Chapter 22 #2
"Of course you do, you would just rather not discuss it at a ball where people are already watching to see whether you'll smile at your guests or frown your way through the evening.
" Julian nodded, minutely, toward a cluster of matrons near the refreshment table whose fans had gone suspiciously still.
"Your mother orchestrated this evening to prove the Ravensmere name has recovered its footing.
You are standing in the middle of it looking as though you'd rather be anywhere else, which rather undercuts the point of the exercise. "
"I am aware of the point of the exercise."
"Then perhaps look aware of it," Tristan said, not unkindly, clapping a hand briefly to his shoulder, "rather than looking like a man doing sums. Where is Amelia? A wife on your arm would improve your countenance considerably."
Where is Amelia, indeed. Sebastian scanned the room and found her near the far wall, receiving a line of guests with a composure that looked, from this distance, entirely unbothered, though he had learned by now the particular set of her shoulders that meant otherwise.
She had not looked toward him once since he'd entered.
He could not, examining the thought honestly, entirely blame her for it.
"You have gone somewhere else," Nathaniel observed, watching him with the same sharpness he usually reserved for a column of figures that would not balance. "This is not merely the expense troubling you."
"It is nothing."
"It is your mother," Julian said with quiet certainty, "or some version of her, standing in every corner of this room reminding you what all this extravagance cost the last time a Ravensmere hosted it in earnest." He said it gently, but there was no retreating from the accuracy of it.
"You built an entire life out of proving you were nothing like him.
This ballroom does not know the difference between the two of you tonight, and I suspect that is precisely what is troubling you, rather than the orchestra's fee. "
Sebastian said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not confirm it at least in part.
He looked instead across the glittering room to where his wife stood receiving guests alone, three days of exhaustion carefully hidden behind a composure he recognized because he had spent eight years perfecting the very same mask himself.
He watched her incline her head to Lady Featherstone, watched the smile that did not quite reach her eyes.
"Sebastian." Tristan's voice, unusually serious, cut through the thought. "Go and stand beside your wife. Whatever this is, it will keep until the two of you are no longer performing separately for the same room."
He crossed the ballroom without answering, aware of a dozen watching faces tracking his progress, aware that his mother's eyes had found him from across the room and narrowed, faintly, in something that might have been warning.
Amelia turned as he reached her, and for one unguarded moment before her expression composed itself into the same careful welcome she'd shown every other guest that evening, he saw exactly how tired she was, and exactly how long she had been standing there alone.
"Your Grace." Her voice was light, pitched for the guests still within earshot, though something considerably cooler moved beneath it. "How good of you to finally join our little ball."
The words landed harder than she likely intended them to, or perhaps exactly as hard as she intended, and Sebastian felt the whole evening's unease curdle, suddenly, into something with a shape and a target at last.
"Amelia." He kept his voice low, aware of the guests still drifting past them, aware of his mother's eyes finding them from with the fixed attention of a woman watching a scene she had helped construct.
"What is all of this," he said, and heard, even as he said it, that the question had come out sharper than he intended.
"It is the ball, Sebastian. I wanted the Ravensmere name to feel welcoming again, after so many years of silence, and I believed it mattered to the estate that we host it properly." She smiled, clearly expecting some measure of shared pride in return. "Do you not think it turned out well?"
She does not see it. She cannot see what this looks like to me. The old fear rose like a wave inside him, memory and present collapsing together until he could no longer entirely separate his wife's careful planning from his mother's ruinous extravagance a decade past.
"You believed." He heard his own voice sharpen and could not, in the moment, stop it. "You spent three days deciding how this family would be presented to hundreds of guests, without once asking whether I wanted any part of it."
"You have not been available fot the asking these past days though, have you? And besides, you agreed to the ball yourself, Sebastian, in the morning room, not a fortnight past."
"I agreed to survive an evening. I did not agree to watch my home turned into the exact, same, spectacle my mother nearly ruined us pursuing."
He heard the old bitterness rising, faster than he could master it, and across the room caught the Dowager Duchess's eyes on him, her mouth curved in something that was not quite a smile, satisfied and knowing, the exact expression she had worn the day she informed him a ball was already arranged whether he consented to it or not.
She wanted this. She built this evening precisely to force my hand, and now stands there watching to see whether I will simply let it happen to me the way I let everything happen to me at nine years old, hiding under a schoolroom table while she managed the wreckage of my father alone.
The thought lodged somewhere behind his ribs, ugly and unwelcome, and he turned it, before he could stop himself, on the one person in the room who least deserved it.
"You spent a considerable sum on this. Without consulting me on the particulars."
"Your mother handled a great deal of the arrangements, but I approved every expense myself, and I did not think—"
"That is precisely the difficulty. You did not think.
" The words left him before he could stop them, old fear speaking faster than sense.
"You cannot understand what happens when women make decisions without considering consequences, Amelia.
I have watched it happen once already, in this very house, and I have spent a decade repairing what it cost. You cannot understand. "
The words left him before he had finished deciding whether to say them, and he heard, immediately, exactly how they would land, and found he could not call them back.