Chapter 24 #2
“This family,” Lady Beatrice said, and her voice was lower now, meant only for Alistair, though the room was quiet enough that everyone could hear. “This family has spent generations keeping the Ainsworths at a distance. Every Cavendish before you understood why. And you would throw that away for—”
“For what?” Alistair asked. “For a surveyor’s error? For two proud men who could not admit they were wrong? Tell me, Mother. Tell me exactly what I would be throwing away.”
Lady Beatrice did not answer.
“The feud,” Alistair said, and now his voice carried, now it reached the corners of the ballroom, “is a ghost. It is a story we tell ourselves to justify our own prejudices. It has no substance. It has no truth. It has only the power we choose to give it.” He turned, just slightly, so that he could see Sophia. “And I choose to give it nothing.”
Sophia’s hand moved. It was a small gesture, barely perceptible—her fingers uncurling at her side, reaching toward him without quite reaching. Alistair saw it. His own hand lifted.
Eleanor held her breath.
Their fingers met.
It was not a dramatic gesture. It was not the kind of thing that would be described in breathless letters to cousins in the country. It was simply two hands finding each other in a room full of people who did not understand, and holding on.
“Well,” Lady Beatrice said. Her voice had gone strange—not angry, not defeated, but something in between. “Well. This is what you choose.”
“It is,” Alistair said.
“Then you will live with the consequences.”
“We both will.”
Lady Beatrice turned. For a moment, Eleanor thought she would leave, sweep out of the ballroom in a rustle of burgundy silk and wounded dignity, leaving her son and the Ainsworth girl to face the scandal alone.
But she did not. She stopped after three steps, her back to the room, her shoulders rigid.
“I invited them,” she said. The words were quiet. Almost wondering. “I invited them to the ball. I thought it would be a gesture of dominance. I thought it would remind them of their place.” She turned her head, just enough that Eleanor could see the profile of her face. “I did not expect this.”
No one spoke.
Lady Beatrice walked to the edge of the ballroom and stood there, alone, watching her son hold the hand of the enemy’s daughter.
The music did not resume.
Eleanor became aware, gradually, that people were looking at her.
Of course they were. She was Lady Eleanor Ainsworth, mother of the scandal, the woman who had raised a daughter capable of such defiance.
She should have been mortified. She should have been rushing forward to apologise, to explain, to smooth over the rupture with the kind of practised social grace that had sustained her through twenty-three years of a marriage she had not chosen.
Instead, she found herself walking toward her daughter.
The crowd parted for her, too. Not with the same deference they showed Lady Beatrice, but with curiosity. With hunger. They wanted to see what the mother would do. Would she weep? Would she rage? Would she drag her daughter from the room by the wrist and lock her in a carriage bound for Derbyshire?
Eleanor stopped a few feet from Sophia and Alistair. Their hands were still joined.
“Mama,” Sophia said. Her voice was steady, but her eyes were bright. “I am sorry for the distress this will cause you. But I am not sorry for what I have done.”
Eleanor looked at her daughter. She looked at the young woman who had inherited her dark curls and her father’s stubbornness and something else entirely, something that belonged to neither of them, something that had grown in the space between what Eleanor had wanted and what she had settled for.
“I know,” Eleanor said.
Sophia blinked. “You know?”
“I have known for weeks.” Eleanor’s voice was quieter than she meant it to be.
“I read your essays. I recognised your voice. I have been reading your voice since you were old enough to hold a pen.” She paused.
The ballroom was silent around them, but she did not care.
“I said nothing because I did not know what to say. I did not know whether to be proud or terrified.”
“And now?”
Eleanor reached out. She touched her daughter’s cheek, just for a moment, the way she had when Sophia was small and frightened by thunderstorms. “Both,” she said. “Still both.”
Sophia’s composure cracked. Just a little. Just enough that Eleanor could see the girl beneath the courage, the child beneath the woman. “I could not marry him, Mama. Mr. Denbigh. I could not.”
“I know.”
“The debts. Greenly Hall. I know what I have cost us.”
Eleanor shook her head. “You have cost us nothing. The debts were not your doing. The roof was not your doing. The surveyor’s error, all those years ago, was not your doing.
” She glanced at Alistair, who was watching her with an expression she could not quite read.
“We have all been carrying burdens that do not belong to us.”
Alistair inclined his head. It was a small gesture, but it carried the weight of acknowledgment. Of respect.
“Lady Eleanor,” he said. “I understand that my family has given yours every reason to distrust us. To distrust me. But I give you my word, whatever that word is worth, after everything, that my intentions toward your daughter are honourable. More than honourable. They are—” He stopped. Searched for the word. “Necessary.”
“Necessary,” Eleanor repeated.
“I cannot imagine my life without her in it. I do not wish to try.”
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment.
She saw the exhaustion in his face, the lines around his eyes that had not been there at the start of the Season.
She saw the way his hand held Sophia’s, not possessively, not dramatically, but steadily.
As if he had been waiting for permission to hold on and had finally decided to grant it to himself.
“The feud,” Eleanor said. “Your mother—”
“My mother will adapt or she will not. That is her choice.” Alistair’s jaw tightened. “I have spent too many years letting her choices dictate mine.”
From the edge of the ballroom, Lady Beatrice made a sound. It might have been a laugh. It might have been something else entirely.
Eleanor turned back to her daughter. “You understand what will happen now. The invitations will stop. The calls will go unanswered. There are people in this room who will not speak to you again.”
“I know,” Sophia said.
“And you are prepared for that?”