Chapter 26
“Your Grace.” Beatrice’s footman opened the door and looked at her, at the single trunk being brought down from the carriage, then at whatever was currently on her face, and his composure faltered. “Shall I inform Her Grace you’ve arrived?”
“Please,” Cecily said.
He showed her into the entrance hall before disappearing.
She stood in the familiar warmth of Beatrice’s house and took in the yellow wallpaper Edward hated but Beatrice had kept anyway, the small portrait of Eloise at eighteen months that hung by the stairs, the smell of good wood and fresh flowers, and felt the distance between here and Blackmoor House settle into her like weight.
She had not sent word ahead. It occurred to her that she should have, that arriving unannounced at her sister’s door with a trunk and no explanation was the sort of thing that required, at a minimum, a note.
But she had not thought of it in time, and she was not sure she could have written a note even if she’d thought of it, because she was not entirely sure what the note would have said.
Dear Beatrice,
I have made a terrible mistake. Not in leaving, but in staying as long as I did and letting myself believe it was something it wasn’t. I’ll be at your door around four. Please have tea prepared?
Beatrice came down the stairs with speed. She stopped on the third step and looked at Cecily. At the coat still on, the gloves still in her hands, the trunk being carried through the door behind her.
“Cecily,” she greeted.
“Hello, Bea. I should have sent word–”
“Where is William?”
“Blackmoor House, presumably.”
Beatrice came the rest of the way down the stairs. She looked at her sister’s face with sharp focus, her eyebrows knitting together. Then she took Cecily by the arm. “Drawing room, come.”
She pulled her in that direction.
The fire was good, and the tea arrived quickly. Beatrice poured while keeping an eye on her and waited, giving her the space to open up.
“He called me a responsibility, you know,” Cecily said after taking a small sip.
Beatrice was very still.
“In those words exactly,” Cecily continued.
“When I asked him what I was to him, he said he had accepted responsibility for me when he married me.” She looked at her tea.
“We kissed. And it was… beautiful, or so I thought. He called it a mistake. Told me that ‘emotional entanglement’ clouds judgment. That Blackmoor could not afford–” She stopped.
“He had a great many things to say about what Blackmoor cannot afford.”
“Oh, William,” Beatrice gasped.
“I knew the terms when I agreed to them,” Cecily said.
“I knew… I knew what it was. I was the one who proposed half of them. In fact, I sat in your drawing room and listed my conditions and… and I insisted on them. I knew exactly what I was agreeing to.” She looked at the fire.
“But then, something happened. Or I allowed myself to believe something had happened. And apparently, I was the only one it happened to.”
“You were not,” Beatrice said.
“I am. He said–”
“I know what he said. I also know what I have seen with my own eyes since the wedding, and what I have watched across a Pall Mall course, and what Edward said he observed across a dinner table.” Beatrice set down her cup carefully.
“William has been taught, through several years of direct evidence, that love is a thing that destroys households. That it begins with everything and ends in damage, and the people who pay most are the ones who had no say in the matter.” She paused.
“He is not wrong that he learned that. He is only wrong that it applies to him.”
“Beatrice.” Cecily looked at her. “I am not going to beg for it.”
“I’m not suggesting you should.”
“He kissed me in a garden and came home, then decided it was a mistake before the morning properly started. That is not a man who has arrived at love and is afraid of it. That is a man who has decided, in advance, that it is not available to him and is enforcing that decision regardless of what actually happened.” Her voice wavered on the last word, which she resented.
“I can endure the gossip. I endured it in Brighton, and I endured three months of London society watching me to see what I would do, and I managed all of it. But I cannot…”
Beatrice waited. When Cecily didn’t continue, she said, “Oh, darling,”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine.”
“I’m going to be fine.”
“Cecily.” Beatrice reached across, took the teacup from her hands, because Cecily had been tilting it at an increasingly alarming angle, and set it on the table. She held her hands instead. “Look at me.”
Cecily looked at her.
“What do you need?”
“I don’t need anything. I just need–” She stopped.
Breathed. “I could endure the rest of it. I had thought it through before today, and I had made my peace with most of it. The gossip. The circumstances. The fact that half of London knows exactly what kind of arrangement it was.” She looked at Beatrice steadily.
“I can endure being talked about. I was talked about before, and I have survived it.”
Her jaw tightened.
“But I cannot endure being tolerated. I cannot sit in that house and be managed and maintained and called a responsibility by a man who kissed me in a garden and then–” She swallowed hard.
“I have spent my entire adult life refusing to be with someone who didn’t choose me.
I am not going to start making exceptions simply because the man in question is… ”
“Is what?” Beatrice prompted gently.
Cecily looked at the fire for a long time. “Exactly what I would have chosen,” she finished. “If I had been allowed to choose.”
The room was very quiet.
“You love him,” Beatrice said. It was not a question.
Cecily looked back at her sister. “I was beginning to.” Which was not the same as admitting it, but was near enough to the truth to satisfy her conscience. “Yes.”
Beatrice exhaled. She looked at the fire for a moment.
“I know he is afraid,” Cecily said, after a while.
“I know that is what it is. I have known it since the beginning, since he stood at the window with Letitia’s wooden horse and told me about a loud house and two frightened children.
I understand why he is afraid.” She looked down at her hands.
“But understanding why someone is causing you pain does not make the pain smaller. It only makes it more complicated.”
“No,” Beatrice agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“And I will not…” Cecily tried to swallow past the lump in her throat. “I will not stay where I am an obligation. I spent twenty-three years waiting to matter to someone. I am not going to spend the next twenty-three being managed by one.”
Beatrice put her arm around her and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and because sometimes the only thing available was the warmth of another person who loved you and understood the distance between what you had hoped for and what you had.
Cecily let herself be held for a moment. Then she sat up, reached for her tea, and took a sip with the composure of a woman who had decided she had said enough and was going to stop now before she lost what remained of herself.
“Is the blue room available?” she asked.
“It’s already being made up,” Beatrice replied. “Collins sent the maids to see to it.”
“He is very good.”
“Edward keeps trying to give him a raise. He refuses it every year on principle.” A pause. “You will stay as long as you need.”
“Thank you.”
“You do not need to thank me for that.”
“I know.”
Cecily could not sleep at night. She had known she wouldn’t be able to—had known it in the carriage, had known it as she changed and lay down in the blue room, with its familiar yellow quilt and the view of the street she had looked at from this window a hundred times in her life.
She lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling, letting the evening settle around her into silence. She thought about nothing in particular for as long as she could manage, which was not very long.
At some point past midnight, she got up, put on her wrapper, and went down the corridor to the nursery.
The baby was asleep.
Beatrice’s boy, five months old and entirely committed to his own schedule, had apparently decided tonight was a peaceful one.
He lay in his crib with the profound stillness of a well-fed infant at rest, his small face entirely smooth, his breathing the deep, unhurried rhythm that Cecily had sat beside for two weeks in another nursery and had learned to find reassuring.
She sat in the chair by the crib and looked at him, feeling the quiet of the room wrap around her.
She had not let herself cry at Beatrice’s.
She had not let herself cry in the carriage.
She had not let herself cry when Letitia had hugged her with the full, unceremonious conviction of someone who understood that physical presence was the only adequate response, and she had not let herself cry on the stairs at Blackmoor House, or in the entrance hall, or at any point during the ten minutes it had taken to walk out of the study and organize her departure and come down the front steps and get into the carriage.
She let herself cry now. Not loudly—the baby was sleeping, and she was not going to wake him—but quietly, in the dark, in the chair beside the crib, with her hands folded in her lap. She clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from making any sound.
She thought about the baby girl from the orphanage. Her small fist around William’s finger. The way she had settled in his arms with total abandon. The deep, slow breathing of a child who had found a safe place and recognized it.
Cecily had stood at the crib and felt the grief of the guardianship conversation move through her like a current, the understanding that this was not hers to keep, that she had agreed to terms that made it impossible, that the baby was going back to Granger Street, and Cecily was going back to being the duchess of a house that she was in temporarily.
She had thought—she had allowed herself to think—that it could be different.
That the arrangement could become something it had not started as.
That a household could be built, slowly and without announcement, out of the accumulated weight of warm conversations at the breakfast table and maybe even coincidental meetings in libraries at night, and all the small, specific, unremarkable things that constituted an actual life shared with actual people.
She had thought the baby could be part of it.
She had thought William could be part of it.
She pressed the back of her hand briefly against her mouth and sobbed even harder.
She had been foolish. She had known the terms and had agreed to them, and somewhere between agreeing and the garden, she had simply forgotten to keep the distance.
Had let it collapse, piece by piece, evening by evening, until she was sitting in a study this afternoon with three pages of evidence in her hand and the word responsibility in her chest and nothing between her and the full understanding of what she had allowed herself to hope for and how wrong she had been to hope for it.
The baby stirred, resettled, and sighed.
She watched him.
I wanted a family.
Not in the abstract. Not the general, theoretical family of a woman who had been told since girlhood that this was what she was supposed to want.
She had wanted this family. These specific people, in this specific house, with the warmth she had felt in it from the first afternoon, with the sisters and the cat story and the knocked-over cream.
She had wanted Isadora finding her books, Letitia arguing about everything, an orphan baby in a nursery, and a man who stayed up through the night because he could not stand to be anywhere near something vulnerable and not account for every possible thing that could go wrong.
She had wanted him.
She still did, which was the part she was going to have to manage.
The candle on the table burned low. The baby breathed evenly. Outside, the London night continued its indifferent business.
She stayed in the chair until the candle went out, and then she sat in the dark. She exhaled heavily, missing the house she had left, the people in it, the life she had almost built inside, and would now have to take apart.
She did not try to make it smaller than it was. It was not small.
It was the largest and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.
It was even larger than the scandal. Even larger than the wedding and the loneliness she felt when she had first arrived at Blackmoor House.
All of that had happened to her.
This she had walked into herself, with her eyes open, and that made it entirely different.
She sat with that for a long time and let herself grieve the life she had very nearly, very foolishly, begun to hope for.
Then she stood, smoothed her wrapper, and went back to the blue room. She lay down and watched the ceiling slowly become lighter as the morning dawned.