Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~9 min read
Chapter 7: The library encounter
SEBASTIAN
He told Lady Caroline on a Wednesday.
He had not, to be precise, told Caroline anything definitive — there had been nothing to definitively tell, which was the problem the society pages had created for both of them by printing what they had printed. His mother had arranged three successive engagements where Lady Caroline was present and Sebastian was present and the proximity was understood by everyone in the room to be purposeful, and he had attended because he had not yet sorted out what he was doing and he had thought — somewhat naively, it transpired — that attending a musicale did not constitute a declaration of intent.
“Lady Caroline,” he said, in the garden at the Ashford evening party, with the sufficiency of the private space around them and the noise of the party inside.
She turned. She was beautiful — he was not unaware of this — and she had the particular quality of a woman who had set her course and did not expect to be redirected. She had directed a great deal of warmth at him in the past weeks, and he had received it with what he hoped was courtesy rather than encouragement, and he was aware, now, that the distinction had not been as clear to her as to him.
“I must be honest with you,” he said.
She looked at him. He had the impression that she already knew — that some version of this had been running in her own calculations, and the specific hope she had been maintaining had known, below the hope, that it was not certain.
“The situation is more complicated than I have allowed it to appear,” he said. “There is — I have a prior obligation. I should have been clearer sooner, and I apologise for that.”
“A prior obligation,” she repeated.
“A legal one,” he said. “From before the war. I have only recently come to understand its full implication myself.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Miss Shaw,” she said.
He kept his expression level. “That is not—”
“You’ve been seen,” she said. Not angry — something more composed than anger, the expression of a woman who had managed disappointment before and knew how it was done. “At the reading room. Twice.”
“My situation is one I cannot speak to more fully at present,” he said. “I am sorry. You deserved more clarity earlier.”
She looked at him for a long moment with the expression he could now identify as the revision-in-progress, the same expression he had seen on Arabella’s face the first time he pointed out an error. “Is she kind to you?” Caroline said.
The question surprised him. He thought about it. “Yes,” he said.
“Good,” she said. She lifted her chin slightly. “Tell your mother that I send my regards.”
She went inside.
He stood in the garden for a moment in the cool evening air and felt, beneath the relief, something adjacent to respect for Lady Caroline Winters, who had handled a difficult situation with more grace than most people managed on their best days.
He went back inside, found Ashford by the drinks table, and said: “Tell me about the Shaws. Whatever you know.”
Ashford looked at him with the expression he used when he was determining whether something was his business. He decided, apparently, that it was. “Lady Margaret is formidable,” he said. “Has been managing her own affairs since her husband died — twenty years now, no trouble about it, excellent income from the Marylebone property. The niece—” he paused. “Arabella Shaw is considered a bluestocking. She’s been in and out of society in a quiet way for years. Intelligent, well-spoken, not considered a catch because she has very little money and no expectations.”
“What else?”
“That’s most of what society knows.” Ashford looked at him. “There are people who would tell you she’s unremarkable. I would note that people who say that are usually the ones she has declined to engage with.”
Sebastian thought about this. He thought about the reading room and the underlined sentences and the precision with which she had constructed her initial approach to him in the Marylebone parlour — every sentence accounted for, every possible response anticipated.
“Not unremarkable,” he said.
“No,” Ashford agreed. He gave Sebastian the particular look of a man who was not going to say the obvious thing. “Enjoy the party,” he said.
He called on Lady Margaret on Thursday with a copy of Cicero, three translations, and no flowers.
He had spent some time on this. The right edition — he had consulted with his own library, which had turned out to be rather better stocked than he’d expected from the rake in the portrait gallery — and the right framing. He was not unaware of what he was doing. He was calling on the aunt of his legal wife to begin the process of making himself a person she could tolerate, which was a more delicate operation than any introduction he had managed in two years of relearning his social self.
Lady Margaret received him in the upstairs sitting room.
She was, as advertised, formidable. She had the quality he associated — unfairly, he knew — with women who had outlasted their context: a kind of settled certainty, as though the world had thrown everything it had at her and she had catalogued it efficiently and moved on. She looked at him with a calm that was not warmth and not hostility but something more interested than either.
“Lord Blackwood,” she said.
“Lady Margaret,” he said. “I understand you speak Latin.” He handed her the books.
She looked at them. She looked at him. He saw the brief recalibration — something he had not expected, or something he had expected differently. She set the books on the table beside her and said: “Sit down.”
He sat.
She looked at him for a long time without speaking, which he had the impression was a preferred technique.
“You were eighteen years old when she came to my door,” she said. “That is to say, Arabella was eighteen. You were twenty-six, which is another matter entirely. You offered her something that solved an immediate problem. You were correct that it solved the problem. You were not, as far as I can determine, correct about much else you promised.”
“No,” he said. He had thought about what to say in this conversation and had decided on honesty rather than management, on the grounds that Lady Margaret would see through management and he did not want to start the association with something she could see through.
“I told her I would return,” he said. “I told her she would be safe.” A pause. “I was not wrong about the safety. I was wrong about the return.”
“You nearly died,” Lady Margaret said.
“Yes.”
“You did not nearly die by accident,” she said. “I am told you purchased a commission that most sensible men in your position would not have purchased.”
He looked at her steadily. This was the thing he had been turning over since Davies told him the story — the shape of the man he had been, the risk he had taken, the particular quality of a man who had expected to die in a Spanish field and had made arrangements accordingly. A woman protected. An estate in order. A commission purchased for reasons that were not entirely about the war.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “My reasons. I don’t remember what I thought.” He held her gaze. “I know what the evidence suggests.”
“It suggests a man who was not careful with his own life.”
“Yes.”
“Are you careful with it now?”
He thought about it honestly. “I am learning to be,” he said.
Lady Margaret looked at him for another long moment. Then she picked up the nearest of the three Cicero translations and said: “This one is adequate. These two are insufficient. The second one’s translator has made errors in the third book that are significant enough to change the meaning.”
He looked at the books. “I’ll bring a fourth one next week.”
“You will look at the relevant passages before you bring it,” she said. “I don’t want another insufficient.”
“Of course,” he said.
He stayed for forty minutes. They talked about Cicero and he held his own, which he suspected she had been testing for. Arabella was not present — she came in at the end, when he was putting on his coat in the hall, with her hair slightly disordered from what appeared to have been a hasty descent of the stairs, which she did not acknowledge.
“Lord Blackwood,” she said.
“Miss Shaw,” he said. “Your aunt is a considerable woman.”
“I know,” she said.
“She told me the second Cicero translation is insufficient.”
“It is.”
He put on his hat. He was at the door and then he turned back, which he had not planned to do, and he said: “There is a small exhibition at the Royal Academy on Friday. I don’t know if you—”
“Yes,” she said.
He had not quite finished the question. She had answered it anyway. He looked at her standing in the hall with her hair slightly untidy and the composed expression with the thing underneath it and he thought: she knows what I was going to ask.
He thought: she is very quick.
“Friday at two,” he said.
“Yes,” she said again.
He went out into the afternoon. He was not, he noted, thinking about what he would do once he had seen the exhibition. He was thinking about what he would say when he saw her at the reading room tomorrow morning, and whether the article she had been working on last Thursday was finished, and whether she would take the walk along the Embankment afterward if the weather held.
He was thinking about the next thing and then the thing after that.
He thought: this is new. This is specifically new.
He thought: I am paying attention to something that is actually mine.
He walked back to Grosvenor Square and found that the city looked, for the first time since he had returned to it, like a place he was interested in being.
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