Chapter Eighteen

Derek kept what he knew of the history of cooking to himself as they ate bowls of stew and crusty bread. It was only him and Jess tonight. Most nights the three of them could eat together without drawing too much attention, but this inn was nicer than the others, and dining with their driver would have drawn notice. Jeffreys ate with a group of other grooms and drivers, leaving Jess and Derek to dine alone.

After five minutes of silence, in which Jess looked at everyone and everything besides him, Derek started voicing his observations. It was a bit more difficult than pulling facts from his head, but it was also enjoyable to observe the people around them and point out details as if they were a painting come to life.

Twenty minutes later, Jess joined him.

Her observations were nothing like his. Where he noticed what people wore or carried, if their hair had been recently cut or their bag patched a few too many times, Jess saw movement. That person limped, but only when she thought someone could see her. One man was seated in such a way that he could see all the possible entrances to the room. Another was slumped over his cup, but his eyes kept jerking to whatever table the serving lass was visiting.

“We look at the world differently, you and I,” he said.

She stiffened. “Yes, I suppose we do.”

He took a bite of stew and studied her. Why hadn’t he learned before that people were a form of art? If there was so much to be learned from someone else’s interpretation of a moment, wasn’t there even more to be learned from his own?

The mediocrity of his art skills meant he’d never been able to get the image in his head onto canvas in a satisfactory manner. Had he walked away from observing the life around him when he’d walked away from his brushes? How much had he missed because of that?

If he were to paint this scene, this moment, what would it look like? Jess would certainly be harshly drawn, with sharp angles and deep shadows. He’d make the seat of the chair higher and a bit wider, giving her a place to hunch behind and hide. Her focus would be outside the frame somewhere, perhaps behind the viewer, making that itch appear between their shoulders until they turned their head to see if someone was lingering behind them, watching them.

She would be defensive. Distant. Shielded.

He picked up his bread and looked at it as he carefully tore off a piece, giving her as much privacy as he could while sitting at the same table. “Do you think that’s a bad thing, our seeing the world differently?”

“Isn’t it?”

With a shrug of his shoulders, he popped the bread in his mouth and turned to look about the public room as he chewed and swallowed. Then he turned his gaze back on her. “I don’t think so.”

“There are others who do not share your opinion,” she said, giving him a haughty look and a smirk that tried to convey that she knew more about people than he did.

Perhaps she did know more about people, at least modern people, but he didn’t think so. People were people, even when the clothing changed. Despite the change of styles and mediums, it was easy to see the thread of humanity over the centuries of art. Love, grief, anger, ambition. None of it was new; it just manifested itself in different ways.

“Interesting thing about opinions,” he said, folding his arms on the table and forcing himself to hold her gaze, even though it made his gut quake a bit. “They tend to vary from person to person. If they didn’t, they would be facts.”

Her smirk drifted into a frown, and Derek fought the desire to grin. It was difficult to argue with the statement of a word’s definition. But if anyone could come up with a way to do it, it would be Jess.

Surprisingly, she seemed inclined to continue the conversation instead of turn it into an argument. “Whose opinion should influence me, then?”

Derek stopped holding back his grin. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

She cast her eyes toward the ceiling and gave her head a small shake before sitting back in her chair, lips curved into a smile instead of a smirk. “Where do you stand on the topic?”

“My own opinion I suppose comes first. God’s, of course, though whether His thoughts are opinions or facts can be debated. Did you know that—”

She held up a hand. “Stay with the subject, Derek.”

He cleared his throat. “Right. At the end of the day, it’s only my opinion that guides my decisions. That opinion is influenced I suppose by God, my family and friends, my colleagues.”

“More than that.” Jess tilted her chin toward the young girl who’d served them their stew. “Her. What was your opinion about her? Not one you form now, but one you already had.”

He paused for a moment, trying to follow her instructions and quiet the thoughts that immediately came to mind. “I didn’t have one.”

“Precisely. She is a servant girl—unseen, unnoticed. I know. I’ve been a servant girl in many a country. It’s the best way to gather information. No one sees you or notices you. You’re like furniture.”

She pushed her bowl away and dropped her gaze to a scattering of crumbs on the table before continuing. “I don’t think or behave in a way that is normal. That limits where I belong. Opinions may not be facts, but they are not solely your creation. They’re conditioned.”

Had Derek never seen this part of Jess because he’d never looked, or was this the first time her defenses had lowered enough to allow it to emerge? “I never knew you were a philosopher, Jess.”

She stiffened, her face falling back into its blank mask. “I’m not.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Philosophy is all of that complicated nonsense found in books and papers. It’s what you do with a painting, drawing all the information together to see the story and the intent of the artist.” Jess shook her head. “That’s not me.”

The shadows on the painting in Derek’s mind shifted. No longer were they all around Jess, creating dagger-like angles and edges. Instead, he deepened the darkness between her and the rest of the room, almost as if the shadow weren’t created by her, but by some sort of invisible shield she’d erected between herself and the rest of the world.

At the moment, he was being allowed to peek around the edges of that shield, and it was changing everything about how he saw her.

“You’re a thinker, Jess.”

One eyebrow lifted and the smirk returned. “Anyone I’ve ever worked with would dispute that. I’m rather known for charging in on a gut decision rather than developing a plan.” She gestured between them and then out to the room. “This is more of a plan than I’ve ever executed. Normally I act first and see what happens next.”

“How is that working out for you?”

“I’m still alive.” She shrugged. “My instincts haven’t failed me yet.”

He pointed a finger at her. “Because you’re a thinker. A quick one, I’m sure. What’s your opinion of the serving girl?”

“She likes working here.” Jess tilted her head. “There’s a difference between forced happiness and real happiness. You see it in the way people walk and hold themselves. Real happiness extends everywhere, while the false kind tends to be limited to the face and the feet.”

Derek chuckled and stopped the hand that was reaching for his ale. “The feet?”

She nodded. “They tend to bounce and smile. But the hands are still limp, the chest is still low.” Her gaze followed the girl about the room. “She’s not like that. She’s practically dancing between the tables, waving to people, chatting to those she isn’t serving. She’s happy.”

“Where did you grow up?” Derek asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“If opinions are conditioned, I’m curious where yours were formed.”

“A bit of everywhere, I suppose.” She looked away. “I left Verbonne when I was eight. Until then I’d known only privilege and comfort. Hiding and the tense situation was a shock, but children are adaptable. Ryland rescued me at fifteen. Since then, I’ve been all over. I’ve seen people do horrible things in the name of ambition and even more terrible things in pursuit of peace. Sometimes I helped those things happen.”

She wrapped her hands around her mug. “I’ve also seen people smile at a funeral. I’ve seen joy in the middle of war. I’ve experienced grace from people who should have condemned me.”

“So seeing the world differently is not a bad thing.” Derek wound his fingers tightly together to keep from reaching across the table and taking her hand. He’d never felt such a compulsion before her, but somewhere between the second inn and the second house, reaching for her had become less about projecting the idea that they were married and more about finding a way to reach over the seemingly impossible barrier between them.

Attacking that division required he take the time to really see her, to try to understand her. Was one a natural extension of the other? Did his attempts to connect with her on a mental level somehow manifest themselves in the urge to reach out physically as well?

That was something to think about later, but for now she was sharing details about herself she never had before. He wouldn’t risk stopping that by taking her hand. He pushed on. “What would you choose for the world, then? Should everyone be as happy as the serving lass or as glum as the man drowning his sorrows in ale over there? If everyone were the same, how would we know happiness from sadness?”

She shook her head, but the frown she’d been wearing began to curve upward a bit at the edges. “I think you, Mr. Thornbury, are the philosopher now.”

“Then you admit you were one earlier.”

Her hand gripped her remaining hunk of bread as if she were considering throwing it at his head.

He grinned as the image in his mind changed a bit more, the shadows shifting to allow a small, hidden glimmer of light. She was a painting come to life, with every angle revealing something new. Every secret he managed to uncover brought up three more. “Tell me more about the people you experienced. The good and the bad. Show me what conditioned your opinions.”

“I went to Spain once.” She rolled the crumbs around the table with her palm. “Helped incite a riot.” Her amber eyes glanced up at him through her lashes. “I’m rather good at that, though this one didn’t really need me.” Her attention dropped back to the crumbs. “A lot of people died, but it changed the war. In the end, it freed a lot of people.”

“The second of May, 1808,” Derek said.

One of Jess’s eyebrows lifted. “That’s hardly had time to make it into one of your history books.”

“Two years ago, Goya, a Spanish painter, depicted that night and the next day. I’ve never seen the paintings, of course. Few have. A colleague in Spain sent me a letter, telling me about wrapping them and putting them into storage on the king’s orders. His descriptions of the paintings were memorable, though. You were there?”

Jess nodded. “At the beginning. Once tempers were running high, I left.”

Her voice was flat as she went on to tell of her limited involvement in short, stark facts. “I didn’t do that type of thing often. My main skills were in getting in and out of places unseen. There were many English sympathizers and informants willing to share their information. I went and got it from them. Most of the time I wasn’t anywhere near the fighting.”

“And when you were?”

“I got out as soon as I could. I can defend myself against an attacker, but I can’t take down an army single-handed.” She picked up a crumb and ground it into dust between her thumb and forefinger. “There was a girl, once. I took her with me until we made it out of the battle. We got to a creek bed barely running with a trickle of water but cut deep into the ground. I told her to get low and run. I never knew if she survived.”

Jess dusted off her hands and lifted her gaze to meet his, some of the tightness around her eyes fleeing as she blinked. “I learned Italian and spent a great deal of time in that area. Napoleon’s control kept it from being an easy place to stay.” A wry grin touched her lips. “It was the British gaining a bit of a foothold that got me wounded badly enough to cause a problem, though. Ryland managed to get me home in the hold of a British warship. Healing took a while.”

Wanting to keep the companionable moment, Derek shared his own memories, not of facts and world history, but of his favorite paintings and the people he’d encountered in his studies. As he spoke, details about those people he’d never realized he’d collected emerged.

Perhaps he’d been paying more attention than he thought. Perhaps their taste in art had influenced the way he viewed them. The question of why he saw people certain ways was going to drive him mad now.

One thing began to become clear as Jess told him about getting caught in the wrong place during the British invasion of the Adriatic coast, her hand sliding to her arm almost without conscious thought. Through all her stories there was a glimmer of hope. Hope that what she was doing would come out well in the end, hope that she could save someone, hope that her walking through darkness would mean someone else, perhaps that girl in the creek bed, wouldn’t have to.

It changed the way Derek saw her. He glanced at the serving girl when her laugh grew loud enough to drift over the chaotic noise of the tavern crowd. It was changing the way he saw everyone. Perhaps the madness that came along with paying attention to people wasn’t so bad after all.

Eventually, the public room grew emptier, and they made their way upstairs. For the first time this trip, they’d been forced to take a single room.

Inside, Jess began gathering some of the bedclothes and making a pallet on the floor.

“I’ll sleep there,” Derek said, shrugging out of his jacket and telling himself the action held no great significance due to the abnormal location.

It felt different, though. He felt exposed. It made him rethink removing his boots.

Jess laughed and threw a pillow onto the pallet. “Have you ever slept on a floor, Derek?”

“No,” he said, moving forward to stop her from removing the blanket, “but I have slept at many a desk. The floor has to be better.”

“There’s no need,” Jess said, her voice a bit more strained. “I’ve done it plenty of times before.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to do it tonight.”

Why were they whispering? It wasn’t as if anyone was going to overhear them, despite the thin walls. They’d hardly been yelling before.

The single candle they’d brought up with them sat on the table beside the bed, barely giving off enough light for him to see the sheen of her pale hair and the shape of her face. There was no detail, no sign that this moment meant anything to her beyond the debate over who would sleep where, but it felt momentous to him.

They’d changed in the tavern below, changed their relationship into something more than grudging partners. She wasn’t who he’d thought she was, and now, with his earlier resentment replaced with understanding of her prior behavior, he didn’t know what to make of her.

The compulsion to reach out and touch her rose in him again, but he didn’t give in. There was no audience here, no performance. Here he had to remember that they weren’t truly married. Hopefully, after tonight, they could at least be friends.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said and dropped onto the pallet.

A few minutes later, he heard her climb into the bed and the pale light of the candle disappeared.

Her breathing evened out soon after, but it was a while before Derek found sleep. The floor was seriously uncomfortable.