Chapter 4
A Seaside Encounter
There was no clean way out of this.
Lady Eleanor Ainsworth had been repeating the thought for the better part of an hour, ever since the footman had delivered Lady Beatrice Cavendish’s invitation on a silver tray.
The envelope sat now on the writing desk in her private sitting room, its seal broken, its contents read three times over.
The wax had been the colour of old blood.
Eleanor had noticed that first, before she had read a single word.
She stood at the window, her back to the room, watching the grey Channel waters churn under an afternoon sky that could not decide between sun and rain.
The Marine Parade stretched below, fashionable carriages rolling past at a pace designed for being seen.
Somewhere out there, her daughter was walking.
Sophia had announced her intention to take the air not twenty minutes after the invitation had arrived, her expression carefully blank, her voice too even.
Eleanor had not stopped her. She had not known what to say.
Three weeks. The Cavendish ball. An olive branch extended across decades of silence — and Eleanor could not decide whether it was a genuine gesture or a trap laid with silk ribbons and candlelight.
She turned from the glass. The room behind her was tidy and tasteful, everything in its proper place, which was more than could be said for her thoughts.
A porcelain shepherdess stood on the mantel, one of the few pieces she had brought from Derbyshire when they had been obliged to close up Greenly Hall and remove to Brighton for the Season.
The shepherdess smiled her fixed, vacant smile.
Eleanor had always disliked it, but it had been her mother’s, and so it remained.
“Mrs. Hargrave.”
The housekeeper appeared in the doorway with the silent efficiency of long practice. “My lady?”
“Has Miss Ainsworth taken a maid with her?”
“She has not. She said she preferred to walk alone.”
Eleanor’s fingers found the edge of the writing desk.
Alone. Of course. Sophia had been retreating into solitude with increasing frequency, and Eleanor knew she ought to press the matter, ought to insist on a companion, ought to do any number of things that a proper mother would do.
But Sophia at twenty-one was not a girl to be managed, and Eleanor had learned, over the years, that pressing too hard only drove her daughter further into that private fortress of wit and silence where no one was permitted entry.
“Very well,” she said. “That will be all.”
Mrs. Hargrave withdrew. Eleanor remained where she was, one hand resting on the desk, the other pressed flat against her skirt.
The fabric was dove-grey silk, appropriate for morning calls, though she had made none today.
She had not been able to face the prospect of polite conversation, not with Lady Beatrice’s words still circling in her mind like carrion birds.
The Brighton Observer. Lady Beatrice had read the essays aloud in that cool, measured voice, each word landing with the precision of a dropped pin.
We wear masks at breakfast, at tea, at dinner, and we call them smiles.
Eleanor had sat in the Cavendish morning room and listened, and nodded, and made the appropriate responses, and all the while something cold had been settling in her stomach.
She knew that voice. The turn of phrase, the sharp eye, the refusal to let comfortable falsehoods stand unchallenged.
She had raised that voice. She had taught it to read, to argue, to think.
And now it was circulating through Brighton’s drawing rooms on sheets of cheap paper, and Lady Beatrice Cavendish was hunting for its author with the patience of a cat at a mousehole.
Eleanor pressed her hand harder against the silk.
She did not know for certain that Sophia was the Observer.
She had not searched her daughter’s room, had not pried into the plain brown notebook that Sophia kept always close.
But she knew. A mother knew. And the knowing was a weight she carried alone, because to speak of it would be to make it real, and once it was real, she would have to act.
She was not ready to act.
She crossed to the writing desk and sat down.
The invitation lay open before her, Lady Beatrice’s handwriting elegant and controlled.
Lady Beatrice Cavendish requests the pleasure of the company of Lady Eleanor Ainsworth and Miss Sophia Ainsworth at a ball to be held at the Brighton Grand Ballrooms on the twenty-first of June.
Eleanor picked up her pen. She would write the acceptance.
She would write it because refusal was impossible, because Lady Beatrice had framed the invitation in terms that left no room for polite decline.
A demonstration that the families could coexist. A public burying of a feud that had outlived its original cause.
To refuse would be to announce that the Ainsworths were not willing to coexist, and that was a declaration Eleanor could not afford to make.
She dipped the nib in ink. The pen hovered above the paper.
She thought of Lord Alistair Cavendish, the way he had looked at Sophia across the Assembly Rooms, the way Sophia’s chin had lifted in response. Defiance, Eleanor had thought at the time. But defiance was a cousin to interest, and interest was a road that led nowhere safe.
She wrote the acceptance. She sanded the paper, folded it, sealed it with wax the colour of cream. She did all of it with her face arranged in exactly the expression the occasion required.
It was, after all, what one did.
She rang for the footman and gave him the letter. Then she sat alone in the tidy room with the porcelain shepherdess and the grey light from the window, and she waited for her daughter to come home.
* * *
The wind off the Channel had teeth.
Sophia Ainsworth pulled her pelisse tighter and walked on, her boots striking the paved promenade with a rhythm that matched the churn of her thoughts.
The sea stretched to her left, a restless expanse of grey-green that smelled of salt and distance and something else she could not name.
Freedom, perhaps. Or the illusion of it.
She had been walking for half an hour, past the bathing machines drawn up on the shingle like beached creatures, past the fishermen mending their nets with quick, practised hands, past the fashionable couples who strolled arm in arm and pretended not to notice the wind reddening their noses.
Brighton in the early Season was a study in determined enjoyment.
Everyone was having a wonderful time. Everyone was delighted to be here.
The air was so invigorating, the sea so refreshing, the company so agreeable.
Sophia wanted to scream.
Instead she walked, and thought about the invitation that had arrived that morning, and about her mother’s face when she had read it, and about the fact that in three weeks she would be obliged to stand in Lady Beatrice Cavendish’s ballroom and smile at people who had spent decades despising her family.
And she thought about Lord Alistair Cavendish, which was worse.
She had not been able to stop thinking about him since the Assembly Rooms. This was infuriating.
She had replayed their conversation a dozen times, dissecting each line of dialogue, each glance, each moment when the verbal sparring had slipped into something that felt less like combat and more like recognition.
He had looked at her across the room at the end of the evening, and she had felt the weight of that look like a hand pressed against her spine.
Ridiculous, she told herself. He is a rake and a cynic and the son of your family’s enemy, and you are being a fool.
She walked faster. The promenade curved ahead, following the line of the coast, and she rounded the bend with her head down and her thoughts so loud that she nearly collided with a gentleman standing at the railing.
“I beg your—”
She stopped. The words died in her throat.
Lord Alistair Cavendish turned from the railing, and his eyes, that particular shade of grey she had been trying not to remember, met hers with a flicker of something that was not quite surprise.
“Miss Ainsworth,” he said.
He was alone. No companions, no fashionable acquaintances, no audience of any kind.
He stood with one hand resting on the iron railing, his greatcoat dark against the pale sky, his hat in his other hand as if he had forgotten he was holding it.
The wind had disordered his hair. He looked, for a moment before his expression settled into its customary languid amusement, like a man who had been thinking about something that mattered.
Sophia found her voice. “Lord Alistair.”
“I had not expected to find you here.”
“Nor I you.” She paused. “I had assumed you would be indoors at this hour, recovering from whatever excesses occupied your evening.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “You assume I was excessive.”
“I assume nothing. I merely observe that your reputation precedes you.”
“And what reputation is that?”
“The one you have cultivated so carefully. The dissolute rake, the witty cynic, the man who has never met a sincere emotion he could not reduce to an epigram.”
He did not flinch. He did not look away. But something shifted behind his eyes, a subtle rearrangement of the light, and Sophia felt a small, unexpected pang of something that might have been regret.
“You have a gift for summary, Miss Ainsworth.”
“I have a gift for observation. The summary is merely the consequence.”
The wind gusted, snapping at her skirts. Alistair gestured toward the railing. “Will you stand with me a moment? The view is instructive, if nothing else.”