Chapter 25 #3
The word landed with the quiet brutality of things said simply.
She sucked in a sharp breath.
“You stepped closer,” she forced out. “You… you took my hand. You led me to the garden. You said–” She stopped herself.
She was not going to repeat what he had said in the garden, was not going to offer it back to him to be filed under mistakes.
“You have been stepping closer for weeks,” she said instead. “In the nursery, in this house. The way you look—you have been–”
“I know what I have been doing,” he cut in.
“Then why–”
“Because it cannot continue.” He said it with the quiet finality of a door closing.
Not a slam, but worse than a slam. The soft, deliberate click of something locked.
“Emotional entanglement clouds judgment. It produces exactly the kind of…” He searched for the right word.
“… irrationality that a household like this cannot afford. My sisters depend on clear-headedness. The estate depends on it. I cannot–” He stopped.
She looked at him.
A household like this.
She had thought of it as a home, even though she had tried very hard not to.
She felt something harden inside her.
“What am I to you?” she asked.
He held her gaze but did not answer.
She asked it again, louder. “William, what am I to you?”
He was quiet for a moment that lasted entirely too long.
“I accepted responsibility for you when I married you,” he said. “That has not changed.”
Responsibility?
A part of her stopped living entirely.
The word went through her the way cold went through thin cloth, immediately reaching everything.
She thought of the garden and how he had touched her and spoken in the dark in a voice that had been for her and no one else.
She thought of the nursery at three in the morning and his forehead against hers and the silence that had followed.
She thought of what he had just said, and she thought bitterly, with the hollow clarity of something finally understood, Of course.
“Responsibility,” she echoed.
“Cecily, we agreed–”
“Oh, I know what we agreed on.” She closed her eyes briefly.
“I was there.” She kept her voice level, because the alternative was something she was not going to give him.
Not in this room. Not today. “You agreed in a Brighton drawing room to marry a woman you did not know, and I agreed to accept it because I had no other choice. And then, somewhere between that drawing room and every evening since, something happened that was not in the agreement. And rather than–” She stopped.
Breathed. “And you have just called it a mistake and called me a responsibility and said we should go our separate ways.”
He said nothing.
“Is that an accurate summary?” she prompted.
“It is time,” he said carefully, “to return to the original terms. For both our sakes. The Season is over. The gossip has faded. There is no reason–”
“No reason?”
“Cecily–”
She had had enough listening to him.
She stood up and looked at him for a long moment—at the utterly shuttered expression he wore—and she felt grief move through her cleanly and completely.
She picked up the notes from the armrest and set them on his desk. He looked at the papers, then at her.
She did not wait for anything else to be said; she walked out.
She didn’t exactly know how she got into her room. She walked towards her bed stiffly, sat on the edge of her bed, and looked out the window for a long time without seeing anything.
Responsibility?
The word pierced through her so hard it hurt.
She had refused six men in three Seasons on the grounds that she would not be someone’s obligation. She had sat in drawing rooms, smiled at perfectly suitable gentlemen, and turned them all down because there had been nothing underneath it—no real thing, nothing that would hold.
She had been told she was foolish. Impractical. Too particular. Too slow to decide. She had agreed to a marriage of convenience because she had had no other choice and had told herself, clearly and in her own words, that she would not give her heart to a man who had not chosen her freely.
And then he had kissed her in a garden, and everything changed.
A loud sob escaped her, and she pressed her fingers to her lips. Her ring caught the light, and she looked at it. Then she stood up.
She was not going to cry in this room. She was not going to cry anywhere in this house. Not because she was too proud, but because if she started, she was not sure she would stop, and there were things that needed to be done.
She went to find Isadora.
Isadora was lounging in her room, with a book open in her lap. She looked up when Cecily came in.
“Cecily.” She smiled. But as she looked at Cecily’s face, her smile slowly faded, and she closed the book without being asked. “Tell me.”
Cecily sat in the chair by the window. She was quiet for a moment, looking for the right words, and then she decided there were no right words and used all she had.
“I am going to go and stay with Beatrice,” she announced. “For a while. I need you to help me. Can you do that?”
Isadora went still. “For a while?”
“Yes.”
“Cecily.” She gasped and sat up straighter. “Is everything alright? Is someone ill? Is it Horatio?”
“No, no. Everyone is fine. It’s not—no.” Cecily shook her head. “I’m sorry. I should have said that first. Everyone is fine.”
Isadora let out a breath. Then she looked at her more carefully.
“Then what–” She stopped. Her eyes trailed over Cecily’s face—the careful stillness of it, the tight eyes, the set of a jaw that was doing a great deal of work. “What did he do?”
Cecily opened her mouth. Then closed it.
She tried again. “He was perfectly–”
Then something happened to her voice on the second word, something she hadn’t allowed.
She pressed the back of her hand briefly to her mouth and looked at the window, breathing through her nose until she was sure she had it back under control.
She was not going to cry in front of Isadora. She was not going to cry in front of anyone.
“He was perfectly civil,” she said. “He was—he apologized. He called what happened in the… what happened between us a mistake, and he said it was time to return to the original terms.” She looked at her hands. “And he called me a responsibility.”
The silence that followed was very heavy.
“He said that?” Isadora asked.
“In those words.”
Another silence ensued.
“Right,” Isadora uttered.
“I want you to know that this house has been–” Cecily broke off. The word that stuck in her throat was home. “That you and Letitia have been–”
Isadora stood up. She set her book on the chair with quiet decisiveness, crossed to Cecily, and pulled her to her feet by both hands.
“Look at me,” she said, squeezing her hands.
Cecily looked at her.
“You are going to go to Beatrice’s, and you are going to let her fuss over you, and you are going to eat the biscuits she puts in front of you even if you don’t want them, and you are not going to spend the next fortnight being sensible about this. Do you understand me?”
Something cracked slightly behind Cecily’s sternum. “Isadora–”
“He is my brother,” Isadora interrupted, “and I love him, but he is currently being the most extraordinary fool I have ever had the displeasure of sharing a bloodline with.” Her dark eyes were steady and entirely serious. “That is not a reflection of anything about you. I wish you to know that.”
“I know,” Cecily said, and found that she mostly did.
“Do you?”
A beat. “I’m working on it.”
Isadora squeezed her hands again and then let go. “Good. That’s good.” She looked towards the door. “Now, let us go to your room. What needs packing?”
They went up to Cecily’s rooms, and Cecily showed her the trunk from the dressing room, the books stacked by the bed, and the violet notebook in the top drawer.
Isadora moved through it with the quiet, efficient competence she brought to everything that needed doing, directing Ellen with the trunk and folding things that Cecily would have simply placed.
She moved to the bookshelf. “Are these all yours?”
“The top two shelves. The bottom is Letitia’s—she leaves them everywhere. You’ll recognize them by the bent spines.”
Isadora looked at her. Her dark, kind eyes filled with tears. “He is–” she began, and then stopped herself.
That told Cecily everything—that she had seen it, had been watching it, had known what was happening in this house.
“He is not always–” Another pause.
“I know,” Cecily said gently. “I know.”
They continued to pack.
Letitia appeared in the doorway at some point. She looked at the trunk. At Cecily. At Isadora. Then back at Cecily with the bright, perceptive eyes that saw everything.
“Are you coming back?” she asked.
Cecily looked at her. “I don’t know.”
She couldn’t lie.
Letitia’s jaw was set. Her eyes filled with tears, and they dripped onto her cheeks. It took Cecily everything she had not to weep with her.
She came into the room and pulled Cecily into a tight hug. Cecily held on and breathed carefully through her nose, trying not to cry.
“He is an idiot,” Letitia murmured into her shoulder.
“Letitia…” Cecily croaked.
“He is,” Letitia said, pulling back. Her eyes were very red. “I am going to tell him so.”
“Give him some time first,” Cecily said.
“How much time?”
“Some.”
Letitia looked at her for a long moment. “All right.” And then, more quietly, in a tiny voice: “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you too,” Cecily said. “Both of you.”
She meant it wholeheartedly.
The carriage was brought around at four. Cecily went down the stairs with nothing in her hands, what with Ellen having seen to the trunk. The entrance hall was quiet. Mr. Prentiss stood at the door with a grave expression.
She did not look in the direction of the study. She put on her coat and accepted her gloves from Ellen.
She stood in the entrance hall of Blackmoor House, which had been her home for two months and she had only admitted it recently, looked at it once—the staircase, the portraits above the fireplace, the longcase clock that she had learned to tell the time by—and then walked out the door.
The afternoon was grey and cold. She descended the front steps and walked to the carriage without looking back.
She stood with her hand on the carriage door and the cold air against her face, and looked up at the study window. She saw his silhouette move to stand by the window, watching her.
She exhaled and climbed into the carriage.
The carriage rolled through the gates and onto the street, and the house fell away behind her. She sat very still and did not think about any of the things that constituted the last two months of her life. Instead, she thought with deliberate firmness that she would be all right.
She had been all right before.
She briefly pressed her fingers to her lips once more, then folded her hands in her lap and looked at the road ahead, remaining very quiet all the way to Beatrice’s house.