Chapter 17
Seventeen
Slowly, the entire group assembled in the drawing room, the air thick with the peculiar energy of amateur theatricals—a mingling of dread and exhilaration that set nerves alight.
Norman lingered near the window, arms folded behind his back, listening more than speaking as the guests settled in. Kitty stood beside Richard and Jane, completely silent, eyes unfocused, as if she was merely physically present, while her soul lingered somewhere in a distant dream.
She had a way of unraveling him that no one else ever had. Why did his thoughts turn so utterly irrational whenever she was near? It was absurd. He had never felt this way before—this restless, this lost. Perhaps he was losing his mind. Or perhaps she was the one driving him to madness.
He fixed his gaze on the golden spill of sunset beyond the window, refusing to let his eyes stray in her direction. If he so much as glanced at her, he wasn’t sure he could stop himself from crossing the room and kissing her—again and again and again, consequences be damned.
Once the last of the guests had filtered in, he knew it was time. Stepping away from the window, he positioned himself at the room’s center, swept his gaze over the gathered faces, and drew a steadying breath.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming.”
A pleased murmur rippled through the crowd. Against his better judgment, his eyes found Kitty’s—her emerald gaze glinting in the candlelight. A shiver raced up his spine, and he quickly looked away. Staring at her in moments like this was nothing short of disastrous.
“I would like to announce,” he continued, fingers tapping an absent rhythm against his thigh, “that we will be staging a performance. The Merchant of Venice.”
The room erupted into delighted chatter, guests exchanging eager whispers.
Cynthia was already chattering about which roles she might best embody, laughing behind her gloved hand. “But of course, Portia must be clever and beautiful and charming.”
“A rare combination,” Kitty murmured under her breath. Her tone was dry, not unkind, but he did not smile. He could not. Not yet.
“I think Cynthia should be Portia,” Lady Mulberry said loudly. “She’s the natural choice.”
Norman looked over at her. He had started to regret inviting his grandmother to his engagement party. She was a madwoman.
“Portia has a great deal of dialogue. It would require someone with—” Norman began to say, but she cut him off sharply.
“Talent? She’s plenty talented,” Lady Mulberry cut in, placing a possessive hand on Cynthia’s arm. “Besides, everyone wants to see her in the lead.”
He could feel the nerves prickling the back of his neck.
“It’s not a matter of popularity,” Norman said quietly. “It’s about coherence. Balance of the cast.”
“Then it’s settled,” Lady Mulberry said, smiling at the room as though he had won a prize.
The implication hung in the air, sticky and uncomfortable. Norman felt every pair of eyes turn his way.
He wanted to protest. He wanted to say no, that the role would be better served by someone more expressive, someone less... evil. But more than that, he wanted to stand against Lady Mulberry for reasons he could not, or would not, articulate.
He looked at Kitty, once. Her expression was unreadable. Then she looked away.
“Nothing is settled” Norman said at last, his voice as stoic as he could muster. “Kitty will play Portia.”
There was a pause. Even Lady Mulberry offered no objection. Cynthia, finally aware of the silence that followed Norman’s declaration, gave a sheepish laugh and slinked to the side.
Norman’s eyes sought Kitty’s.
“Kitty?” Norman’s voice carried across the murmuring crowd, uncharacteristically uncertain as her stillness stretched between them. The polished floorboards creaked under his shifting weight. “Would you do me the honor of joining me?”
His outstretched hand hovered in the air, the invitation hanging as delicately as the chandelier’s crystals above them.
Kitty finally walked up to him and took the page from his hand with quiet composure. Her fingers brushed his briefly—an accident, he told himself.
She stood opposite him, spine straight, eyes calm. Something settled in the room. A hush. As though the very air shifted to accommodate the weight of something more honest.
She inhaled. And began.
“I could teach you how to choose right,” she said, her voice low and trembling with control, “but then I am forsworn… so will I never be… so may you miss me…”
Norman didn’t breathe. She was magnificent.
Kitty continued, her gaze flickering to his face. “But if you do, you’ll make me wish a sin, that I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes…”
Norman stepped forward.
“They have o’erlook’d me and divided me,” she went on, quieter now. “One half of me is yours, the other half yours—mine own, I would say—but if mine, then yours, and so all yours.”
She raised her eyes from the script—granting his silent plea at last. When their gazes locked, the depth of her emerald eyes struck him like a physical blow to the chest.
It was more than mere looking; she saw him, piercing through every carefully constructed layer straight to the raw core of him. The air left his lungs in a near-silent rush.
The world narrowed to that verdant hue—brilliant, all-consuming. The drawing room, the guests, the very play they rehearsed all dissolved into irrelevance. There was only Kitty, and the devastating certainty that she meant every word she’d spoken.
It was not a rehearsal anymore. It was a confession. And Norman, standing before her, knew he was lost.
He answered with something raw in his voice. “Let me choose, for as I am, I live upon the rack.”
Kitty’s eyes searched his.
“Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess, what treason there is mingled with your love.” She looked at him, her gaze burning. She was no longer reading from the script. She was speaking. The words were now hers.
“None but that ugly treason of mistrust,” he said, and it was not Bassanio speaking now. “Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love…”
Her lips parted.
“There may as well be amity and life ‘tween snow and fire,” he went on, barely aware there were people in the room around him, “as treason and…” he paused, taking all of her in. Then he breathed, “…my love.”
Kitty’s voice was soft but firm now. “Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything.”
Norman closed the gap between them by half a step. “Promise me life, and I’ll confess the truth.”
“Well then,” she breathed, the edge of a smile behind the ache in her voice, “confess and live.”
Norman drew in a breath. The moment stretched, delicate and dangerous. He could feel the heat of her skin from where he stood. He could see the slight tremble in her fingers where they clutched the page.
“Confess and love,” he said slowly, reverently, “had been the very sum of my confession. O happy torment, when my torturer doth teach me answers for deliverance. But let me to my fortune and the caskets.”
Silence.
And then—
Applause.
Not thunderous. But sure. Steady. Enough to break whatever spell had formed between them.
Kitty stepped back, blinking as if waking.
Norman’s heart beat loudly in his chest. Not with nerves. Not from performance. From something far more dangerous.
“It is decided then,” he said, voice carefully level. “Miss McGowan shall portray Portia.”
Kitty could not sleep.
No matter how many times she flipped her pillow over or pulled the sheets tighter or tried to count the dull ticks of the grandfather clock down the corridor, rest would not come. It was as though her mind had latched onto something jagged and refused to let go.
She was angry. Or upset. Or something that hovered between the two like storm clouds gathering just above the sea. Her thoughts, feverish and unruly, turned again and again to Norman.
Norman.
The name alone made her jaw tighten. Infuriating, impossible Norman—with his maddening smiles and his unbearable inconsistency.
Glimpses of the truth clawed at her chest, restless and definitely unwelcome.
She wanted him—God help her, she did—but not like this. Not when he could kiss her breathless one moment and turn to ice the next, leaving her stranded between longing and fury.
Marriage to him wouldn’t be the worst fate. It might even be… intoxicating. But not if it came with these whiplash shifts, this unbearable uncertainty.
She deserved better.
And yet—
He had spoken those lines from The Merchant of Venice not as an actor performing a role, but as a man laying bare his own heart.
It made no sense. None at all.
All afternoon he had refused to meet her eyes, keeping his distance with careful precision. So why choose that moment to drop his guard?
Why did he look at her like that afterwards? As if every word had been meant for her alone?
The contradiction burned. He couldn’t ignore her all day only to scorch her with that gaze when the lines suited him.
Was this some cruel game?
She pressed her fingers to her temples. Norman was the most impossible man she had ever met.
And Kitty had not imagined it. He had barely looked at her, except when forced, and even then, his expression was unreadable, as though he had painted his face in layers of politeness to avoid being known.
But that made it worse, didn’t it? The fact that he was putting up a wall between them.
Kitty pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes.
He had kissed her—by his own will. He had initiated it.
And to make matters worse, he had looked at her with something that made her chest burn. And now—now he was pretending she did not exist.
It was infuriating.
Was this how it was going to be?
No. Absolutely not.
She sat up, the bed creaking softly beneath her. Her breath trembled as she exhaled, but her jaw was set, sharp as the moonlight slicing through her window. If she did not ask him—if she did not force the words into the open—they would eat her alive.
She needed to understand.
She needed to know what had changed between yesterday and today. Even if the answer hurt.
Kitty threw back the coverlet and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold beneath her feet. She reached for her dressing gown and tied it tightly around her waist.
The house was silent. The fire in the hearth had long since gone out, and only the moonlight guided her as she crept across the room and eased open the door.
The corridor yawned before her, a stretch of blackened wood and faint, familiar creaks.
Kitty paused in the doorway and listened. Nothing. No footsteps. No voices. No servants returning from the kitchen or early risers starting the hearths. Good.
She stepped out into the hall.
The air was colder out here, touched with that peculiar dampness that only came in the dead of night. Kitty wrapped her arms around herself and began to walk, barefoot, her steps nearly soundless against the rug that stretched the length of the corridor.
She passed portraits of ancestors she did not like, paintings of moors and lakes she had never visited, and an urn on a pedestal that seemed almost alive, if not a bit judgmental of her.
The silence pressed against her ears like water. Every breath she took felt too loud. Every floorboard that groaned beneath her step felt like a betrayal.
Norman’s room was in the east wing, near the observatory. He had requested it himself when they had all arrived for the summer. Too far, Kitty had thought at the time. Too remote. But perhaps that had been the point.
She just knew she had to go.
If she waited until morning, the courage would be gone. Dissolved into tea and toast and the farce of civility and propriety.
She was almost there.
Kitty turned into the east corridor, her steps quicker now.
She passed a narrow table with a vase on it—red and gold, garish in daylight but now just a dull silhouette.
The doors on either side were shut, shadows pressing against the gaps beneath them.
Everything smelled like candle wax and old wood.
She was nearly at Norman’s door when she heard the muffled sound of hurried footsteps behind her. Kitty froze, heart leaping to her throat.
She turned sharply, her dressing gown swirling about her ankles—and caught sight of two familiar figures rounding the corner into the east wing.
Richard and Jane.
What on earth is Jane doing in the men’s corridor?
She ducked instinctively into the nearest shadowed alcove, pressing herself against the cool wood paneling, heart hammering against her ribs.
The corridor was dim, lit only by the faint spill of moonlight through the high windows.
She held her breath as they approached, speaking in low, urgent whispers.
“I thought I heard something,” Jane whispered, breathless.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Richard said, glancing over his shoulder. “Someone could have seen you.”
“I was afraid you’d do something foolish.”
“I’ve already done something foolish,” he muttered.
Kitty’s breath caught as she pressed herself deeper into the shadows.
Richard’s tone was low, anguished. “If anyone finds out—”
“…wandering into... trouble,” Jane added, her voice thick with some emotion Kitty couldn’t name.
Kitty’s brows knit together. Trouble? Who? Her? Norman?
There was a brief silence, filled only by the distant creak of the ship’s timbers shifting against the wind. Then Richard sighed, a sound pulled from somewhere deep and weary.
Kitty pressed her palm flat against the paneling to steady herself. The conversation felt heavy, private—something not meant for her ears. And yet she remained rooted to the spot, a peculiar mixture of guilt, confusion, and something else blooming in her chest.
Were they... patrolling? Guarding her? As if she were some reckless child prone to leaping from balconies or dueling in moonlit gardens?
She might have laughed at the thought—if it didn’t feel so ridiculously over-the-top.
Before she could listen further, Richard shifted, glancing down the hallway. His gaze skimmed perilously close to her hiding place.
Panic jolted her into motion.
Moving swiftly and silently as she could, Kitty slipped away, skirts brushing lightly over the floor, breath catching in her throat.
She didn’t stop until she reached the door of her bedchamber.
Only when she was safely behind it, the heavy oak door firmly closed, did she allow herself to breathe.
She would deal with Norman another time. Tonight, it seemed, her own family had already decided her fate—or at least, they thought they could.
The moonlight spilled across the floor in silver ribbons, stark against the darkened room.
Kitty slipped into bed, pulling the covers high over her head, trying to block out the memory of whispered voices in the dark.
Tomorrow was another day. Another chance.
But tonight, she would lie awake wondering just how much of her life was being plotted without her knowledge.