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“I hated him,” Nathaniel said with his lips grimacing at the memory of his time in college.

He spoke of a tutor with too many books and not enough students, who had once assigned him a three-hundred-line translation of Theocritus purely because he thought Nathaniel ought to suffer a little for his arrogance.

“That went on for two years. And then, on the day I left, he pressed a copy of Thucydides into my hands and told me that arrogance was simply ignorance in an expensive coat.”

Eleanor smiled, slow and genuine. “A brutal truth, well-tailored, though.”

“Yes,” he said, quietly amused. “I suppose it stayed with me.”

He spoke of travel next almost shyly, as though uncertain whether his memories deserved attention. But Eleanor listened, leaning in just slightly, as her fingertips grazed the rim of her glass.

“It was in Florence, I think,” he said, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the candlelight. “I used to walk down to the Arno in the mornings. Before the city was properly awake. There was a bench under a sycamore, always damp with mist, always empty.”

She could see it as he described it: fog curling low over the river, the hush of a city not yet stirring.

“And you just … sat?” she asked gently.

“Read, sometimes,” he replied. “Mostly I just watched. There’s something terribly satisfying about the indifference of water. It moves regardless of who’s watching.”

Eleanor smiled faintly. “That sounds like peace.”

“It was,” he admitted, then glanced at her. “Until the mosquitoes discovered me.”

She laughed, completely taken aback by his comment. “That rather ruins the poetry of it.”

He huffed a small, reluctant chuckle. “That’s travel, I suppose. One part beauty, two parts mild suffering.”

“And Vienna?” she prompted, more and more intrigued.

Nathaniel hesitated, then continued, “The concert halls were always full, the music too loud, and the smoke unbearable. But once the lights went down …” He paused. “You could forget yourself. Completely.”

Eleanor watched him as he spoke, not just hearing the words, but seeing what they cost him to offer.

He wasn’t trying to impress her. There were no named composers or glittering salons, no boastful tales of foreign affairs or nights of debauchery.

Only moments, like watercolour sketches, spread out between them.

“And you travelled alone?” she asked quietly.

“Mostly,” he said. “My mother thought it was unbecoming, of course. A gentleman wandering Europe without a proper companion.” He gave her a dry smile. “She imagined all manner of scandal.”

“And was there?”

“No,” he said, simply. “Just silence. And space.”

Eleanor nodded. She understood that better than he could know.

“You don’t seem like a man who enjoys space for its own sake,” she observed.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Not at first. But solitude teaches you things.”

“About yourself?”

“About who you miss. And who you don’t.”

Their eyes met across the table, and for a heartbeat, Eleanor forgot the distance that still lived between them. The house, the name, the expectations. It all fell away for just that moment.

And then she looked down, composing herself.

“It sounds like you were chasing something,” she said softly.

“Perhaps,” Nathaniel murmured. “Or running from it.”

Eleanor did not press. She only folded her hands neatly in her lap and said, “Either way, you found something worth remembering.”

“Yes,” he said, his voice lower now. “Perhaps I did.” He paused for a moment, then looked up at her again. “Do you ever think about travelling?”

“I do,” she said without any hesitation. “But the Right Honourable Earl of Ravensdale would never allow it. Not on my own, at least. In fact, he would not even allow me to travel alone to visit my brothers.”

“Well …” Nathaniel said cautiously, “a beautiful young woman travelling alone … it is not something a father would wish for his daughter.”

She frowned. “All the wishes my father has for me are actually for himself. After all, that is how I ended up here, with you.”

She almost bit her tongue upon saying those words, but it was already too late.

They had escaped the confines of her mind and were no longer her own to retract.

She thought that this would surely ruin the flow of the evening, but it seemed that it did exactly the opposite, and his next question caught her off guard.

“What if we leave the Earl of Ravensdale aside … what are the wishes you have for yourself?”

Eleanor had always considered herself a just person who valued personal autonomy, but there was rarely a woman granted that privilege. That was why her rebellion had always been quiet, confined to books and spirited rides.

“To become the sole proprietor of my own self,” she said simply.

He didn’t say anything at first, although she thought that, as always, he would have some clever remark. Surprisingly, he didn’t. That assured her that this time, he was truly listening.

“It never occurred to me that one might not have such ownership,” he finally said.

“It depends on one’s perspective of the world,” she pointed out. “Yours is very much different from mine.”

“That is true.” He nodded only once.

“You see, when one becomes the sole proprietor of one’s own self, matters such as travel become wishes that easily come true,” she said somehow wistfully.

It was not so much the travel that she yearned for, but the possibility of making that decision on her own.

“Husbands and wives travel together,” he suddenly mused. It sounded as if he just had an idea but needed to say it out loud, to see what it truly sounded like.

“They do,” she said with a smile.

When the final course was cleared, which was a delicate arrangement of preserved pears and spiced cream, Eleanor found she was reluctant for the evening to end. The room felt warmer somehow as if the conversation itself had shifted the temperature.

She looked across the table and couldn’t help herself. “Thank you … for joining me this evening.”

Nathaniel gave a slight incline of his head, the candlelight catching the sharp edge of his jaw. “Of course,” he said as if that were the only thing to say. His voice, too, was quiet. Almost surprised.

They sat for one more moment in the stillness. Then he stood and moved to her chair. It was done neither hastily, nor ceremoniously. It was simply offering, as a gentleman would.

“May I see you back?”

She blinked, then nodded, rising with him. “Yes. Thank you.”

They stepped into the corridor, and the hush of the house swallowed them whole. The night was velvet around them, the walls were dimly lit, their footsteps barely more than whispers on the floor.

He didn’t offer his arm. She didn’t reach for it.

They didn’t need to. It would have been too much, too soon. The absence of touch wasn’t a void tonight. It was a space they had both agreed to honour.

They walked slowly, neither speaking, but the air between them carried something else now.

She could not name it tension or expectation.

But perhaps a kind of awareness … of each other, of the evening, of the possibility that silence, when chosen, could mean something entirely different than when imposed.

Eleanor could feel her pulse, steady and strange, somewhere between her throat and her wrist. She had not expected this desire to hold onto the last few seconds of his presence.

And to think how it all started. She almost chuckled at the thought. How everything changed. How they changed and bent to the blowing of the wind, trying not to break.

They parted with no great words. No lingering glances, no breathless hesitations.

“Good night, My Lord,” she said, offering him a small smile.

His mouth, in turn, curved just slightly. “Good night, My Lady.”

No touch. No promises. But something had changed as the door gently closed and the hush of Loxley House settled back around her like a mist.

Eleanor didn’t go to bed right away.

Instead, she wandered softly towards the writing table. The room smelled faintly of paper and rose oil, and her shawl still lay over the arm of the chaise, exactly where she had tossed it earlier that evening with a nervous flick of the wrist.

The surface of her writing table lay bare before her, save for the inkwell, a fresh sheet of parchment, and the faint crease left behind by the letter she’d folded with trembling fingers the night before.

Her fingers brushed that empty space, a ghost of the gesture she’d made when she left it for him.

The letter had been a risk. But it was also a choice to be seen, to be heard. To speak instead of waiting for permission in a house that was not a home, although everyone expected her to act that way.

She let herself sit at the desk, her hands folded over one another. No one had told her that marriage, even one made for reason rather than affection, could feel like navigating a foreign country without a map.

She did not know the customs of this place. She did not know its language. But she had stepped forward anyway.

And tonight, she had not been met with silence.