence of a woman who had been mistress of the house for forty years and had no intention of relinquishing the title, whatever the legal niceties might say. "I see I have taken you by surprise. I do apologize. The roads were better than I feared, and Peters has kindly assured me there is a room prepared, though I confess I did not give him the chance to say no."

"Mother." Eleanor crossed the room, both hands extended. "How wonderful. We had no idea you were coming. Mama will be overjoyed."

"Your mother wrote to me." The Dowager Countess took the hands, held them for a moment, and released them. Her eyes, which were a pale, considering grey, travelled over Eleanor's face, her gown, the set of her shoulders, with the frank appraisal of a woman who had been assessing women for half a century and did not intend to stop now. "I thought it best to come in person. There are matters to discuss which ought not to be committed to paper."

"Of course." Eleanor kept her voice steady, pleasant, betraying nothing. "Shall I ring for tea? Or something stronger, after your journey?"

"Tea will do very well. And I dare say your mother will join us presently. But first, Eleanor, I must make you known to my travelling companion. Or, rather, I ought to say, my companion for the foreseeable future." The Dowager Countess turned, with a small gesture, toward the young woman in green. "This is Miss Charlotte Winslow. Miss Winslow has been in my employ for some months past, and I find her so useful that I have brought her with me to the country. Miss Winslow, my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Eleanor Ashworth."

Charlotte Winslow dipped a small curtsy, not too deep, not too shallow. "Mrs. Ashworth. I am very happy to make your acquaintance."

The voice was warm, a little lower than Eleanor had expected, with the soft Gloucestershire flattening of certain vowels that a London education had not quite succeeded in erasing. Eleanor smiled her best smile, the one she had perfected over two seasons, and inclined her head. "Miss Winslow. You are very welcome. I am sure we shall be glad of company; the house has been rather quiet of late."

"She reads aloud to me in the evenings," the Dowager Countess said, settling herself into the chair nearest the fire, "which is something I had quite given up hope of finding. My eyes are not what they were, and most of the young women one employs these days either mumble or fall asleep over their own words. Miss Winslow does neither. She also, I am given to understand, draws."

Eleanor's attention sharpened. "Draws?"

"Birds, principally. And flowers. With a considerable degree of accuracy, I am told, though I confess I have not examined the work myself. It is not the sort of accomplishment one usually associates with a young woman of her background, but there it is." The Dowager Countess accepted the cup of tea that Peters had somehow already produced and set it, untasted, on the small table at her elbow. "Her family, I should perhaps explain, is from Gloucestershire. Not people of fortune, but respectable. Her father was a tenant of Lord Harlowe's, I believe, or something of the kind. The eldest daughter is married to a curate. The youngest, I am told, is a great beauty, and has lately taken it into her head that she ought to be presented. Miss Winslow herself, as I expect you have gathered, is the one who keeps the rest of them out of the workhouse."

The picture, Eleanor thought, was being drawn with considerable skill, and the Dowager Countess was not in the least trying to be kind about it. The brown-haired girl in the green wool stood very still, a faint colour in her cheeks, and said nothing.

"Mother," Eleanor said, "I am sure Miss Winslow is a great comfort to you, and we shall be very glad to have her assistance while you are here. If you will forgive me, I shall just step and tell Mama you have arrived. She will be wild with delight, but she has a head that does not take surprises at all well, and I would rather she heard the news from me than from Peters."

The Dowager Countess inclined her head. "By all means. Tell her I shall come to her in a quarter of an hour, when I have caught my breath. And Eleanor."

Eleanor paused at the door. "Yes, Mother?"

"We shall speak later, you and I. There is no need to look so anxious. I have not come to quarrel with you."

Eleanor allowed herself the smallest of smiles. "I did not suppose you had, Mother."

"No," said the Dowager Countess, and her pale eyes rested on Eleanor's face for a long moment before she turned, with a little sigh, to her tea. "I dare say you did not."

Eleanor had been gone perhaps five minutes, and the room had grown very quiet. Charlotte could hear the clock in the hall marking the seconds with a kind of deliberate patience, and beyond the window a rook was making its slow evening circuits above the elms. The Dowager Countess sat with her hands folded over the head of her cane and said nothing at all, which was, Charlotte had learned, generally a sign that she was thinking something quite unkind and was reserving it for a more advantageous moment.

"Child," said the Dowager Countess at last, "you are a tolerable card player but a very poor actress. I have been watching you look at that bookshelf since you came in, and you have not taken in a single word I have said for the last quarter of an hour."

"I beg your pardon, my lady. I was only admiring the binding of the Encyclopaedia. It is the ninth edition, is it not?"

"It is the tenth, and you know it perfectly well, and you were not looking at the Encyclopaedia at all. You were looking at the shelf to its left, where the poetry lives. There is a Donne there that I had not noticed before, with a great deal of writing in the margins in a hand I do not recognise. It is not Nathaniel's; his hand is much neater. It cannot be Eleanor's, for she never opens a book unless there is a list of names inside the cover. I had meant to ask him about it." She paused, and her pale eyes, so unexpectedly sharp, rested on Charlotte's face. "You may fetch it down, if you like. I was going to send for it after tea in any case, and it will save Peters the trouble of climbing."

Charlotte rose, more willingly than she could quite bring herself to pretend, and crossed to the shelf. The volume was not hard to find, for it had been set a little forward of its neighbours, as though someone had taken it down and not quite returned it to its place. It was small and bound in a dark calf that had been much handled, and the gilt on the spine had been rubbed away by years of reading. She carried it back to the chair beside the Dowager Countess and sat down with it in her lap.

"Airmail," the Dowager Countess observed, in the tone of one making a note. "I thought so. The paper is too white for this house. He must have brought it from Vienna."

Charlotte opened the cover, and the first thing she saw was a small pressed flower, very flat and brown, that had been slipped between the pages as a bookmark. It was a sprig of something she could not quite identify, with a faint ghost of a scent that rose from the page when she lifted it, dry and sweet and very foreign. She set it carefully to one side and turned to the title page.

The book was a selection, not the whole of Donne, and someone had chosen the poems in a particular order, beginning with the early love poems and moving slowly, by way of the anniversary poems and the funeral poems, to the sermons. The name of the original owner had been scored through in ink, and a name had been written above it in a different, rather heavier hand. She did not at first recognise the name, and then she did, and her hands went quite still.

"Well," said the Dowager Countess, with the air of a woman who has been waiting some time for a particular penny to drop, "and what does the great bear say in his margins, Miss Winslow?"

"He does not say very much, my lady. He has marked certain lines, and written a word or two in the margin beside them. He has not written very much at all."

The Dowager Countess gave a small, dry laugh. "That is like him. He was always a child who would spend an hour over a single line of Virgil and then go out and kick a ball through a window. He is the same now, only the windows are larger and the Virgil is Donne. Read me one. Any one. I should like to hear how the bear sounds when he is alone with a book."

Charlotte hesitated, but the Dowager Countess was not a woman to whom one said no twice. She turned the pages until she came to a poem she half-remembered from the shelf in her father's study, and read it under her breath, and then, because the Dowager Countess was looking at her with her head a little on one side, she read it again, more clearly.

"Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new."

She paused, and her eye was caught by a line in the margin, written in a hand that was at once careful and a little unsteady, as though the writer had not quite meant to set it down.

I am not worth the mending. I know it. He knew it. He was kind enough to pretend otherwise, and I was a fool enough to believe him, and now he is dead and I am here, and the house is falling down, and I do not know how to begin.

"Well," said the Dowager Countess, very softly. "Well, well."

Charlotte looked up. The old lady's face had changed in a way she had not seen before. The theatrical composure had fallen away from it, and what was left was something older and much more tired, and very fond.

"He wrote that," the Dowager Countess said, "within a week of coming home. I did not know he had kept the book. I thought he had left it in Vienna, with everything else. He told me he had not been able to bring himself to pack the books. He said it would have been like packing a piece of someone, and he could not bear to do it in pieces."

"My lady," Charlotte said, and stopped, because she did not know what to say.

"You may read the rest, child, if you have a mind to. I shall not ask you what you find, and I shall not ask you to repeat any of it to me. I have seen enough. I came down here to find out whether the boy was as wretched as I feared, and I have found out, and now I must go and have my supper, and pretend to my daughter-in-law that I am not. You may keep the book until tomorrow, if you like. I expect you will want to look at the drawings in the back."

"I did not see any drawings, my lady."

"You will not find them at once. They are tucked into the very back, between the last leaf and the cover. He would not have shown them to me, and I shall not look at them, and you must not let Eleanor see them under any circumstances, or she will have them framed and hung in the great room before breakfast, and the poor boy will never forgive any of us. Do you understand me, Miss Winslow?"

"Perfectly, my lady."

The Dowager Countess rose, with the aid of her cane, and stood for a moment looking down at the small book in Charlotte's lap. Her hand, for just an instant, came to rest on Charlotte's shoulder, and the weight of it was surprisingly light.

"You are a good girl," she said, "and you have a steady head, and I am very glad you are here. I shall say so to Nathaniel, and he will make a point of disagreeing with me, and we shall quarrel about it, and I shall win, as I generally do. Good night, child."

"Good night, my lady."

The door closed behind her, and Charlotte was alone with the book.

She sat for a long time without opening it again, listening to the clock in the hall and to the rook outside the window, which had settled at last on the weathervane of the stables and was making a great deal of noise about nothing in particular. The light in the room had grown very low, and the fire had fallen to a single deep glow, and she could see, if she looked up, the last of the evening sitting in the tops of the elms.

She turned to the back of the book, as the Dowager Countess had told her to do, and there, between the last leaf and the inside of the cover, she found what she had not known she was looking for. It was a single sheet of paper, folded twice, and it was covered on both sides with a drawing in pencil of a sprig of some plant she did not at first recognise, done with a care and a precision that made her breath catch in her throat. The leaves were set at slightly different angles, as though the artist had wanted to show how they caught the light, and the roots had been drawn with a particular tenderness, as though they were the part of the plant that mattered most to the person who had drawn them. At the bottom, in a hand she was beginning to know, was a single line.

For C., who taught me to look at things properly, and who is not here to see this. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.

She closed the book, and sat for a long time with her hand laid flat upon the cover, and the fire made a small sound as a log shifted, and the rook on the weathervane said something important to the evening, and somewhere in the house a door was opened and closed again, and the world went on being the world, and she was in it, and she had not known until that moment how little she had understood of the man who was to be her employer, or how much there was to understand. She thought of the drawing in the margin of the book, and of the word sorry written three times, and of a young man who had come home from a foreign country with a book of poems and a single pressed flower and a great many things he did not know how to say aloud, and she thought that she would, perhaps, in time, be able to help him to say some of them. She thought that it would be a long time, and that it would require a great deal of patience, and that she was not at all sure she had it in her, and that she would try.

She heard, at last, the small sound of footsteps in the passage, and she looked up, and the door opened, and Lord Nathaniel Ashworth stood on the threshold with a candle in his hand, and the light of it caught the edge of the book she was holding, and for a moment neither of them spoke.