Chapter Twenty-One
He kissed her.
It was nothing like the thing the novels had taught her to expect, the swooning and the fireworks.
It was both quieter than that and a great deal more.
His mouth came to hers slowly, almost carefully, as though she were something he had waited a long time for and did not mean to spoil by haste; and then his arms came round her and drew her in, and the careful seemed to go out of it, and she thought she felt the whole rigid four years of self-command in him give way.
She rose into it without a thought in her head, her good hand closing in the lapel of his coat to steady herself, because her knees had ceased to be of much use to her at all.
The cold round room, the lamp, the bright hard stars beyond the glass, the whole weight of everything that stood between them, all of it narrowed and fell away until there was nothing left in the world but the warmth of him, and the quiet catch of his breath, and the astonishing fact of being held.
When at last they drew apart, she did not step back.
She turned her face against his chest instead and stood there with her cheek above his heart, listening to it beat, quick and not at all steady, the heart of a man who was not nearly so composed as he made the world believe.
She shut her eyes and let herself, for the space of a dozen of those uneven beats, simply be where she was.
“I am afraid,” she said at last, into the wool of his coat. She had not meant to say it. It came out small and plain and true. “I am so happy I can scarcely breathe, and underneath it I am so afraid, and I cannot make the two of them stop happening at once.”
His arms tightened. “Tell me.”
“It is not a doubt of you. Please do not think it is that.” She drew back enough to look up at him, needing him to understand.
“It is only that the things in our way are real, Your Grace. They are not the made-up obstacles of a story that come right in the last chapter. Your mother will never countenance it. Not in a thousand years, and you know that better than I. And the world…” Her voice wavered.
“The world will not call it a love match. It will call it a scheming companion who got above herself and a duke who lost his head. It will say so in every drawing room in England, and it will not care in the least that it is wrong. I have nothing. No fortune, no settled home, no people to stand behind me. I am exactly the sort of woman they will assume the worst of, and there will be nothing to answer them with.”
He was quiet a moment, and she braced herself, because she had laid it all out plainly and there was no honest way for him to wave it off.
He did not try.
“I know,” he said. “All of it. I will not stand here and tell you pretty lies, Clara. You have had enough of being managed; I will not do it to you too.”
His hand came up and tucked a loosened strand of hair back from her face, and the tenderness of the small gesture nearly undid her.
“I do not have all the answers yet. I have not worked out how, or what it will cost, or whether we shall come through it without harm. But I have worked out this much.” His voice changed, went low and steady.
“After the ball, when Hartwick and his daughter are gone from under this roof, I am going to speak to my mother. And I am not going to be moved. Do you understand me? I have been moved my whole life. By duty, by guilt, by everyone’s perfect certainty of what I owed them.
I let them shut me up on this hill for four years because I believed I deserved nothing better.
I am done with it. I will stand for this. I will stand for you.”
For a moment, she could not speak at all.
“No one has ever stood for me,” she said when she could, and her voice broke clean across it.
“Not like that. My mother loved me; I know she did. But we were two people holding to one another in a life that was already falling apart, and I never knew where love ended and need began. Since then, people have wanted me near because I was useful, or quiet, or because I could be relied upon to ask for nothing. No one has ever once looked at the whole of me, with all the difficulty and danger attached, and decided I was worth the trouble.”
“Then let me be the first,” he said quietly. “Let me stand for you. Let me prove, not by pretty words in the middle of the night, but by what I do when morning comes, that you are worth every trouble attached to you.”
And at that, at the grave simplicity of it, she had no answer. She could only look at him, and be looked at in return, and try to understand that he meant it.
“But how is it to be done?” she asked at last, because she was a practical creature even with her whole heart in her throat. “Truly. Set the wishing aside. What is to become of a duke who marries his mother’s companion?”
“He is talked about,” Cedric said. “Extravagantly. For a season, perhaps two. And then some other man does something more diverting, and the world forgets, as the world always forgets.” His thumb moved slowly over the back of her sound hand.
“I have a fortune that is my own, Clara, and lands that answer to no one living, and a name old enough to weather a great deal of clucking. The plain truth is that the world can do remarkably little to a man who has decided to stop minding it. I spent four years not minding it for the worst reason there is. I find I would rather spend the rest of them not minding it for the best.”
“And your mother?”
A shadow went over him; he did not pretend it away.
“My mother will be angry, and hurt, and will say a great many hard things she only half means. And then, in time, I must hope, she will see that I am happy, which is the one thing she has truly wanted for me all along, however badly she has gone about the getting of it.”
He paused, and when he went on, his voice had dropped.
“I have already had the correct life, Clara. The suitable one. The one the whole world nodded over. It nearly killed two people, and it left me a ghost on a hilltop counting moons. I do not want the correct life any longer. I want a true one. I want…” He stopped, as if the wanting still half-frightened him to say.
“I want one with you in it. If you will have me. Whatever it proves to cost.”
And to that, she found she had no words at all.
Here stood a man offering to brave the ordered world he had been born to, for no better reason than that he wanted her: the whole troublesome, unprofitable, unsuitable rest of her.
It lay so far outside anything she had ever let herself imagine that she could only reach up, draw his face down to hers, and answer him in the one language that wanted no words.
He showed her Saturn before she went, low in the east, its rings tilted to a thin bright line, because, he said, she ought to carry away something of the night that was not only him.
She bent to the eyepiece with his hand resting light at the small of her back and looked at the ringed and impossible planet hung in all that dark, and thought that the universe was very large, and very strange, and that perhaps, after all, it had room enough in it for a thing as unlikely as the two of them.
When she slipped back across the dark grass at last, the sky was going pale grey at its eastern edge, and the great house loomed ahead of her, cold and quiet and asleep.
Somewhere inside it waited the work of the day: the flowers to be arranged, the candles counted, the guests’ rooms made ready, the ball after which everything was to be set right.
For once, she let herself believe that it would be.
She climbed the back stairs with Saturn’s rings still bright behind her eyes and a man’s promise warm in her chest, and she did not let herself think, on that one good morning, about how many things could go wrong in a crowded room, or how patiently a clever man could wait for exactly the chance he wanted.
For this one hour, the impossible felt possible. She had the rest of her life, she thought, to be afraid in. She would let herself have this.