Chapter Twenty-Two
The first person to cross the cleared floor was not a stranger making amends but Cecily, coming fast from the side of the room where she had been made to stand apart, and she did not stop at a polite distance or wait to be received.
She came the whole way, took her sister’s arm in both hands in front of everyone, and turned with her to face the room, so that whatever the county decided to do next it would have to do to the two of them together.
“She has left one thing out,” Cecily said, and her voice was nowhere near steady, but she let it shake and went on regardless.
“So, I am going to do it for her, because she will never say this part. She never says any of the parts that belong to her, and somebody in this room ought to hear it from a person who was standing there when it happened.”
“Cecily. You do not have to.”
“I do, though, and I have spent nineteen years not having to, and you can all see for yourselves what it made of me.” She kept her eyes on the room, and her chin came up.
“Everything my sister read out to you tonight, I grew up in the middle of it. I watched him do it. He made her the difficult one so that I could be the good one, and I accepted it, because it was warmer where I was standing. I never asked, in all those years, what it was costing the person out in the cold to keep me warm.”
A murmur went along the room and came back, and Cecily’s hands tightened on her sister’s arm, hard enough to mark the silk.
“One of the papers she showed you tonight came out of his locked drawer.” Cecily’s chin stayed where it was.
“I fetched it. Nobody sent me, and nobody knew. I rode over to his house and picked the lock of his drawer with a hairpin.” She kept her face to the room.
“It was to begin paying back something I owe, and I have only lately worked out how much of it there is. So, when you are settling what to think about my sister, you had better know it was the daughter he trusted who robbed him, and that she would do it again tomorrow, and twice again on Sunday.”
“That is a very great deal to confess in a ballroom,” said Lady Ferrers, and the astonishment in it was dry and had nothing cruel left in it at all.
“It is nothing beside what she confessed by standing up here in the first place.” Cecily’s voice broke then, properly, and she let it break in front of them.
“I am tired of it, I am so tired of being the good daughter of a bad man, and I would rather be the difficult sister of a good one. I am choosing that here, out loud, in front of all of you, so that nobody can tell me afterwards that I did it quietly in a corner where it did not count for anything.”
Theodora turned, at last, and looked at her sister, and let it reach her all at once, having promised herself in the library that she would do no such thing tonight.
She let it show for exactly one moment before she put it away, because a moment was owed and more than a moment would have been a performance.
“You have ruined your standing with every family in this room,” she said low for Cecily and not for the county. “You were the marriageable one, the one with a future in these houses, and you have just spent it, the entire sum, on a public sentence. Tell me you understand that.”
“I have spent it on you.” Cecily’s grip did not loosen. “It is the first thing I ever bought with money of my own, Theo, and it is the only purchase of my life I am certain I will never regret.”
Across the room, Lady Iris Danforth rose from her gilt chair.
She rose early, before the wreck was complete, and gathered her shawl with hands that had lost their certainty somewhere in the last half-hour.
Two of her court disentangled themselves in time to follow her.
The rest discovered urgent reasons to remain exactly where they were, on the correct side of a room that had just changed which side was correct, and Theodora counted them, but took no pleasure in the counting.
“She is going,” Cecily murmured. “Ought we to say something to her?”
“Do nothing at all. Watch her instead.” Theodora kept her voice where it was and had no need of more.
“She is going before anybody in here is made to choose between her and the truth with her standing in front of them. Let her have the door. A woman who leaves has conceded, and every person in this room can count.”
Lady Iris reached the door and did not go through it. She turned, and took her time over the turning, because a woman who had ruled a room for a season did not give it up merely because the floor had moved under her.
“I do hope, Your Grace, that you will be very happy,” she said, “in your unusual sort of marriage. And I shall think of your sister so very often. Nineteen, and such a pretty manner, and she has just told four counties that she is a housebreaker. I am in town from March, you know. I dine out five nights in the week, and I am asked everywhere, and I find I am forever being consulted about girls.”
“You will find me happy, Lady Iris. It is unusual chiefly in that both parties tell one another the truth, and I understand that is thought eccentric in some houses.” Theodora inclined her head with perfect courtesy.
“Do give my regards to your agent. You and I shared one until this evening, and I expect the arrangement will be renegotiated before morning, now that the terms are a matter of public record.”
Lady Iris’s face did a thing it had not done all evening, and the thing was her age, arriving at once and staying.
She took the loss and did not put it down.
“You have the paper, then. Keep the paper. I never had anything but the season, and the season is written down nowhere, and it cannot be seized by any solicitor living.” The sweetness came back over her face, unhurried and complete.
“March, Your Grace. Bring your sister to town. I shall be so very kind to her.” She went out, and two of her set went after her.
Her father was the next to leave, but he neither looked at his daughters nor said anything. He just fled the room.
For a moment nobody seemed to know what a room was supposed to do, having watched its own furniture rearranged.
Rowan had come two steps off the wall while she was speaking and had stopped himself, and the stopping cost him a good deal more than the two steps were worth.
He had given his word not to cross the floor tonight, and he kept it.
Then he crossed it, at the one moment that was his to take, and walked out into the middle of the cleared boards.
He did not go to his wife’s side, even now. He stopped a courteous distance off and bowed, formally, a man asking rather than a man assuming.
“They have not danced yet,” he said, loud enough to be heard, because he meant it to be heard. “The county came to watch an ending and got a beginning instead, and a beginning ought to be marked. Duchess. Will you open the ball?”
“You are asking me to dance in front of a room that spent an hour deciding whether I was mad.”
“I am asking you to dance in front of a room that has just decided you are not.” He held out his hand but did not close the distance.
“Dancing is what a room does with a feeling it cannot name. Give them somewhere to put it. It is a great deal more useful than an apology, and considerably harder to take back.”
“You have thought about this.”
“I have thought of very little else since Rede told me the ball was a trap. I could not settle how the evening ought to end, so I settled only that it should end on your feet, in the middle of the floor, with everybody watching you do the thing they came to watch you fail at.” He waited.
“The rest I left to you. I have got that much by heart at last.”
Theodora looked at his open hand, at her sister beside her, and at the room in its new and hasty order, and she crossed the small distance herself, because he had left it for her to cross, and she put her hand in his.
“One dance,” she said. “And you will not walk me up and down this room exhibiting me mended. We dance as two people who happen to be married, and not as a rescue with its object on its arm.”
“I would not dare do otherwise. I am aware the county is watching, and aware that you would make me regret it in front of them. I find, to my own surprise, that being watched matters to me a great deal less than being made to regret things by you.”
The musicians, who had spent the evening preparing to accompany a disaster, found themselves called upon to open a ball instead, and after a startled moment the leader lifted his bow, and the first notes went out over a room that had come for a very different music.
They danced. Theodora had not stood up in company in three years and had expected her feet to have forgotten the business entirely, but they had not, and they took the first eight bars without consulting her at all.
Rowan danced without display, exactly, attentively, his attention entire and on the person in front of him, and that was the difficulty, because his attention was the one thing she had never learned to stand in for any length of time.
The figure carried them together, parted them and brought them back.
Each return gave her half a second in which to arrange her face, and she used it the first time, and the second, but by the fourth she had given up bothering.
The room went off at the edges. What was left was the half-inch of air between his glove and hers at the turn, and the steady warmth of the hand at her back doing precisely what the dance required of it and nothing whatever besides.
She was aware of Cecily at the edge with both hands pressed to her mouth.
Most of all she was aware of doing in public, freely, on her own feet, the one thing she had been told her whole life she was too difficult to do.
“They are going to talk about this for a decade,” Rowan said, turning her.