Chapter Thirteen
Lady Honoria played, as her mother-in-prospect had promised, exquisitely.
Cedric sat through it with his hands quiet upon his knee and his face arranged into the attentive blankness that passed, in such company, for appreciation.
The piece was difficult, and she made nothing of the difficulty; every note fell where it was meant to fall, every ornament was turned with a clean and practised grace, and from the first bar to the last, there was not one single instant in which Cedric felt that the woman at the instrument was anywhere in the room at all.
She played the way a clock kept time, accurately, tirelessly, and without the smallest interest in the hour it told. When she finished, her hands came to rest, and she looked up with the expectant composure of a pupil who had performed the set exercise correctly and awaited the master’s nod.
“Exquisite,” the Dowager pronounced. “Quite exquisite. Did I not tell you, Cedric? One hears nothing like it in the country.”
“You play with great accuracy, Lady Honoria,” Cedric said, which was true, and the most he could honestly find to say.
“You are very kind, Your Grace. I was taught by Signor Bertoli; my father would have none but the best.” She rose from the instrument with the same neat economy of motion she did everything, and the Earl, from his chair, gave a small nod of satisfaction, as though another item had been ticked upon a list.
And Cedric, watching, was visited by a memory he had not summoned and could not at once put down: a darkened dome, and a young woman bent to an eyepiece, and the sound she had made at the sight of Jupiter’s moons, that small broken oh with the whole of her heart in it, as though wonder itself had found a voice.
There was the difference, laid out as plainly as a sum.
One woman had been taught, at great expense, to perform feeling she did not possess.
The other could not have hidden what she felt if her life had hung upon it, and her life very nearly did.
He knew, with a certainty that frightened him in that elegant, warm room full of candlelight and approval, which of the two he would cross any distance to sit beside in the dark.
He was aware of Miss Ellsworth at the edge of the room, half in shadow, one hand kept carefully from sight, watching the performance with a composure as careful as his own. He did not let his glance go to her. It cost him something not to.
“Duke.” The Earl had risen. “If the ladies will excuse us. I believe you promised me a quarter of an hour.”
***
The study was the one room at Farenwoode that was wholly Cedric’s own, and he resented the Earl’s presence in it the way a man resents a stranger’s boots upon his hearth.
He poured the brandy himself, two measures, and set one at the Earl’s hand without ceremony, and did not sit, and did not invite his guest to.
Hartwick sat regardless, easing himself into the chair by the fire as if it had been kept warm for him, and turned the glass in his long fingers, and came to his business with the directness of a man who considers preamble a waste of time.
“I shall be plain with you, Farenwoode, for I think you are a man who prefers it. I have come a long way, and not for the scenery.” The firelight moved in the pale eyes.
“You want an heir, and a duchess to mend a name that, forgive me, has been let go somewhat to seed these four years. I want a connexion of the first rank for my daughter, and a friend of consequence in the upper House, where a duke’s voice would be of no small use to certain interests of mine.
My daughter is beautiful, well-bred, accomplished, and trained from the cradle for exactly the position you have standing empty.
The thing arranges itself. I do not see that either of us need pretend it is anything more complicated than two sensible men recognising a mutual advantage. ”
“You are admirably frank,” Cedric said.
“I find frankness saves a deal of time.”
“Then I shall return it.” He set down his own glass untouched.
“I am not in the market for a wife, Lord Hartwick. Not your daughter, accomplished as she undoubtedly is, and not any other woman offered to me as a mutual advantage. I married once for sensible reasons that everyone approved, and I will not do it again, and there is nothing you can lay before me this evening that will alter that. I am sorry you have had the journey for nothing.”
The Earl did not appear in the least discomposed. He sipped his brandy, and considered the fire, and when he spoke again, his voice was easy and cold, and that was the moment Cedric understood exactly what manner of man he was dealing with.
“You are direct. I respect it. But you will allow me to observe that men in our position are seldom permitted the luxury of inclination, however we may cherish the illusion of it.” He smiled.
“I have made it my study, Duke, to understand what a man wants, and what he fears, and where the two may be made to lean against one another. I have generally found that a man who tells me no in September has discovered any number of excellent reasons to say yes by the spring. I am a patient man. I did not build what I have built by taking the first refusal for the last word.”
He turned the empty glass slowly in the firelight.
“You live very retired here, they tell me. A man alone with his telescope, night upon night, far from the world and its notice. A curious way for a duke to spend his prime. Though I daresay a man may do as he pleases upon his own land, and trust to the remoteness of it to keep his habits to himself.”
“My habits are my own concern, Lord Hartwick.”
“Of course. Of course they are.” The pale eyes lifted, mild as new milk.
“I only observe, as a friend, you understand, as a man who wishes you well, that privacy is a very great comfort, Farenwoode, right up until the day it is not. I have noticed, in a long life, that the things a man does where he believes himself unobserved are precisely the things that prove, in the end, the most expensive to him. A useful principle. It has served me admirably.”
He rose, and set down the empty glass, and inclined his head with exquisite courtesy.
“Think on it. There is a great deal here that could be made to suit everyone, a very great deal, and a wise man does not close a door merely because he cannot, at the first glance, see what lies beyond it. Goodnight, Farenwoode. You keep an excellent brandy.”
And he was gone, leaving Cedric alone in his own study with the fire and the untouched glass and the cold certainty that the matter was far from concluded, whatever he had said.
Cedric stood a long moment looking into the flames, turning the man’s last words over.
The things a man does where he believes himself unobserved.
It was very likely nothing, the idle menace of a man who menaced from long habit, as other men cleared their throats.
And yet Cedric found he did not like it.
He did not like it at all. For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder, with a chill that had nothing to do with the dying fire, whether anyone had marked a certain figure crossing the garden these past nights toward a certain lighted dome.
***
Clara could not sleep.
Her hand throbbed under its bandage in time with her pulse, a dull insistent ache, and her mind would not be quieted; it went round and round the same hopeless circuit, the argument, the blood on the marble, Anne’s warning, the beautiful golden woman downstairs who was everything the Dowager wanted and everything Clara was not, until she gave up the pretence of rest and rose, and wrapped her shawl about her, and went to the window for the small comfort of the night sky.
The moon was near to full, and the grounds lay washed in silver, every shrub and path and stone picked out clear as in a drawing; and as she stood there, she saw him.
A tall dark figure, crossing the silvered garden with the unhurried certainty of a man who had walked the same path a thousand times, going away from the house and up the rise toward the pale dome that crowned it.
Cedric. Going to the observatory, on a clear night, exactly as he had told her he would; going, she understood with a lurch beneath her ribs, in the expectation that she would follow.
For a moment, she did not breathe. The longing that rose in her was so sudden and so complete that it frightened her, the wish simply to take up a candle and go down the stairs and out across the grass and up the hill into the one place in all the world where she had felt wholly herself, where a man had shown her Jupiter and given her back her own soul and spoken to her as though her mind were the equal of his own.
It would be so easy. The house was abed. No one would know.
No one would know. It was the very thought that had ruined a hundred women before her. She pressed her bandaged hand flat against the cold glass until the pain of it cleared her head.
Someone would know. Anne had all but said so, and the blood scarcely dry on her palm was proof enough of how little this house valued her and how swiftly it would be rid of her.
If she were seen, even once, going to him at night, she would be gone by morning, turned out without a character, without a home, without the smallest hope of another situation, and what then?
She had no people left to take her in. She had nothing in the world but the precarious shelter of this roof and the wages that fed her, and she would lose every scrap of it the instant the Dowager had cause; and a duke, whatever he felt, whatever he made her feel, could not save her from that.
He must not even be permitted to try, for the trying would be the ruin of them both.
She stood at the window a long time, watching the dome, her whole heart pulling her toward it and her whole hard-won sense holding her where she stood.
And in the end, the sense won, because it had to, because it was the only thing she had left to keep her safe; and she made herself turn from the window, and lie down upon her narrow bed, and she did not go.
She wept a little, silently, into the dark. But she did not go.
***
In the observatory, Cedric made his small preparations as he always did.
He lit the lamp and turned it low. He set out two of the notebooks, and then, after a moment, the third, the one she had not yet read.
He swung the telescope to where Jupiter would presently clear the trees, and checked the focus, and checked it again, and told himself that he did this for the sake of the work and not for the sake of the young woman who might soon bend over the glass.
The night was very fine. The sky was scoured clean from horizon to horizon, the best seeing he had had in a fortnight, and she would surely come, for she loved this as he loved it, and there was no power on earth that could keep a person who loved it from such a sky.
He waited.
The minutes went by, and then the quarter-hours, and the door did not open. He told himself she was delayed, that the house had been late settling with guests in it, that she was waiting until the last candle was out.
He found Jupiter and watched the moons a while and made a note or two in a hand that was less steady than he could have wished. He listened, between the small sounds of the night, for the soft tread upon the path that did not come.
An hour passed. The lamp burned lower. And slowly, sitting alone among his charts and instruments, with the whole indifferent universe moving in its serene and predictable courses overhead, Cedric came to understand that she was not coming.
She had thought better of it, perhaps. Or been frightened of it. Or simply seen more clearly than he had the thing they were both risking. And she had been right to stay away. Her staying away was very probably the kindest and wisest thing she could have done for either of them.
It did not help in the least. He sat on in the cold, watching the door that would not open, until at last the stars began to pale and a thin grey light crept up the eastern edge of the world; and then he put out the lamp, and gathered the notebooks no one had come to read, and went down the hill alone in the colourless hour before the dawn, to a house in which the woman he was not permitted to want lay sleepless three rooms from the woman his mother meant him to marry.