Chapter Forty-One
With the long task of receiving guests completed, Kate looked forward to finding a drink and hopefully never having to make conversation with a debutante again. Not so for Celine. For Celine, it seemed it had only been the beginning.
She entered the ballroom like a charming, exquisitely mannered typhoon, resuming conversations that had begun in the reception line and greeting brand-new acquaintances with disarming warmth.
She enquired after children, made sensible comments about the cost of bread, and encouraged—then expertly de-escalated—a game of double entendre with the playwright Mr. Sheridan, whose job it was to be entertaining.
It had been about ten minutes, and they were barely past the doorway.
Celine’s dance card was full.
Only Kate knew her well enough to see the fevered edge behind her energy, like a child trying to taste every sweet in the shop before Nanny came to pull her out by the ear.
Propriety no longer required Kate stay by her.
A number of matrons were politely jostling to take her off Kate’s hands.
But still she stuck by Celine like the lovelorn swain she was, with no sign Celine either was aware of or appreciated her presence.
As Celine was leaving one conversation, but before she had started the next, Kate got a hand around her upper arm, and then they were in a quiet, out-of-the-way spot beside a tall potted fern.
Finally, the pressure in her seemed to ease; she had Celine to herself.
Now there was no one else to take Celine’s focus away.
Now Celine would have to acknowledge her.
Celine politely disengaged her arm at the earliest opportunity and made to return to the floor.
Kate frowned and said, more angrily than she meant to, “Slow down. You have the rest of your life to enjoy it. This is your world now.”
Celine shivered and looked up. Kate realised she was crowding Celine against the wall, bullying her. And still Celine’s eyes met Kate’s only for a moment, then her dark lashes swept down. “It is wonderful. Just like a dream.”
She felt a thrum of foreboding at the echo of the Wroth bastard’s phrase. Will it melt away at first light, as though it were a dream? She wanted to take Celine’s face in her hands, here in front of everyone, and make Celine look her in the eye. She wanted to shake her.
Instead, she looked down and saw she had taken some of the fantastical material of Celine’s dress between her fingers. Subtly, she used her hold to pull Celine closer.
“It is yours,” she repeated, low, “and it is real.”
“Yes,” Celine said, turning her face away. “Mine for the taking.”
She didn’t know if Celine meant it as a reprimand, but she felt the shameful sting of the words. Mine for the taking. She let go of Celine’s dress. And still all she could think of was picking Celine up and carrying her away.
“Lord Seaton is beckoning me over for the minuet,” Celine said, and ducked out under her arm. “Please excuse me.”
“But Celine, I—”
Celine glanced over her shoulder and half smiled. “You should dance with one of them,” Celine said. “It would only be sporting.”
She had no idea who Celine meant.
But before Kate could ask her, or think of a way to keep her, Celine made her graceful escape.
She walked away from Kate with a sway that sent her skirts into motion and made her body and soul seem in absolute agreement.
As she moved farther into the room, she seemed to draw more and more of the light to herself.
It was this effect that made Kate understand for the first time what the material of Celine’s dress could do.
She saw more than one person turn unconsciously towards Celine and then start as though coming to, gaping.
By the time Celine entered the dance floor, almost half the room must have been watching her.
Or maybe it was Kate’s intense awareness of her that made it feel that way.
Celine stopped suddenly and turned a half circle. It seemed that no matter what Kate said, Celine couldn’t believe this world was hers. She stood at the centre of it and took everything in like the memory was going to have to last her a lifetime. She stood at the centre of the world and shone.
Ten thousand lights was not exaggeration.
And beneath them all stood Celine in a gown whose shoulders and low neckline were stitched with diamonds, and whose full skirts were scattered with petals of mirrors and silver, ten thousand of them, glittering bright.
It had been sewn with an artistry Kate had no power to comprehend in this moment.
All her intellect, her entire being was bent to the single task of taking Celine in.
She looked like every cracked mirror had been made whole in her person.
She looked like she was made of light.
“Go after her,” Royce muttered. She had sauntered over from somewhere, drink in hand. Kate didn’t spare her a glance.
From the other side of the room, Lord Burnley had begun to make his way towards Celine, not content to wait any longer. The violence Kate had felt on first seeing him was nothing to what she felt now, watching him claim what was hers.
Go after her, her heart said.
But she doubted herself.
She feared what the violence in her might mean, what the pressure bearing up through her might mean. She was going to break something, and she had spent a lifetime learning not to break the things she loved.
She feared she was a coward. She feared the reason she didn’t want Celine near her was not to protect Celine, who was the strongest person she had ever met, but because if she let down the drawbridge and opened the gates, it might be her own cold fortress that trembled and shook and broke apart.
Lord Burnley reached Celine and offered his hand, then led her into the opening promenade of the minuet. Royce sucked her teeth in disgust and wandered off to find another drink.
Kate couldn’t go to Celine, but she couldn’t take her eyes off her, either.
She tracked the wide circle Celine made around the room, the brilliant sway of Celine’s skirts lighting up her senses.
When the promenade was complete, Celine and Burnley entered the floor alone and the other couples stood back, impatiently awaiting their own minute of display.
Kate and Celine had danced the minuet together under the strict eye of the dancing master, Mr. Forsyth.
It was a flirtatious dance of coming together and moving apart, eyes holding but never for longer than a moment.
She had felt the power of what they were mimicking and had kept the mood playful, light, never allowing the full effect to be felt.
She felt the full effect now.
As though she and Celine moved side-by-side to the slow, wistful music, she felt Celine’s body dip exactly with hers, stride forward exactly with hers; and then she let Celine go, almost like letting a flower loose from her hand into a river’s slow current.
Celine moved ahead of her, and she behind, and still they were perfectly synchronised. Their gestures flowed and exactly mirrored one another as they turned, and turned again, prowling closer and then moving apart, dipping in unison, as though their every breath were taken from one unifying lung.
She stood at the side of the ballroom and watched Burnley make his inadequate attempt at partnering Celine and knew in her bones it should be her out there, Celine’s equal, Celine’s lover. The pressure inside her surged. Yes. Yes.
She put all the old arguments to herself as to why she would not trap Celine into marriage.
Celine would be bound to her with no legal means of dissolving their union when Celine realised what she’d married. Yes, came the immediate, possessive response. She will be yours forever.
Celine would be in danger from Lord Wroth and his mad bastard. Celine will stand with you against any threat.
Celine loved her because that was what Celine did—she fulfilled the perverse desires of those with power over her. She has held your future in her hands from the moment she arrived. She is the angel holding the knife.
She is yours.
The minuet at last ended just before midnight, and ten circles formed up for a lively cotillion. She watched Celine spin and bow and sway and skip like a winking star come down to bless them all for one night. But Celine didn’t—wouldn’t—look back. The room seemed to shimmer and shake.
Richard stepped up beside her, also looking at Celine. “You’ll make yourself a laughingstock if you keep looking at her like that. The duke who fell in love with her own ward. Which is still worlds better than the truth.”
“I’ll send for you when I want your opinion on anything,” she said coldly, without looking at him.
If she hadn’t been so absorbed, he wouldn’t have been able to approach her.
Anger and hurt surged within her and she welcomed the way everything cooled in response.
It focused her mind. It brought her back from the edge of something terrifying.
Richard grabbed her arm and turned her roughly to face him. “You didn’t have to fucking ruin me!”
She looked into his face that had been so dear, into his dark, perturbed eyes, and laughed. “What did you think was going to happen? You know the consequences of crossing me. Did you think you were going to be any different?”
The briefest pause said he had.
“You really are a heartless bitch.”
She held his eye and showed no response, and in a strange way, it bored her. How quickly one of the most important relationships of her life had fallen into this familiar, antagonistic back-and-forth.
“A special election has been called,” he said, “because I suddenly lack both lands and funds on which my seat in Parliament depends. All my funds.”
She was incredulous. “You expected me to keep bankrolling your seat? Ask Pater to buy you another one.”
Richard’s eyes flitted to the Wroth party, and he grimaced.
She shook her head, feeling pity and disgust and something else she didn’t want to think about.
“He’ll have to, now the dukedom’s not coming your way.
He can’t let his heir marry a poor gentleman of no particular distinction.
” She slapped his shoulder. “Buck up, cousin. It looks like you’ll be prime minister someday after all. ”
But as she walked away, she was dissatisfied.
He had sold her future out in exchange for his.
He had thrown his lot in with her bitter enemy and hoped for her downfall.
She had every reason to hate him. And yet she felt as disgusted with herself as she was with him for falling so easily into hatred.
THE PIG ON the sideboard looked worse for wear.
Most of its skeleton showed through its carved flank, and its one cloudy eye beheld what was left of that night’s long supper with the jaded knowingness of the dead.
In each of the three connected rooms were many tables that were now in much the same state as the pig: variously stripped and occupied.
Celine had gone into supper on the arm of her dance partner, as was proper, and had ended up across the room from Kate.
Kate could no longer doubt the distance was by design.
Celine would not let her near. She watched people leave their own seats so they might stand around Celine and be included in her conversation—in such numbers the room would have unbalanced then capsized under the momentum, had it been a ship.
And she is only twenty-four, Kate thought with amazed longing. She is only just starting to become the woman she will be.
Somewhere, a clock struck three. The tall, delicate statuary on the tables, dripping with angels and pots of sweets, trembled with every step taken, every chair pushed back. Elsewhere, she heard Richard’s loud, friendly laugh.
He, who had every reason of friendship and love, hadn’t stood with her.
She didn’t think Celine hated her. She thought the distance Celine had enforced was to do with loss and saying goodbye.
The loss of Celine suddenly felt very close, and very real, and it scared Kate to death.
It was just beneath the surface now. She wouldn’t be able to keep it at bay for much longer.
Celine’s voice became a little hoarse, her mouth making beautiful shapes behind her hand as she laughed, her eyes thinning to wicked crescents as she delivered a witty riposte. Celine, sailing through an anecdote in English, looked up and caught Kate’s eye and faltered.
Kate told herself what was rational: Celine had her own reasons for making herself respectable and popular.
She was hardly a blameless hero. But it was impossible not to feel it.
How her own enemies had become Celine’s enemies and had not been allowed to prevail.
How she had been born into this fight, and had fought it alone from the age of thirteen, and had thought she would always fight it alone.
Celine’s attention was called away, breaking the eye contact between them.
It was her suitor Lord Burnley, who stood solicitously behind her chair and spoke to her, his manner private.
Celine cocked her head, listening, then nodded once.
She put her hand in his and allowed him to help her rise.
She followed him away from the table and out of the room.
He was going to address himself to her. He was going to propose.
And there was no way in hell Kate was going to let that happen.
What erupted through her, finally, was an annihilating truth that neither doubt nor fear could withstand: She loved Celine, and Celine was strong enough to take it.
She stood and followed Celine from the room.