Chapter 22
Estella didn't come.
Sebastian stood beside the fountain in the east garden for twenty-three minutes. He knew the precise count because he'd been marking time against the muffled chime of the clock in the ballroom.
Twenty-three minutes he’d waited in the cold. Without his coat, because he'd come straight to the garden after the supper dance without stopping for it. He was, apparently, a man who had lost all capacity for rational thought.
He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes straining to see into the dark shadows. Where was she?
She'd asked him to meet her here at this precise location. She'd looked at him with those luminous eyes and said, “I need to speak with you properly.” And he'd agreed, because he was constitutionally incapable of refusing Estella Hale anything she asked for.
At the fifteen-minute mark, he told himself she'd been delayed. Someone had caught her in conversation. The duchess had needed her. Perfectly reasonable explanations.
At twenty minutes, the reasonable explanations began to thin.
At twenty-three minutes, wariness pricked at him. Something was wrong. Was she hurt? Ill? Perhaps caught up in one of the baroness’s endless conversations about her silly dogs?
He went back inside.
The party was still in full swing. The orchestra was playing something bright and fast, and the dance floor churned with couples. He surveyed the room.
The duchess he found near the card room entrance, speaking with a group of gentlemen. Alderton was on the dance floor with a young woman Sebastian didn't recognize. Thea Evermore was standing guard by the refreshments, surveying the crowd much as he was.
But Estella was…nowhere.
His chest tightened. He scanned again, slower this time. She was not in this room.
"Lord Blackwood." The voice came from behind him, light, pleasant, and nervous.
He turned. The young woman standing before him was a stranger. Chestnut hair, pleasant features, a pretty pale gown that she was gripping at the sides.
Yes, definitely nervous. Her smile even wobbled as he met her gaze.
She curtsied. "Forgive me for approaching you so directly. I'm Lady Clarissa Whitfield."
He stared at her. Gaped really. Lady Clarissa Whitfield. The name registered a beat too late. But then he saw it, in his mother’s distinctive handwriting. In his own when he’d written back, but—
"Your mother arranged an invitation for me this evening," she said. As if that explained everything.
It did not. But he finally found his voice. "Lady Clarissa, I wasn't aware you were in London."
"I arrived three days ago." She was twisting a ring on her finger, turning it round and round. "Your mother thought this ball would be a good opportunity for us to…" She faltered. "To meet."
Of course. His mother. She'd apparently taken his silence as some sort of agreement. But he hadn’t agreed.
Yes, all right, he had written a letter saying he’d be amenable to meeting her—but he hadn’t sent it.
Every time he’d gone to post it, his mind had filled with a certain blue-eyed beauty, and he hadn’t been able to do it.
But apparently his mother had gone ahead anyway.
"Lady Clarissa," he began, but she held up a hand.
"Please. Before you say anything." She drew a breath. "Might we speak somewhere private? There is something I must say."
He led her to a small anteroom off the main corridor. He left the door ajar, for propriety's sake, and turned to face her.
Clarissa stood near the window. She had kind eyes and an anxious mouth, and she was looking with barely concealed pleading. "Lord Blackwood. I need to ask you something, and I beg you to be honest with me."
He inclined his head. What else could he do?
She closed her eyes briefly, as though steeling herself. When she opened them, the anxiety was still there, but beneath it was something harder. Something that reminded him of another woman entirely. "Please don't agree to this match."
Sebastian went still.
Clarissa rushed on. "There is someone else.
A man my parents would never consider because he hasn't a title or the fortune they expect.
I care for him, and he cares for me, and if you ask for my hand, my parents will never entertain another option.
" Her voice shook but held. "You're a marquess.
No one can compete with that. But if you refuse—if you tell my father that the arrangement doesn't suit—then perhaps, in time, they might consider… "
She trailed off, twisting the fabric of her gown in her hands to the point that he feared it might tear. "I know this is dreadfully forward," she continued. "And I know you don't know me, and I have no right to ask—"
"Lady Clarissa."
She stopped. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
"I was never going to agree to an engagement," he said.
She blinked. Her lips parted. "You—what?"
"I entertained the possibility, but quickly realized I am not able to enter into a formal understanding."
He had realized this. He just hadn’t told anyone because he didn’t want to admit it aloud.
He winced at his own cowardice. "I should have made that clear. I'm sorry you were put in this position."
Clarissa sagged. The tension left her body so suddenly that she swayed on her feet, and Sebastian found himself reaching out to steady her elbow. But before he could, she grabbed the back of a chair.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, thank goodness."
The relief on her face was so naked that Sebastian was oddly moved. This stranger had walked into a ballroom, sought out a scarred marquess she'd never met, and begged him to set her free—all so she could marry the man she loved.
"This man," he said, "the one your parents won't consider…"
Clarissa's cheeks flushed. "He's a clergyman. My father's living, actually. He's…he's a good man, but he hasn't a title, and his income is modest. My father has made it very clear that I'm expected to marry well."
She said the last two words with a bitterness that didn't suit her pleasant face.
Sebastian thought of Estella, who'd told Charlotte she didn't need love, just someone kind and responsible. He thought of the duchess, who'd said “no young woman should have to navigate this world without someone standing between her and the wolves.”
He thought of the devastating expression on Estella's face when he'd told her his interest was merely obligation.
It occurred to him then that the wolves weren't always strangers at balls. Sometimes they were the people who were supposed to protect you.
"I'll write to your father," Sebastian said. "I'll make it clear the match was never viable. A difference in expectations."
Her face lit with hope. "You would do that?"
"I should have done it weeks ago. This arrangement should never have progressed as far as it did." The responsibility for that sat squarely on his own shoulders, along with everything else.
He'd been so consumed with avoiding Estella, with maintaining his careful distance, that he'd let his mother's machinations proceed unchecked.
Clarissa's eyes glistened. "Thank you, Lord Blackwood. Truly. I cannot—"
"There's no need." He cleared his throat. "I hope your clergyman deserves you."
She smiled then, and left the anteroom with a lighter step than she'd entered it. Sebastian stood alone and tried to identify the feeling expanding in his chest.
It was not relief.
Relief implied the removal of a burden, and the burden he carried had nothing to do with Lady Clarissa Whitfield.
He supposed it was recognition.
He'd watched a woman beg for the freedom to love the man she'd chosen, and it had cracked something open.
Clarissa had chosen love. She'd walked into a room full of strangers and fought for it.
And Estella had done the same. On the terrace. At Vauxhall. On the dance floor tonight when she'd marched up to him and demanded a waltz with the same courage she brought to everything.
She'd chosen him. In fact, she'd been choosing him for weeks. And he'd told her, over and over, that he wasn't a choice she was allowed to make.
He rushed toward the door and went to find her.
He searched the ballroom again. Then the terrace and then the ladies' retiring room entrance, where he loomed awkwardly until a startled maid informed him that no, Miss Hale was not inside.
He found Thea Evermore in a corner. She looked up from her book with an expression that suggested she'd been expecting him.
"Where is she?" he asked without preamble.
"She left." Thea's voice was carefully neutral. "Some time ago."
"Left?" His voice came out sharper than he'd intended. "Left where? Is she all right?"
Thea's expression hardened. "She was unwell, I'm told."
Unwell… His eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Miss Evermore. Where did she go?"
Thea studied him for a long moment. Her spectacles glinted, and behind them her dark eyes were sharp and assessing and…not entirely friendly. "She went home, I believe."
Something was wrong. Estella didn't leave events early. Not to mention, she’d set a rendezvous.
"Did something happen?" he demanded. "Did someone—"
"That young lady you were just with." She said the words simply, but there was a downward pull to her lips that made it clear she was utterly annoyed with him.
"Pardon?"
She gestured toward the room where he’d met with Lady Clarissa. "I saw Estella speaking with that same young lady a little while ago. And when they parted, Estella looked…unwell. She left shortly after."
A sharp exhale left him as he made the connection. She’d spoken to Lady Clarissa. Lady Clarissa, who was under the impression that they had an agreement in place…to be married.
His gut heaved.
I think about you. Every minute of every day.
He'd said that to her. Less than an hour before she'd learned he was engaged to someone else.
The guilt that crashed through him was different from the guilt he carried about Andrew. That was old and heavy, a burden he'd learned to bear. This guilt was sharp and new and entirely his fault—not a tragic accident, but a catastrophe of his own cowardly making.
He'd pushed her away. And through his silence he'd let his mother's arrangements proceed because it was easier than facing the truth.
And now Estella—brave, stubborn, extraordinary Estella—no doubt believed that the man she'd kissed on a terrace and waltzed with under candlelight and asked to meet in a moonlit garden…
had an understanding with another woman the entire time.