Havemercy (28 page)

“I know you aren’t stupid,” he said. “It is one of your particularly unique qualities, Hal, and I don’t have a mind toward forgetting it anytime soon. No. Nevertheless, I’ve decided—at least, I thought—to have an eye toward asking you something.”

He was thinking out loud, babbling in the way I’d only heard very rarely, which meant that he must have been quite nervous.

I was in no mood to console him, terrible and selfish as my misery had become, but my hands unclenched a little from their iron hold on the bedspread to wrap around his own. “Say it, then,” I whispered.

“Come with me,” he said, all at once, as if he were afraid it might lodge in his throat halfway before he had the chance to get it out.

It startled both of us, and me so much that I found myself unable to speak.

“I—I would be most honored if you would come with me,” Royston quickly revised, looking down at the floor with what appeared to be considerable interest. “I’ve thought about it. Or rather, since I received the news I have been thinking about it, and, well, I think it’s the best solution. In any case, there it stands. My invitation may come as quite a shock, but I am nevertheless very serious about it.”

I was too shocked to laugh at the way he was speaking, overly serious, as though it was a business proposal, and so I did the only thing I could do: I just flinched. My surprise was tempered with pleasure and dismay at once; I wanted to pull my hands away to cover my face and found that I could not—of course, because Royston was still holding them.

In all the strangest fantasies I’d entertained since I began studying with him—and there had been many, in this very room, extravagant and off center as my thoughts ever were—I had always imagined that I’d give anything to hear him ask this very question of me. I would be most honored if you would come with me.

In as many words, that was all I’d wanted. Yet it was one thing to imagine it in the dusky moments between waking and sleeping, and quite another to be faced with the possibility, real and whole in the waking world.

I knew at once the complications; they were why I’d always assumed it would be no more than a daydream.

“I know that I would be depriving the children of a most excellent tutor,” he went on, seeking to draw me from my silence. “I merely find that I have grown . . . accustomed to your conversation, as well as your company, and while there are a rare few people in this world whom I consider my friends, I find quite suddenly that you are one of the dearest. As I said, the request is selfish. Yet it isn’t entirely ludicrous, either. We could—There are some things, Hal, that would be greatly facilitated by a move to the city.”

I didn’t dare to imagine what he meant by that. In the moment, with all that I stood to lose, I couldn’t afford to presume myself into even further disappointment.

“If you wish to stay with me, then you shouldn’t leave,” I said, horrified at my own selfishness but still unable to stop myself. I freed my hands to hold his face, tilting it up to get a real, full look at it. “Don’t leave.”

He looked at me with dark, miserable eyes, and I felt guilt settle heavy in my chest like a burden.

I hadn’t meant to be a burden.

“Hal,” he said at last.

“I can’t go,” I whispered, pulling my hands away and drawing my knees up to my chest. I wished quite suddenly that he wouldn’t kneel so before me: Our positions were abruptly reversed, and I found myself unexpectedly averse to the change. It was one of many changes. I couldn’t bear to look at it straight on. “Since I was a child, my father promised me. And the chatelain has done so much for me, funded my entire education, brought me here to live in his house and fed me, clothed me. My bed is his, the clothes on my back, all the books on my shelves, save for the ones you gave me. I couldn’t be so ungrateful. I can’t go.”

“Please,” Royston said carefully, as though he had no idea what an effect such words had on me. He moved now, unfolding from where he knelt, and paused but a moment before he sat beside me on my bed. He almost knocked the back of his head against the sloped ceiling—something I’d done countless times before.

“Be careful there,” I murmured. “The ceiling is very low.”

“Ah,” Royston said. “Yes. I see.”

We sat for a time in uncomfortable silence while I fought off the urge to cry, or indeed to think of anything at all. My thoughts were treacherous, and my fingers felt impossibly cold.

At last, I heard Royston draw in a measured breath. “I would pay them very generously in thanks for their understanding,” he told me, with a straightforwardness that stunned me. “They would understand, I think—and it is not as if you are the only tutor in all of Nevers. You wouldn’t be leaving them in such dire straits as all that.”

“That would be asking too much of you,” I replied, as soon as I’d found my voice.

“I think it a negligible detail,” Royston replied, “when I have just asked so very much of you.”

“It’s quite different,” I told him. On the whole I felt as if my mind had been oddly separated from all my emotions; I was speaking, certainly, but at the same time not entirely sure I was in control of the words I spoke. I might have been a mechanical dragon more than I was myself, for all I had control of my actions, or understood the recklessness of my own heart.

“It isn’t so very different as all that,” Royston said. He turned his face as though he sought to capture my gaze and, after a moment of unnecessary perversity, I allowed our eyes to meet. There was something in his gaze that made me wonder if he was trying to say more than I’d heard. I felt something clench tight within me, unruly and curious despite myself. “If,” Royston continued, gently, “by this offer, I presume too much—”

This was hard for him. I saw it in the tight lines around the corners of his eyes, the matching lines, just as tight, around the corners of his mouth. I knew enough of Royston to know he wasn’t the sort of man given to such persistence; when he was denied so firmly something he wanted for himself, he withdrew to prevent any further infliction of the same hurt.

Yet here he was, importuning me further. I was repaying him for all his kindnesses by being stubborn as a mule and heedless as a child.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, all at once and in a breathless rush. “Royston, please, you mustn’t think me ungrateful—”

“I don’t.”

“—and you mustn’t think I wouldn’t want to go with you,” I went on, “because when I think about what it will be like once you’ve left, it’s too insufferable.”

Royston’s eyes lit up for a moment with warmth and good humor, and something that looked a little like relief. “I’m glad to find us in agreement on that point, at least,” he said.

I flushed, and pressed on, determined to make myself heard. “Only,” I stammered, “only I can’t do it. To leave without any warning—to abandon Alexander and William and Etienne, even Emilie—”

“It is quite sudden, yes,” Royston agreed.

“And what’s more,” I added, blush growing deeper, “I don’t know the first thing about the city.” I realized all at once that the majority of my altruism stemmed not from my desire to repay my distant aunt and her husband’s kindness, nor was it to save the children from the sadness of parting. Rather, it was my own intractable fear of the city herself, all three maidens, whatever specter of it I’d concocted. I was raised in the country, and I thought of it without reservations as my home. While I wished to follow Royston, and I did—it was almost feverish how completely I wished it—I was also terrified.

I faltered then, and Royston saw through my protestations at once.

“Hal,” he said, taking one of my hands in both of his own, “you are far more clever and far better-read than most students at the ’Versity. What separates you from them is their monstrous sense of self-entitlement, but no more than that, I assure you. The city, too, is no more than the countryside with a great many more houses and a great many more opportunities.” He paused for a moment, then allowed himself a slight, self-deprecating smile. “Perhaps that is somewhat oversimplified,” he continued, “but there is some truth to it. I asked you to come with me when I leave tomorrow with some considerable measure of selfishness, but at the same time I would never have made the offer if I didn’t think you would benefit from the arrangement just as much—if not more so—than I. There are some people who aren’t made for the limitations of the countryside. You are one of those people, Hal. If you say that you will be happier here reading what little my brother can procure for you, teaching the basic patterns of grammar to my nephews, then I will not press the matter further, and though I will be quite distraught to take my leave of you, I will do it. But can you truly look me in the eye and tell me with all honesty—and do not let fear temper your answer, Hal—that the city does not hold for you something you crave, something you have always craved, something you have longed for ever since you first imagined it might be out there, just beyond your reach, waiting for you to have the chance to attain it? Tell me—it is the same longing you foster when you read, is it not?”

When he was finished speaking, I found I could scarcely breathe. Royston was a peerless speaker, and had he asked me at that moment to leap out a window, I suspect I would have done it for him without hesitation. His eyes were very bright and his face alive with the meaning behind his words. I felt my heart stutter in my chest as my breath stuttered in my throat.

This was one of many reasons why I so often dreamed of kissing him. He spoke more beautifully than the most exquisite passages I’d ever read.

The expression on his face was too overwhelming, the force of his words too pure. I looked away from him and knotted my fingers in the bedsheets.

“It is,” I whispered. “I do wish for that.”

“When I was somewhat younger than you,” Royston told me, “I left my home in the countryside. I had no such offer as you have before you now, and—I’ve never told this to anyone—I was completely terrified of all that lay ahead of me.”

“But you did it yourself,” I replied. “You have no reason to feel beholden to anyone now, for the . . . the price they paid for you when you were that age, to rescue you, to show you all the things you speak so eloquently about.” I was near to shredding the sheet, and I forced myself to let go of it before I really did tear it. “It is almost . . . too kind of you. Your offer.”

“I won’t hold you to it,” Royston promised. “I don’t expect to be repaid.”

I shook my head. “Then you undervalue me,” I said. “It would seem that I owed you too much.”

“Then think of it in terms of my selfishness,” Royston said candidly. “In the terms I have tried my hardest not to think of it. As I said, you are more than worthy of the city, but if you would do me the favor of considering it from my perspective—Hal, I am quite close now to begging for your company.”

It was much the same as the way I’d begged for him to stay.

We were unexpectedly equals, at least in terms of how greatly opposed we were to being parted from one another. After a moment, I found myself laughing, then Royston was laughing with me; we ran the gamut from nervous to relieved in no more than a second, and I fell against him, hiding my face against his shoulder, muffling the sound of my laughter in shades of gratitude and delight.

“Would you really?” I asked him, when I’d quite composed myself once more. “Would you really take me away from here, take me with you to the city?”

“This is no jest, Hal,” he said. “I would never have offered it if I didn’t have every intention of seeing it through. A good assistant is a rare thing to come by; a good student even rarer.”

“Mme will be so angry,” I added. “She’ll be likely to faint all week.”

“Let her be angry,” Royston said. “She deserves you less than anyone else here.”

I sobered for a moment when I thought of the others. “I will miss them,” I said softly. “I’m very fond of the children.”

“They shall come to hate me, no doubt, for whisking you away from them,” Royston replied. “I will be their evil uncle, who stole the light out of their lives without any warning.”

“Don’t,” I murmured, and nudged his shoulder lightly with my own, but there was no vehemence in my rebuke.

“Hal,” he said, and I wondered what it was about his voice that could make my own name sound like a title both foreign and beautiful. Despite what good sense had taught me about the extent of Royston’s personal feelings, I turned slightly, and tilted my head up.

He touched my cheek, and looked at me with an expression that I’d only ever seen him wear when he spoke of Thremedon, his beloved city. Then he winced, and took his hand away to press it against his forehead, a faint glimmer of unhappiness crossing his face.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. I didn’t know why I had thought . . . but it didn’t matter. If Royston was going to take me to the city with him, I would have to be more circumspect.

“No,” he said, though his argument sounded halfhearted at best. “It isn’t that. I’ve only . . . I’ve got something of a headache, that’s all.”

“Oh,” I said, accepting the lie, because it was clear that was what Royston wanted me to do. “That’s all right. We can—we don’t have to talk.”

We were silent for a while after that, but this time it was without the prior awkwardness. I toyed with one of the rings on Royston’s left hand, and he allowed me to do it. It was a ring for poison, with a complicated, stiff catch, and the silence that stretched between us was punctuated by the sound the ring made when I managed to open it.

At last, Royston said, “Will you come with me, then?”

“Yes,” I told him, without hesitation. “Yes, I’ll come.”

“Ah,” he replied. The pleasure and relief flooded his voice, deepening it. “Well,” Royston went on, and I was sad to hear that quality disappearing from his voice, “it’s rather late to talk to my brother about the matter.”

I hid a yawn against the inside of my elbow. “I don’t know what I should pack,” I admitted.

“Don’t worry,” Royston said. “I shall see to that. Would you . . . ah, would you like me to stay with you awhile? If you have any questions about the city—about what will be expected of you there—I wouldn’t mind answering them.”