Chapter Twenty-Two
“… and you will greet Lady Carteret the instant she arrives, Duchess; she expects it, and we can afford no slight tonight of all nights, however small.”
The Earl of Hartwick had been holding forth upon the ball since before the covers were laid, and Clara, slipping into her place at the foot of the table, let the words go past her unheard, because the Duke had looked up when she came in.
Their eyes met. Only for a moment, the space of a single breath; but in that breath the whole of the night before came back to her in a rush so vivid she was half afraid the entire table must see it written on her face: the cold, round room, the warmth of him, the ringed planet hanging in all that dark.
She looked down at her plate with the colour climbing hot into her cheeks and busied herself with a piece of toast she had no intention of eating.
When she dared glance up again, he had returned his attention to his coffee, perfectly composed. Only the faint restraint in him, the careful stillness that she had learned to recognise, betrayed that the moment had cost him anything at all.
It was the most dangerous secret she had ever carried, and she found she would not have given it up for the world.
She made herself attend to the room instead, and what she saw there sobered her.
Lady Honoria was not well. She sat very upright in her chair, as she always did, and answered when she was spoken to, and lifted her teacup with the same practised grace; but her hand, when she raised it, was not steady, and there were shadows beneath her eyes that powder had failed to hide.
Once, when her father’s voice rose to make some point about the evening’s guest list, Clara saw the cup tremble in her fingers badly enough that she set it down untasted rather than risk it.
Something had worn very thin in the beautiful golden girl since the shopping expedition.
Something was frightening her past her power to hide it, and Clara, who knew a great deal about carrying fear behind a composed face, watched her with a pity that had long since outgrown any rivalry she might once have felt.
The day that followed was given over wholly to the ball.
The household turned itself inside out. Clara was set to the lighter work, arranging great branches of hothouse flowers, directing the footmen where the card tables should stand, counting candles into their sconces; and the Dowager, moving through it all like a general on the eve of battle, maintained towards her a cool, precise, unobjectionable civility that unsettled Clara more than the open contempt of the week before.
There were no cutting remarks. There were no impossible demands. There was only a careful, watchful restraint, as though Clara had become something that required handling with caution.
“Miss Ellsworth.” The Dowager’s voice, finding her among the flowers, was perfectly level.
“The white roses for the gallery, if you please, not the pink. And tell Foster the card-room is to have the green baize. When you are finished, you may rest a little before you dress.” A small pause, and then, in exactly the same pleasant tone: “I am sure you will wish to look your best tonight. One never knows, at these affairs, beside whom one may find oneself standing.”
It was said so agreeably that Clara could not have repeated a syllable of it to any soul as unkind, and yet it left her cold to the marrow. There was a warning folded neatly inside the courtesy, small and sharp as a note slipped into a glove, and she understood it perfectly.
I am watching you. Take very great care.
She remembered the Duke stepping between her and the room in the drawing room, and the Earl’s pale eyes taking silent note of it, and understood the Dowager’s careful restraint for exactly what it was.
She was not comforted by it in the least.
***
By evening, the great house had been transformed, and Cedric stood at the head of his own blazing ballroom and received the county into it and wished, with a fervour that would have astonished every soul present, that the whole glittering business were already over.
A hundred candles and more burned in the chandeliers and along the walls; the musicians tuned and retuned in their gallery; carriage after carriage came up the drive and gave up its cargo of silk and jewels and expectation.
He stood between his mother and Lady Honoria, who had been placed, with great care, exactly where a future duchess would stand, and who looked the part to perfection in ivory silk worked with gold, and who had not, he thought, smiled once with her eyes all evening, and he bowed, and murmured the correct things, and felt himself playing a part in a performance whose ending everyone but he seemed to have agreed upon in advance.
“Farenwoode.” Lady Carteret, formidable in purple and diamonds, gave him her hand and ran a pair of shrewd old eyes over his face.
“How well you look. Better than I have seen you in years.” The eyes moved past him to Lady Honoria and warmed with frank approval.
“And what a very pretty picture the pair of you make. You may as well know, Duke, that the whole county is on tiptoe; we have every one of us quite decided how this house party is to end, and we shall be most put out if we are disappointed of our happy news.”
“You must not believe everything the county decides for you, Lady Carteret,” Cedric said.
“My dear boy.” She patted his arm as if he were a slow child. “The county is never wrong about a wedding. It is the one subject upon which we are sounder than Parliament.”
And she sailed on into the room, leaving the expectation hanging in the air behind her like a heavy scent, and Cedric standing in it, and Lady Honoria beside him pale and silent and saying nothing at all.
And then he found Clara.
She was near the far wall with Miss Bradley, half in the shadow of a great stand of lilies, dressed in a simple gown of pale green that some hundreds of pounds of London silk in that room could not have made him look at twice; and to his eyes she was the only thing in it worth seeing.
She had done something to her hair. She looked, he thought, with a catch beneath his ribs, radiant, and unaware of it, which was the better part of the radiance.
Across the whole crowded length of the room, their eyes found one another, and held, and the connection of it went through him with a force that was nearly physical, candlelight and crowd and orchestra and all.
And then, shy, and quick, and meant for no one in the world but him, she smiled.
A small smile. Tentative, and real. It was worth more to him than every bow he had taken that night.
He had to look away before his face gave the whole of it up to the room.
Duty claimed the first set, and duty’s name was Lady Honoria.
He led her out, and they took their places, and she moved through the figures with a flawless mechanical precision that never once faltered and never once warmed, her lovely face composed into the careful mask he had come to know, her eyes, he noticed it whenever the dance brought them together, going again and again to the edge of the floor, where her father stood watching them both with an expression of deep and settled satisfaction.
“Are you well, Lady Honoria?” he asked her quietly, the next time the figure brought them near enough for speech. “You seem… Forgive me, you do not seem yourself.”
“I am quite well, Your Grace. Thank you.” The words were perfectly correct, and there was nothing whatever behind them, and her gaze flicked once toward her father, and away. “It is only the heat.”
“You need not pretend with me, you know.” He kept his voice beneath the music. “Whatever it is. I have grown rather expert at knowing a person who wears a face that does not fit them. I wear one myself, most days of my life.”
For a moment, something moved behind the mask.
Her eyes came up to his, and there was such a depth of misery in them, and something else beneath the misery, something that looked, for one half-instant, almost like a warning struggling its way to the surface, and her lips parted, and she drew a small breath as if to speak.
Then, over his shoulder, she saw her father.
Whatever had been rising in her face went out of it all at once, like a candle pinched between finger and thumb.
“You are very kind, Your Grace,” she said, and the trained pleasant voice was seamless again, the mask back in place without a join showing.
“But indeed, there is nothing the matter. Shall we?” And she turned them smoothly back into the figure, and was once more flawless, and remote, and lost to him.
Once, between the sets, he caught sight of Edward across the room, dancing with Miss Bradley, and the contrast struck him like a blow.
There was no mask on either of those two faces.
Edward was laughing at something she had said; she was looking up at him as though the crowded ballroom held no one else; the whole bright easy happiness of them was so plain, so unguarded, so free, that Cedric had to turn away from it, because the wanting of it for himself, for Clara, was suddenly more than he could comfortably bear in a public room.
Edward found him a few minutes later, flushed and grinning, by the windows.
“You are wearing a most peculiar expression, Cedric. I have been trying to place it the whole evening, and I have only this moment succeeded.” He leaned in, mock-grave. “You look almost happy. It is deeply unsettling. Do stop, you will alarm the dowagers, and they have weak hearts.”
“I cannot think what you mean.”
“No. Of course you cannot.” But the grin had softened into something shrewder and kinder, and Edward looked at him a moment with the frank affection of a very old friendship.
“I shall not pry. But whatever it is, old friend, whoever it is, I am glad of it, gladder than I can well say.” He clapped Cedric once on the shoulder.
“Now. I am going to go and dance again with the cleverest, kindest woman in the whole of Yorkshire, before some other fellow comes to his senses and asks her first. Wish me joy.”
“I wish you joy, Edward,” Cedric said, and meant it more than his friend could know.
The heat built as the evening wore on, the candles and the press of bodies thickening the air until the great room felt close as a hothouse.
After the third set, half stifled and wanting a moment to himself before he had to be the Duke of Farenwoode again, Cedric slipped through one of the long windows and out onto the terrace.
The cool of the night came over him like clean water. He crossed to the stone balustrade and looked out over the dark gardens, where the first stars were pricking through the deepening blue above the black mass of the trees. For the first time in hours, he let his shoulders come down.
Somewhere under those same stars was the hilltop, and the small round room, and if he held his nerve and kept his word, there might come a night, not so far off now, when he could climb to it openly, with Clara’s hand in his, and never again come down to a house that was not theirs.
Behind him, from the doorway, came the soft sound of footsteps.
Light. Hesitant. Not the firm tread of a servant nor the heavy one of a guest come out to smoke; a woman’s step, slow, and somehow deliberate in its hesitancy, as if its owner were following a part she had been given and did not relish.
He turned from the balustrade and saw Lady Honoria standing alone in the lit doorway, the ballroom blazing at her back and no chaperon anywhere behind her.
Alone, on a dark terrace, with him.
Something cold turned over in his chest, and he understood, half a heartbeat too late, that he had made a terrible mistake in coming out here by himself.