what they’re taught or how they are before they appear in society as if sprung fully formed from the egg.’
How could she refuse to try to breach the gaps between them? It was a start if they understood each other better, she supposed, but some of the old rebellious Callie whispered, when was he going to tell her the adventures he’d had without her?
‘Much depends on the family she comes from and the one she might make one day. Grandfather Sommers’s classical education didn’t prepare me to instruct young women about the niceties of life and I left that to my aunt. I do know aristocratic young ladies have very different ambitions to genteel ones, though, and our teaching was always aimed at the latter.’
‘So what does a genteel young lady need to know?’
He surprised her by meekly handing her any items she nodded at and putting ones she rejected in neat piles as they worked in an easy harmony she would have found incredible only yesterday. It felt oddly intimate having him share the room that was her sanctuary for so long, yet he made it seem normal to silently debate over her most intimate garments and possessions in front of the man who should have shared her life, so how could she tell him to leave her alone and go back to being the outsider in this otherwise all-female household?
‘How to manage a household and control a budget, the details of her kitchen and how it is supplied. how to contrive and make do and be sure her family are in credit with the world in every way possible,’ she said as she tested that question in her head and tried it out on what she had done her best to teach her young ladies. ‘She needs to know enough of the world to keep certain parts of it out of her house and encourage other ones in with the right degree of hospitality. To record and examine accounts, visit her neighbours and be a useful part of her local community, and value truth over show, as well. I don’t know if I can really describe an ideal wife since I doubt such a paragon exists. The closest I can get is to say she should be well informed and able to care for her family, ready to love her children and support her husband’s endeavours as best she can, yet still be a woman of character in her own right.’
‘And for all that they need algebra and natural philosophy and a smattering of Greek and Latin?’ he asked, looking at the pile of books she was thumbing through to find which ones she could leave behind and which must go with her.
‘I only teach those if a girl shows an aptitude for learning and a lively curiosity about the world. Their potential husbands are taught them as a matter of course, so I see no reason to rob a girl of a chance to explore them before she has to be busy with a family.’
‘It’s a wonder you restrict yourself to a few extra lessons with your brighter pupils. Your late grandfather seems to have treated you like a student at Balliol.’
‘All that learning didn’t do me much good, did it?’ she asked, avoiding his gaze as she tried not to look back on the idealistic, impulsive girl she was when she fell in love with him. ‘I was so full of wondrous myths and legends and tales of wild adventure I couldn’t see real things as they were.’
‘What were they then?’ he asked quietly.
‘Impossible,’ she said bleakly, the gaps and betrayals of her young life piling up to remind her what a fiction her dream of perfect contentment with her hero-lover was.
‘No, it was possible. We only needed time to grow up and cope with such hot passions in the everyday world. Left to ourselves we would have found a way, Callie. You have to believe that or we might as well set up a nice little school for you in Bath and hire a law office for me on the moon.’
‘Perhaps we should,’ she said with a half-smile at the thought of him negotiating with the ancient gods of Olympus for the rights of a celestial body.
‘Don’t. It’s unthinkable to turn our backs on a last chance at love,’ he said hoarsely and there he was again, the true Gideon under all that gentlemanly self-control.
‘If we can’t laugh together, we’ll never be anything but strangers at heart,’ she warned him. ‘Half of what went wrong between us was because the intensity of our love felt so fierce. If we’re going to try again, our marriage must be rooted in real life.’
‘I expect you’re right, but could we agree not to laugh about parting again, if you want me to stay sane while we work our way round the thorns?’
‘I’ll agree to that, Gideon, but I refuse to be rushed into anything else.’
‘What do I have to do then, Callie? I warn you I’ll go down on my knees and beg if I have to sooner or later and you’ll find it embarrassing and ridiculous. Just agreeing to come to Raigne with me is hope enough for now, though, so I’ll excuse you that ordeal for as long as I can endure the temptation of you so close and not abase myself,’ he said, and how much of what he said was serious and how much a joke? She eyed his careful smile and unreadable gaze and decided it would take longer than a day to read the true Gideon under all that armour nowadays.
‘The world will still believe we’re together again,’ she said flatly and wondered if she had been stupid to agree to go to Raigne with him, after all. ‘You only came back yesterday, Gideon, we haven’t had time to get used to each other as we are now, let alone as man and wife.’
‘At least at Raigne we can be the people we really were all along.’
‘Without my aunt trying to wreck us all the time.’
‘Yes, a new start, Callie, that’s all. At least this time I won’t have to spend hours at my law books and you won’t be living in a strange city with people you have little chance to know.’
‘I see the logic of it, but what if we fail publicly this time?’
‘Would that be so much worse than not trying at all?’ He strode over to the window and back again, looking as if this cramped little room was closing in on him. It felt too small to her now; a cell built with Aunt Seraphina’s lies, and she bit back a reckless urge to go tonight, dark and dangerous thought it might be to risk travelling at night. ‘Tell me truly you only want to find another school to teach in. That you can forget the chance of a family and I will smother my hopes and promise not to trouble you again,’ he finally said as if it hurt.
He stood still and met her eyes, let the guard he kept round himself drop. Did she really want this man she once loved to beg? No, it couldn’t have been love in the first place if she did. So here she was up against words she didn’t want to say.
‘Yes...’ she breathed at last, then saw pain and bleak loneliness in his gaze before he blanked it and realised he thought she meant yes to him going away. ‘I mean yes to Raigne and us, you idiot,’ she told him brusquely. ‘But that’s all for now,’ she reasserted even if she had seen the truth of his longing behind his wary eyes.
‘It’s enough,’ he said shortly and she could see from the way his shoulders relaxed that the hard control he’d kept his mouth and those dear, familiar green-shot grey eyes under was lifted.
Feeling a little ashamed of herself for making him reveal more than he wanted to in order to combat her attack of the dithers, she still felt as if she were walking the edge of a precipice.
‘Well, that’s finally settled then,’ she said briskly and began packing as few boxes as she could to take away tomorrow.
‘Good, I’d hate to have come after you if you change your mind, because I warn you, Callie, I won’t go away quietly this time. I’ll
