Chapter 19 #2
“Pembrooke was handsome and congenial enough,” she went on, “eager to be married because he needed my dowry and whatever Chester would settle on him afterward. His father approved of the match because he wanted the connection to the earldom. And my mother did too because it fulfilled Chester’s decrees and she wanted me settled, I think.
“And I was happy enough. Or I thought I was. Even though I’d seen Crawford and Violet by that point, what they had.
The way they looked at each other, and I knew it was different with Pembrooke, but I thought it was fine enough.
Until that night, when I realized he was utterly and completely besotted. But not with me.
“I’d gone to a musicale with my mother and aunt.
Sarah Jenson was to play the pianoforte and her sister, Amanda, the harp.
I’d been, of all things, feeling sorry for Sarah.
She’d had a difficult start to the season—you’ll recall her asthma attack at the Waverly Ball—and planning a musicale hardly seemed a strong way to finish it.
The ton is not known for its generosity in such matters.
“But as it turns out, I was wrong. A musicale was absolutely the way to win the hearts and minds of the ton. Or one of their hearts and minds, anyway. Pembrooke’s, of course.
“There I was, sitting in the audience and feeling rather smug, what with my wedding to plan and wearing a dress I liked and waiting for my fiancé to arrive. He did, finally, and took my hand.
“Then Sarah took the stage and she began to play. It was… spellbinding. She was extraordinary, making even boring Brahms feel monumental. And then Amanda began laying on a melody with the harp that was romantic and lilting. A top note to the passion and vigor with which Sarah manipulated the pianoforte keys. I remember I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be transported to somewhere else. The way a book can transport you or a well-told story. It was entirely unexpected and so, so beautiful. And when it was over, the applause was deafening. I was clapping so vigorously Mother nudged me to stop. A lady must never show vigor, not in that way, as she liked to remind me.”
McGann snorts, but she keeps on talking.
“I looked over at Pembrooke to see if he was enjoying the music as much as I, and he was staring, eyes as wide as embroidery hoops. He leaned forward in his chair, like he was drawn to that stage, his hands splayed on his knees. I knew he’d met Sarah before, her asthma attack had been at his family’s ball, after all, but I don’t think he saw her then.
Not the way he saw her now. One look at his face and I knew, because I’d seen that look before on Crawford’s face when he gazed at Violet. It was love. And it was not for me.”
“Damn fool him,” McGann says.
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I sat through the rest of the musicale, each arrangement more beautiful than the last, and I watched him. He was nothing but proper. Legs crossed, eyes on the stage, my hand grasped in his, but I’d spent enough time posturing for the ton to know it when I was being postured at.
“I gave his hand a little squeeze, just to see what would happen. He looked down at me, startled, as if he’d forgotten I was there. And then he gave me a vague, bland smile before he turned his eyes back to her.
“But even then, I thought I may have been mistaken. So, after the music ended and the crowd gathered for punch and promenades, I sought him out to ask him outright.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.” She laughs a short, self-deprecating kind of laugh.
“I do not recommend it as a course of action, by the way, should the opportunity ever present itself to you. I found her first, Sarah, at the punch table, and I went over to congratulate her. I told her her playing was spectacular and that I’d no idea of her talent.
And she blushed and thanked me, and I was trying to understand a way to slip Pembrooke into the conversation, to judge her reaction, when the man saved me the trouble by approaching us.
He kissed my hand and told me I looked radiant, but I knew—I could feel his eyes on her when he said it.
And then we took to the floor, and I said to him, Miss Jenson looks lovely tonight. And he said he hadn’t noticed.”
“We always notice, Menace.”
“Indeed. He’d done nothing but notice. But I…
I don’t know how to explain it. I needed to hear him say it, I suppose.
So, I pressed. I remarked that her skill on the pianoforte was admirable.
But he didn’t comment on that. And while I was trying to come up with some other leading question, he asked why I was so curious about Miss Jenson this evening, and I found I lost my nerve.
I asked instead if he looked forward to the wedding.
“And he said, ‘Our match is approved.’”
She hears McGann rustle on the floor, as if he could feel the same squirming discomfort she had felt then. “That’s not an answer,” he says.
“No. It isn’t. Or I suppose it is, in a way. But not the kind of answer I wanted. And so, I said I thought we should wait until spring to give us time to properly plan.”
“He declined that idea, I take it?”
“He said spring won’t do. That we’d be wed at the soonest possible date now that the betrothal papers had been signed. And then he said it again. ‘Ours is an approved match, after all.’
“We were dancing by that point, and I tried to feel the pressure of his hand on mine. I wanted to know if it was…” She peers down at McGann, who had rolled onto his side, facing her.
“If it was the way yours had felt the night before when you took off my gloves. And then when you taught me how to palm strike and punch. But I felt nothing. And I wondered if he felt anything. Any kind of tingle on his skin or flutter let loose in his belly? Because that’s what I felt when you touched me.
But he had no outward reaction at all, and I realized it was an all or nothing kind of affair.
Either both parties were zinged or neither of them were.
“And so, I said I would be amenable to a winter wedding if he would tell me why he had been staring at Sarah Jenson all evening. That he owed me the truth, at least, before we wed.”
“Holy hell, Menace.”
“Indeed. Pembrooke said he owed me nothing of the sort in the coldest and flattest voice I’d ever heard. It felt a little like the man who’d held a knife to my throat in that alleyway in Covent Garden; that he was empty, with nothing inside of him.
“And then he said, ‘You are an earl’s daughter, with a dowry, exactly as my father commanded. We’ll be wed posthaste.’
“And then the set ended, and he bid me goodnight, and that was that.
“It shouldn’t have hurt me because I knew that was all I was.
A dowry and a title, or adjacent to a title in any case.
My father was an earl. My cousin is an earl.
And so, I’m a lady. But the title has nothing to do with me.
It’s only a firmament the ton uses to hold us all in place.
And that evening, I looked around, and for the first time I saw it: How the titles tell us who to speak with, who to befriend, who to marry.
Who to be. Violet had tried to tell me but I hadn’t really understood what she meant until that moment.
“And for the first time, I didn’t want that stupid title that wasn’t even mine to tell me who I was. And I was furious that I’d almost let it. Furious at a world that would allow such nonsense. And then I left to find you.”
“And it all went to hell,” he says.
“Yes,” she agrees. “It did. And I think we should talk about why.”