In such situations, the natural thing is to pull one's hand back with a flustered laugh and pretend nothing happened.
Eloise snatched hers away as though something had crawled onto it.
Ryan pressed his lips together to keep from smiling.
"It was an accident."
"I know."
She said it pleasantly enough, then moved her chair a deliberate step to the side. The corner of his mouth curled despite himself.
The sensible thing, objectively, was to say nothing and return to the documents. But the sight of her recoiling from his hand as though it had personally offended her lodged itself somewhere and wouldn't let go. And then the letter came to mind — tucked in the back of his desk drawer, full of warmth and trust — and he heard himself say:
"Sorry I'm not your Ry—"
Eloise was out of her chair before he could finish the sentence. Her hand came down over his mouth.
"*You—!*"
She stood there with her palm pressed to his lips and her face scarlet, looking at him with the expression of a woman calculating exactly which tree in the garden would be best suited for hanging someone upside down from.
"G-give me back my letter — you didn't tell anyone, did you — oh God, why did it have to be *you* of all people—"
She was muttering, half to herself, barely coherent. And then she saw it: the corners of his eyes creasing, the sharp blue of them going soft with something that was unmistakably laughter.
She hadn't expected that.
She had expected contempt. A nude drawing, a letter full of fantasies — she wouldn't have been surprised if he had refused to look at her at all. But there was no contempt in his face. He was genuinely, quietly, enjoying himself.
While Eloise stared at him in bewildered surprise, she felt something warm against her palm.
Ryan exhaled — slowly and deliberately — directly onto the hand covering his mouth.
"*Ow!*"
She yanked her hand back.
"*You—*"
The spot tingled as though she had held it too close to a flame. She shook it out, but the warmth didn't leave. She needed to say something, but her tongue had stopped cooperating entirely.
It hadn't been vulgar. It hadn't even, strictly speaking, been rude — if anything, her clapping her hand over a guest's mouth was the greater breach of manners. And yet.
Ryan watched her with unhurried interest.
"Do you write letters like that often?"
Eloise said nothing.
"Full of..." he seemed to consider his phrasing, "...imaginative familiarity with Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave?"
"I wrote it *wrong!*"
She said it too loudly. Both of them looked at the door.
A beat of silence.
"My Lady Eloise?" Mrs. Parker's voice came through the gap. "Has something happened?"
"No! It was an insect!"
"I see. Ask the sergeant to deal with it — a gentleman oughtn't to be afraid of insects."
Her footsteps receded toward the kitchen.
Eloise let out a slow breath and looked at Ryan.
"If you want to laugh at a pathetic woman who writes letters full of — as you say — fantasies, then go ahead. My pride seems to have left me some time ago anyway."
She meant it. She was too tired to be embarrassed any further.
She pressed her cool hands to her burning cheeks and lowered her head.
Why did this man of all men get to keep every one of her most mortifying secrets? Had he been sent to Blissbury specifically to torment her?
She steeled herself for laughter.
"How long have you been writing to Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave?"
She blinked.
"...Quite a long time. You served in the army, so you'll remember — when word spread that letters would reach soldiers if you simply addressed them to the right unit and name, everyone started sending them. I began then. Back when the lieutenant colonel was still just a lieutenant."
"That early? Before he was well known?"
"His name was already appearing in the military papers." His slight tone of surprise sharpened her voice without her intending it. Ryan smiled faintly.
"And the letters — were they always like this?"
"I swear on my parents' lives, no." Since all concealment had become pointless, Eloise told him. When she had started. What she had written at first. How the letters had gradually become something else, once she'd understood they would never be answered and no one would ever read them.
She had expected him to look at her the way people look at someone who is not entirely well. Instead, Sergeant Thornton listened with the absorbed attention of someone hearing an interesting story, eyes bright.
"I never wrote the sort of things you read in the newspapers — I never asked him to marry me, never wrote as though I were already his wife." She couldn't have, even if she'd wanted to. What she felt for Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave was something more than friendship but lighter than love. Closer to admiration. The sort of feeling that, had she lived in New York society, she might have directed toward some accomplished woman a few years her senior — someone she would have waited anxiously to hear from, agonized over what to wear to see.
But Feltham had no such figures. And so she had found hers in the newspapers her father brought from the city, in the dispatches and battle reports and the dry lists of commendations. Lieutenant Colonel Wilgrave had become the one.
"Go ahead and tell people if you like. My reputation is already at the bottom of the sea."
Having said all of it — things she had not told even Abigail — Eloise felt something loosen in her chest. So this was why people went to confession.
"I'm not going to tell anyone. I don't make a habit of tormenting people."
Eloise's eyes narrowed slowly.
"Don't you? Then what was the meaning of *'Not your Ryan, but another Ryan entirely'* at the bottom of that letter?"
She was just drawing breath to continue when Mrs. Parker's voice came from the hallway.
"My Lady Eloise! Do stay for dinner!"
Eloise startled and looked at her watch.
Six o'clock.
"Good heavens. Where did the time go?"
The days were so long now she hadn't noticed the light shifting. Mrs. Parker came upstairs a moment later, wiping her hands on her apron.
"You'll both be a while yet, by the look of things, so I've prepared something. I've set a place for the sergeant as well, though—" She looked at Ryan with the expression of someone who has been holding back a great deal for a long time. "Though I hardly know if—"
Eloise glanced at Ryan.
"Are you still not eating properly?"
The question was all the opening Mrs. Parker had needed.
"Oh, don't start me on it. I've said everything there is to say and more. How a person can eat so little and still stand upright is beyond my understanding. I know soldiers grow accustomed to going without on long marches, but we are not on a march, we are in Blissbury, and a man must eat. To receive the blessings that God in His mercy has set upon this earth, and to give proper thanks for our daily bread, a man must at the very least sit down at the table and—"
"Set a place for me. I'll eat."
Mrs. Parker stopped mid-sentence.
"I — I beg your pardon?"
"I'll eat dinner."
She stared at him. She knew perfectly well that his lack of appetite had nothing to do with the food — she had coaxed him to the table before and watched him go pale halfway through and excuse himself abruptly. For weeks now she had quietly been setting aside the richer dishes and preparing things easier on a troubled stomach for his evening meal: soft bread, oatmeal cooked in milk.
"Are you... certain?"
"I think I can manage today."
Ryan stood.
For the first time in a very long while, he noticed that he was hungry.