Chapter Twenty-Three
“Your Grace… Forgive me, I must speak with you. I must. There is no one else I can…”
Lady Honoria came toward him across the dark terrace quickly, too quickly, and caught his arm in both her gloved hands, and her voice as she said it was pitched a degree too loud for the empty night, loud enough to carry, loud enough to be heard by anyone who might happen to be near the long windows; and Cedric, every instinct in him suddenly awake and shouting, tried to step back and disengage her hands.
“Lady Honoria. Lower your voice. Whatever this is, it cannot be spoken of here, alone; you must see how it would look. Let go of my arm, and we will go in, and you may speak to me before your father and my mother both—”
“I cannot.” Her fingers tightened. And then, beneath the carrying performance of it, so low that it was meant for him and him alone, in a voice gone ragged with a terror that was real, she said: “Forgive me. Please. I have no choice. He has left me no choice. Forgive me, Your Grace, I am so very sorry.”
And he understood it all in a single sick rush, a half-second before the French doors were flung open and the light and the noise of the ballroom came pouring out across the stones.
Gasps. A woman’s cry. A confusion of voices rising all at once. And above them, his mother’s voice, sharp with shock: “Cedric!”
In the same instant Lady Honoria, with a small broken sound that he would later understand to be despair and not triumph, let her knees give way and fell against his chest, so that his arms came up by pure reflex to catch her.
There they stood, locked in what any eye in that doorway would have taken for an embrace.
He turned his head.
The doorway was full of people: his mother at the front with one hand at her throat, the Earl of Hartwick pushing through behind her, and ranged in the spilling light a dozen of the most prominent and most talkative people in the county, every one of them staring.
“My daughter.” The Earl’s voice filled the terrace, pitched for the very back of the crowd. “Alone. Upon a darkened terrace. In the arms of the Duke of Farenwoode.”
A woman’s voice somewhere in the press said, low and thrilled, “Well. I am sure I never…” and was hushed, though she did not seem very sorry to be hushed.
“There can be no question of what this is,” the Earl went on, “nor of what honour now demands of a gentleman. I will have your word, Duke. Here. Tonight.”
“Lord Hartwick.” Cedric set Lady Honoria back from him.
She came away without the least resistance and would not lift her eyes.
He forced his voice as flat and reasonable as he could make it.
“Nothing whatever has happened here. Your daughter came out onto this terrace alone, not a minute since, and entirely unbidden. I have neither said nor done one single thing that—”
“We can all of us see what we see, Your Grace.” It was the woman at the front, Lady Carteret, her diamonds and her warmth alike gone suddenly cold. “A well-bred girl does not fall weeping into a man’s arms in the dark for no reason in the world. The poor child.”
“She did not fall. She was—”
“Does it greatly signify how she came to be there?” A man’s voice this time, mild, and reasonable, and utterly ruinous. “The point, surely, is that she was there. And that we have, every one of us, seen it.”
Cedric heard his own protest wither in his throat, because he understood, with the cold clarity of a man watching a door swing shut, that it did not matter in the smallest degree what had in fact occurred.
A dozen people had seen what they believed they had seen.
By morning, it would be the truth in forty drawing rooms, and by the week’s end, the settled fact of four hundred, and nothing he could say, no denial, no explanation, no naming of the trap for the trap it so plainly was, would ever once overtake it.
Perception has already become fact.
The thing was finished before he had even known it was begun.
“It is a most serious matter.” His mother stepped forward, white-faced, her voice not quite steady, and Cedric saw with a hollow lurch that she believed every word of it; that she had not the least notion she was being used; that she saw before her only a respectable girl’s ruin and her son’s plain duty, and that some buried part of her, the part that had wanted this match above all things on earth, was already, against her own genuine horror, beginning to be glad.
“My son has always known what is owed. Whatever else the world may say of him, he knows his duty.”
“Hear,” said someone, low; and another voice took it up; and the soft ripple of agreement that passed through the lit doorway was, Cedric thought, the most terrible sound he had heard in four years.
“Let us not conduct the business out here, before the world.” The Earl was all smooth command now. “Duchess. Your guests will be wanting to go in. Duke. Your study, I think.” A pause, exquisitely measured. “At once.” It was not a request, in any particular.
And because there was nothing else in the world that he could do, Cedric inclined his head, and turned, and walked back in through the long windows into the blaze and heat and whispering of his own ballroom, the Earl at his shoulder and his mother close behind, like a prisoner walked between his guards.
The ballroom had heard already; a thing of that sort ran through a crowded room faster than fire through a hayrick.
The faces turned to follow him as he crossed it, fans lifting, heads bending together and apart, the whole avid, decorous machinery of his ruin turning before his eyes with not one wheel of it that he had the smallest power to stop.
He found her as he crossed the floor.
She was standing against the far wall where he had last seen her, with Miss Bradley at her side, and the colour had gone out of her face, every scrap of it, so that she looked carved from the same pale wax as the candles guttering above her.
Across the whole crowded, whispering, music-starting room, their eyes met and locked, and there was no shyness in it now, and no warmth, and no stolen sweetness; there was only her understanding, complete and terrible, looking back at him.
She heard. And she knows what it means.
He could not go to her. He could not say one word.
He could only hold her eyes for the space of three steps, and let her see in his face that it was a lie, all of it, that he had not chosen it and would never choose it, and then the crowd came between them, and the Earl’s hand was at his elbow, and he was through the far door and gone.
***
Clara did not remember deciding to move.
She stood against the wall while the crowd surged back into the ballroom around her, while the musicians, who had faltered for a startled instant, struck up again as though nothing at all had happened, while the couples re-formed their sets and the talk resumed at a fevered, delighted, scandalised pitch all about her.
Compromised. On the terrace. Hartwick’s girl. Well, and we all knew how it would end, did we not?
The words seemed to come at her from every side, bright and avid, and she could not seem to feel her own hands.
“Clara.” Anne had hold of her now, gripping her fingers hard. “Clara, look at me. Breathe. It is not… We do not yet know that it is—”
“I have to leave.”
“You cannot. Not now, not like this. The Dowager will see you gone, she will know something is wrong. You must stay until—”
“I cannot stay.” She heard her own voice come out flat and strange, from very far away. “Anne, I cannot stand in this room one moment longer and watch them all be so happy about it. I cannot pretend that it does not hurt.” The last word almost failed her. “Let me go. Please. Let me go.”
And Anne, looking into her face, let go of her hand.
She did not remember crossing the ballroom, or finding a side door, or any part of the dark grounds she walked through to reach the hill.
Her feet simply carried her, without her direction or consent, the way they had carried her so many nights towards the small warm light above the trees.
Except that there was no light there tonight, and she did not think there ever would be again; and still she climbed, because there was nowhere else in all the world that had ever felt a little like hers.
The observatory door gave under her hand.
The familiar room closed round her in the dark: the telescope standing patient at its slice of empty sky, the work tables drowned in their star charts, the cold dead stove.
And the cruelty of it was almost more than she could bear, for it was here, on this very floor, beneath these same charts, that she had stood not four-and-twenty hours ago and been happier than she had ever been in her life.
She crossed to the window. Jupiter hung low and bright above the black line of the trees, exactly where it had hung the night he had shown it to her, turning on its way, indifferent and serene, caring nothing at all for anything so small as a heart breaking in a cold room beneath it.
And the whole of it came down on her at once.
I shall have to watch him marry her.
There was no way round it. She had nowhere else on this earth to go, no people, no money, no situation but this one.
She would remain in this house as his mother’s paid companion and watch the marriage arranged and the wedding made.
She would stand among the servants at the back of the church while he married another woman.
She would live, year upon year, beneath the same roof while he built a life and a family with someone he had never wanted, and she would be useful, and quiet, and ask for nothing, and feel her own heart grow a little smaller with every ordinary day of it.
She sank down onto the cold stone floor beneath the window and put her face into her hands, and she wept as she had not wept since her mother died.
She wept for the one night she had let herself hope, and for the morning that had taken it away again, and for the long grey years she thought she could already see stretching out before her beneath those indifferent stars.
She wept until there was nothing left in her to weep with, and her breath came only in slow, exhausted shudders, and the cold of the floor had crept all the way into her bones.
And then, because she had nowhere else to go and no strength left to go there, she drew her knees up against her chest there on the hard floor among the fallen star charts and the notebooks filled with his careful hand, and she closed her swollen eyes, and let a thin and broken sleep take her at last.