Chapter 14
“Pall Mall,” Beatrice said.
Everyone looked at her.
She raised her eyebrow like she had just made a decision and was simply waiting for the room to catch up. “It’s not yet three, the light is still good, and we have been sitting in this drawing room for two hours, behaving ourselves.” She looked at Edward. “Get the mallets.”
“I’m not sure Cecily is ready to lose again because–” Edward began.
“The mallets, Duke.” Cecily stood up with a smile.
Edward got up to ring a footman.
The garden was long and south-facing, with well-kept grounds.
Someone had set up the course already—hoops placed with the spaced precision of a household that did this regularly—and the late afternoon light was doing something generous across the lawn, the kind of light that made everything look slightly better than it was.
William had played Pall Mall perhaps a hundred times in his life and had never once found it particularly interesting. He revised this assessment within approximately four minutes.
“I’ll go first,” Cecily declared, taking the mallet from the footman with one brisk, decided motion. She looked at the mallet she chose with intense focus.
“Guests go first,” Beatrice agreed pleasantly.
“I’m not a guest,” Cecily said. “I’m family, and I’m here to set the record straight.” She looked at the first hoop, lined up, adjusted her grip once, and hit the ball with a clean, decisive clack that sent it through cleanly and rolling to the perfect position for the second hoop.
A brief silence ensued.
“Right,” Edward drawled. “I see how this is going to be.”
William took his position and played, and the game began in earnest.
“Absolutely not,” Cecily huffed after a while. “That was out.”
“It was not out,” Edward protested. “It cleared the hoop by a considerable margin.”
“A considerable margin,” Cecily repeated. “Duke, it grazed the wire. I heard it.”
“You heard the wind.”
“I heard the wire.”
“There is no wire.”
“There is wire enough.”
William stood slightly to the left of this exchange with his mallet resting against his shoulder and watched his wife argue with a duke about a game of Pall Mall with the focused conviction of someone for whom the outcome of this particular hoop was a matter of genuine moral consequence.
She had her hand on her hip. Her hair had come slightly loose on the right side—she hadn’t noticed, or had noticed and didn’t care, and he was finding he could not look away from it.
Her cheeks were high with color from the cool air and the argument, and she was looking at Edward with the expression she had used on William across the breakfast table, which he now recognized as the expression she wore when she had already decided she was right and was simply waiting for the other party to catch up.
Beatrice was standing near the garden wall, eating an apple she had produced from somewhere, watching the proceedings with the serenity of a woman who had made a deliberate decision to be uninvolved.
The game continued with intensity, and William soon discovered that Cecily was good.
Not politely good, not lucky-good, but genuinely, technically good.
She read the ground before she played, adjusted her stance with quick, practical attention, and hit the ball cleanly, even though Edward was a worthy opponent.
She was also completely incapable of concealing her feelings about the score.
“Yes,” she said when her ball cleared the fifth hoop cleanly. The word came out with a quiet, emphatic satisfaction that she appeared entirely unaware of.
“Well played,” William praised.
She looked up at him. There was a sparkle in her eyes—uncomplicated and unguarded, the expression of someone who had forgotten to manage their expression because they were too busy being pleased—and it lasted approximately two seconds before she recovered herself.
“Thank you,” she said with composure.
Beatrice, near the wall, had given up all pretense of not being entertained and was simply watching them with her arms folded and her apple finished and the expression of a woman getting everything she had hoped for out of an afternoon.
Edward took the lead at the seventh hoop by means of a shot which Cecily described as lucky, and which he described as skilled, and which William privately thought was lucky but had no intention of saying so.
“That,” Cecily said, staring at the ball’s final position with the focused displeasure of a military strategist reviewing an unexpected defeat, “was the wrong outcome.”
“It was the correct outcome,” Edward countered. “It was simply not the outcome you wanted.”
“In this context, those are the same thing.”
“They are emphatically not the same thing.”
“Duke,” Cecily said, turning to him with the patient precision of someone about to make a very simple point to someone who should understand it, “you have won enough things in your life. You are a duke. You own property in four counties. You have a beautiful family, an excellent cook, and a dog named Horatio–”
“That’s our dog.” Eloise beamed.
“–and I think,” Cecily continued without pause, “that the generous thing, the truly gracious thing, given the disparity in our life circumstances, would be to allow me this one hoop.”
Silence followed.
Edward looked at his wife. Beatrice bit the inside of her cheek.
“No,” he said.
“Fine,” Cecily huffed, and took her shot with a violence of intention that sent the ball considerably farther than necessary and rolled it into the hedge at the garden’s edge.
William retrieved it without comment.
“Thank you,” she muttered, taking it from his hand with clipped courtesy.
“Of course,” he said.
She looked up at him. He looked back at her.
He was close enough to see the exact moment her indignation broke—a crack in it that became something helpless and then became, unmistakably, a laugh.
She pressed her lips together against it.
Failed. Turned away very quickly, under the pretence of lining up her next shot.
William looked at the middle distance and said nothing, but he felt the pull of something in his chest that had been there all afternoon and was becoming more difficult to ignore with every passing hour.
Cecily’s ball had taken a wide angle off a bump in the ground and come to rest in a position that was either just through the hoop or just short of it, depending on who was looking.
Then she turned back to Edward and said, “I’m taking the point,” and walked to the next hoop with settled finality.
“Is she always like this?” William asked him quietly.
Edward watched his sister-in-law line up her next shot with the focused intensity of a general. “At Pall Mall, yes.” He paused. “At most things, if we’re being honest.”
William watched her hit—clean, precise, satisfying—and mutter yes again under her breath as though she couldn’t help it.
“Yes,” he murmured. “I’m beginning to understand that.”
“She was never like this in Society,” Edward elaborated, coming to stand beside him with his mallet slung over his shoulder. “In drawing rooms, she was perfectly pleasant. Asked the right questions, said the right things. You’d have thought her quite composed.”
“She is composed,” William said.
“She is composed,” Edward agreed. “When she remembers to be.” He nodded toward the far end of the course, where Cecily had now stood up, made a decision about the ground, and was positioning herself with settled concentration.
“At home, she was always like this. Arguing about everything. Refusing to concede anything she didn’t believe was genuinely lost.” A pause.
“Drove every suitor we ever entertained completely mad.”
“There were suitors.” It came out less like a question than William intended.
“There were always suitors,” Edward confirmed. “She refused them all.”
Down the course, Cecily hit the ball—clean and decisive—and said something under her breath that William was fairly certain was not ladylike and that the distance mercifully prevented him from hearing clearly.
Then she looked up, caught the ball’s final position, and the expression that crossed her face was that of a person receiving news they had fully expected and were entirely pleased about.
She was smiling. Not the composed, careful smile he had seen her use in front of him. He watched it come and go, and felt something shift in his chest that he had been feeling with increasing frequency.
Beatrice pushed off the garden wall to stand on his other side, serene and unhurried.
“Six suitors in three Seasons,” she said pleasantly, as though continuing a conversation rather than beginning one. “Mama kept a list. She found it soothing, I think, to have it written down.”
“Six,” William echoed.
“That we knew about.” Beatrice watched her sister line up the next shot.
“She turned down the first one without telling anyone for a week. We only found out because his mother mentioned it at a card party, and Mama came home and had to lie down.” A slight pause.
“She’s always preferred books. It made the whole enterprise rather difficult.
You cannot compete with a book. A book never says the wrong thing at dinner. ”
“A book,” William said, watching Cecily crouch down to examine something near the hoop with the total, oblivious focus of a woman who had forgotten the game had other participants, “does not argue about every point.”
“She argues with books, too,” Beatrice revealed. “She writes in the margins.”
William thought of the library. Of Cecily in the chair by the fire, with her feet tucked beneath her and both hands over the cover of a very French novel pressed against her knee, and the color that had risen in her face, and the way she had looked at him while trying very hard to look at anything else.
“Books,” he said, allowing his voice to carry, “are formidable rivals. I’m beginning to understand the difficulty.”
He said it toward the course, not toward Beatrice, but he was aware of Beatrice’s expression shifting slightly, the way expressions shifted when something had been confirmed rather than discovered.
At the far end of the course, Cecily looked up.
She had not been looking at them—she had been entirely occupied with the mallet in her hands and the ground in front of her and some private assessment of the angle—but something made her look up at that precise moment.
Her eyes found his with the direct, immediate accuracy they always had, as though looking at him were simply where they went when they were not being directed elsewhere.
He held her gaze.
And he watched it happen. Watched her hear the word books and watch her mind go somewhere specific, watched the color rise in her face with the sudden completeness of something that could not be recalled once it had begun.
It started at her cheekbones and moved, and she looked away almost immediately—down at her mallet, at the course, anywhere with intention—but not before he had seen all of it.
He looked back at the mallet in his hand.
“I see,” Beatrice said from beside him, in the tone of a woman who had seen more than he had intended.
He said nothing.
Down the course, Cecily repositioned herself for her shot with the focused composure of someone who had decided to be entirely normal and was succeeding at approximately sixty percent.
William was smiling again. He was aware of it this time and made no effort to stop.