“Crikey,” said Matthew, turning his half-empty glass in his hand. “How unfeeling. She probably means Kellington.” He looked at her sideways, as if gauging how she’d react to this news. Cordelia wondered what Matthew would say if she told him in turn about Alastair and Charles. It was odd to know something so personal about Matthew’s brother, and not be able to say so. “Not long after my first visit to the Ruelle, Kellington offered me a private concert in the Whispering Room.”
Cordelia felt her cheeks turn pink. “And that became a broken heart?”
“That became an affair, and the affair became a broken heart. Though I am, as you see, entirely recovered.”
Cordelia remembered Matthew in the Ruelle, Kellington’s hands on his shoulders. She remembered the look on Lucie’s face too, when Anna had said, Matthew seems to prefer a hopeless love. “What about Lucie, then? Did she break your heart? Because she wouldn’t have wanted to.”
Matthew rocked back slightly in his chair, as if she’d pushed him. “Does everyone know about that?” he said. “Does Lucie?”
“She has never told me anything indiscreet on purpose,” Cordelia reassured him. “But in her letters, she has often revealed more than I think she meant to. She has always… fretted over you.”
“Just what every gentleman wants,” Matthew muttered. “To be fretted over. One moment.” He stood up and went to the bar; Cordelia felt a twinge of sympathy for the barmaid as Matthew leaned over the polished wood, flashing his charming smile. She hoped the girl understood that Matthew’s flirtation was only a game, a mask he wore without thinking of it. It should never be taken seriously.
Matthew returned with a new ale of a much darker color and flopped back into his chair.
“You haven’t finished the other,” Cordelia said, gesturing to the glass. She could not help but think of her father—he, too, would often start a new drink without finishing the old one. But Matthew was not like Elias, she told herself. Elias hadn’t been able to make it through her wedding without falling to pieces. Matthew drank more than he should, but that didn’t mean he was like her father.
“Since we are apparently unburdening ourselves, I decided to switch to something stronger,” Matthew said. “I believe you were scolding me for flirting?”
“We were talking about Lucie,” said Cordelia, who was beginning to regret she had brought it up. “She does love you—just—”
He smiled, a crooked but real smile. “You needn’t console me. I did think I cared for Lucie romantically, but that is ended. I promise I am not nursing a broken heart and covering it up with wild flirting.”
“I don’t mind the flirting,” Cordelia said, nettled. “It just keeps you from being serious.”
“Is that so bad?”
She sighed. “Oh, probably not—you’re awfully young for serious, I suppose.”
Matthew choked on his ale. “You make it sound as if you are a hundred.”
“I,” said Cordelia, with dignity, “am an old married woman.”
“That is not what I see when I look at you,” Matthew said.
Cordelia stared at him in surprise. He had finished his glass; he set it down on the table between them with a decided thump. She could have sworn there was a flush along his cheekbones. More flirting, she thought. Meaningless.
He cleared his throat. “So, given what you told me in Maidenhead, we’re looking for a mythical barrow somewhere on the Ridgeway Road. How are we meant to find it, exactly?”
“According to the book I read, it’s near the Uffington White Horse.”
“It’s near a horse? Don’t they move about?”
“Not this one,” said Cordelia. “It’s a massive drawing of a horse, on a hillside—well, not quite a drawing, really. It’s cut out of the hill in chalk trenches, so it shows very white against the earth.”
“Is it the Uffington Horse you’re talking about?” said the barmaid, who’d snuck up on them with their steak pies.
Matthew and Cordelia exchanged a look. “That’s the one,” said Matthew, fixing the barmaid with his most angelic look. “Any help you could give us in finding it?”
“It’s just down the road a bit. You can see it for miles on the hillside, and folk come from all around every year to help scour the horse—keeping the chalk white, like. There’s a path up the hill leads to the chalk trenches. People climb it every so often, and they leave offerings, too—flowers and candles. It’s a witchy kind of place.”