“I thought he took you for granted,” said Matthew. “Then I saw the way he ran to you, after that battle in Nelson Square. It seems a thousand years ago now, but I remember it. He ran and caught you up and he seemed—desperate—to know that you were all right. As if he would die if you weren’t. And I thought—I thought I had misjudged him. So I told myself to stop.”

Cordelia licked her dry lips. “Stop what?”

“Hoping, I suppose,” he said. “That you would see that I loved you.”

She stared at him, motionless, too shocked to speak.

“I fully expected James to come to his senses,” he said. “Good Lord, when I saw you two in the Whispering Room, I thought it would barely be seconds before he was hitting himself with a brick for ever having thought he loved Grace while at the same time throwing himself at your feet and professing his adoration.”

Cordelia thought of Matthew saying to her, what felt like a long time ago now, I have wished for a long time for him to place his affections somewhere else, and yet, when I saw him with you in the Whispering Room, I was not happy.

Yet it had never occurred to her that he intended anything by it but flirting—Matthew’s flirting, which meant nothing at all.

“I suppose I merely thought it would be enough for you to know,” he said. “That you might—if anything were to happen to me, you would remember I loved you desperately. And if for some reason, at the end of a year, you and James divorced, I would—well, I would have waited. But I would have hoped the time would have come when my addresses would not have been disgusting to you.”

“Matthew,” she said. “Look at you. Listen to you. Your addresses could never be disgusting.”

He almost smiled. “I remember,” he said. “At the ball, the first time I really met you, you told me I was beautiful. That held me for quite a long time, you know. I am very vain. I didn’t love you then, I don’t think, though I recall thinking how fine you looked when your eyes blazed with anger. And then at the Hell Ruelle, when you danced, and proved yourself braver than all the rest of us combined, I knew it for sure. But love is not always a lightning bolt, is it? Sometimes it is a creeping vine. It grows slowly until suddenly it is all that there is in the world.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured. “Only that I truly did not suspect…”