Chapter 3
“Drink,” Beatrice urged gently. “You will only make yourself ill.”
She sat with her on the settee, pressing the teacup into her hands for the third time.
Cecily stared at the untouched tea. “It does not matter.”
“Of course, it matters. You will faint at this rate.”
Cecily had cried herself hollow by morning.
It had started on the walk back from the shore—a few dignified tears, she had told herself, entirely reasonable given the circumstances, which she would allow and then be done with.
By the time she reached Beatrice’s townhouse, she was crying properly.
By luncheon, she had stopped and started twice.
By evening, she had given up pretending she was going to stop.
She woke up the next morning with her eyes swollen and the particular hollow tiredness of someone who had slept badly and dreamed worse, and lay in the grey dawn light conducting a thorough inventory of everything she had lost.
“No,” she said, her voice breaking despite her effort to keep it steady. “It does not. Because no one will look at me the same way again. No respectable man would want me now.”
Beatrice considered lying. Cecily could see the consideration, brief and well-intentioned, cross her face before she abandoned it.
She pressed her lips together briefly. “The morning papers have it.”
Cecily sat up against the pillows and closed her eyes.
“Of course they have it.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was something, though not much.
“Mrs. Fowler was one of them. On the beach. I recognized her. She has been in Brighton a fortnight with nothing to say, and now I’ve given her something to say, and she will say it to absolutely everyone. ”
“It may not spread as far as–”
“It will,” Cecily said without heat. Simply a fact she had already made her peace with.
“You know it will. By Thursday, it will be in London. By the weekend, it will be at every breakfast table in the county.” She looked down at her hands, at the counterpane bunched between her fingers.
“And then it’s over. All of it. Everything I’ve been waiting for. ”
Beatrice was quiet for a moment. “You don’t know that.”
“I know how it works, Bea. We both do.” Cecily looked up at her.
“A woman whose name is attached to a scene like that—who is found at dawn on a beach with a man, alone, his shirt half open and her kneeling beside him… There is no version of that story that Society tells kindly. It doesn’t matter what actually happened.
It never matters what actually happened. ”
Beatrice reached out and took her hand. Cecily let her.
“I was trying to help him.” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, which she resented. “He was lying in the tide, Bea. Unconscious. What was I supposed to do, step over him and keep walking?”
“No,” Beatrice replied gently. “Of course not.”
“Then what–” Cecily stopped. Breathed. “It doesn’t matter.
The right thing and the sensible thing were not the same, and I chose the right thing.
Now, I am going to pay for it for the rest of my life.
And the part that I cannot—the part that keeps–” She pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth.
“I’ve been so careful. You know how careful I’ve been.
Every suitor, every Season, I’ve waited because I didn’t want to settle, because I wanted something real, and now I don’t even get the chance.
That choice has been taken from me entirely, and I didn’t even—I didn’t do anything wrong. ”
“I know,” Beatrice said softly.
“It doesn’t help, knowing that.”
“No,” Beatrice agreed. “It doesn’t. But it isn’t too bad—they haven’t used your full name. Not yet. But it’s descriptive enough that anyone who was in Brighton yesterday will–”
“Know immediately.” Cecily squeezed her eyes shut. “What does it say?”
Beatrice hesitated.
“Bea. Tell me.”
“A compromising scene,” Beatrice revealed carefully, “between an unnamed lady and a certain well-known gentleman, discovered on the eastern shore at dawn, in circumstances of unmistakable intimacy.”
Cecily’s stomach dropped.
“In what sense discovered?” she asked.
Beatrice hesitated. “They describe you kneeling beside him. His coat open. The tide not yet withdrawn.” She swallowed. “They make much of the isolation with the gentleman.”
“A gentleman,” Cecily repeated faintly.
“They haven’t named you,” Beatrice assured her. “And they haven’t named him either. Not yet.”
Cecily let out a breath she had not realized she had been holding. “Then perhaps…”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Breathed. Steadied herself. Outside, Brighton continued its cheerful indifference—a carriage, voices, the distant suggestion of the sea.
She was still sitting there, dry-eyed and emptied out, when the sound of the front door reached them from below. Brisk, purposeful footsteps in the entrance hall. A voice she would have recognized anywhere, carrying the particular tone it reserved for situations that required immediate management.
Both sisters went very still.
“That’s Mama,” Cecily whispered.
Beatrice stood. “I’ll go down first.”
“Don’t.” Cecily pushed back the counterpane and reached for her wrapper. “She’ll only come up here if you do. Better to face it in the drawing room. At least there, we can call for tea and pretend we’re civilised.”
The Dowager Countess of Moreland had not come alone.
She had brought her lady’s maid, her travelling case, and three London newspapers folded with the relevant pages facing outward, which told Cecily everything she needed to know about the nature of the visit before her mother had even removed her gloves.
She swept into the drawing room, where Cecily and Beatrice were sitting—Beatrice upright, Cecily with her hands folded and her expression braced—and deposited the newspapers on the table between them with the controlled energy of a woman who had spent a long ride composing herself and was holding that composure together by sheer force of will.
“Well?” she prompted.
“Mama,” Beatrice said carefully. “Sit down. Let me call for tea.”
“I have had tea.” Lady Moreland sat anyway, straight-backed. “You have been very busy,” she remarked, removing her gloves. “Both of you.”
“Mama–” Beatrice began.
“I came as soon as I could.” Lady Moreland’s eyes moved immediately to Cecily’s face with an assessment so swift and thorough that Cecily felt she had been cataloged. “You’ve been crying.”
“Observant of you.”
“Cecily.”
“I’m sorry.” Cecily meant it. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m—yes, I’ve been crying.”
Her mother looked at her for a moment longer, and something moved very briefly through her expression.
Not softness, exactly, but the shape of where softness lived when it was not currently available.
Then she reached for the first newspaper, opened it to the marked page, and set it on the table between them.
“You have read this,” she said.
“I’ve heard enough of it.”
Cecily looked at it. The headline was not subtle. Neither was the illustration beside it—a rough sketch, mercifully imprecise, of a woman kneeling beside a prone figure on a shore, the caption beneath reading A Most Irregular Morning Encounter.
The column described the scene in the languid, suggestive prose that the Society pages reserved for moments exactly like this one, careful to imply everything while confirming nothing, which was somehow worse than outright accusation.
She read it once, then set it down.
“Then you know that London is already discussing a compromising scene with an unnamed lady on the Brighton shore.” Her mother tapped the page.
“They haven’t used my full name,” she pointed out.
“Not in that one.” Lady Moreland reached for the second paper. “In this one, they have.”
Cecily closed her eyes for a moment. Then she opened them.
“What you may not know is that the gentleman involved is not merely a gentleman.” Lady Moreland set the paper down carefully.
Cecily’s chest tightened. “Who is he?”
Lady Moreland met her eyes squarely. “William Whitmore, the Duke of Blackmoor.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“He’s a–” Cecily stopped. “He’s a duke.”
“Yes.”
She stared at the papers. “I pulled a duke out of the sea.”
Beatrice winced. “Technically, you found him,” she corrected weakly.
“Beatrice, I swear–” Cecily glared at her.
“What? He was already out of the sea when you found him,” Beatrice argued, with the serene expression of a woman who knew she was being unhelpful and had made her peace with it.
“Girls!” Lady Moreland called sternly.
When both of them turned to face her, she continued, brisk now. “He is unmarried. He has a considerable fortune, an estate outside of London, and a house here in Brighton. He was hosting a party the night before last, apparently. He is also…” A pause, deliberate. “Well known.”
“For what?” Cecily asked, already guessing.
“For his charm,” Lady Moreland answered. “For his recklessness. For never being dull. The papers prefer the word rakish.”
The word landed with peculiar softness, like something dropped from a great height.
Of course he was.
Cecily looked out the window. At the pale Brighton sky above the rooftops, indifferent and unhelpful. She thought of green eyes and a jaw that could have been artistic and a voice that had been rough with pain and still, somehow, faintly amused.
She thought of his hand on her arm and the six inches of charged air between their faces and the way her heart had behaved, which she was now going to stop thinking about immediately and permanently.
“Of course he is,” she muttered.
“Cecily–” Beatrice started.
“No, I mean it quite literally.” Cecily laughed, a short hollow sound. “Of course, the man I stumble across at dawn on the beach is a rakish duke whose name is already in the papers. Of course, that is the exact man. Because anything less would not have been thorough enough a disaster.”