Chapter 32
Anna had stood in the modiste’s workroom three weeks ago and looked at the draping ivory silk and the gilded laurel wreath.
Venus, the goddess of love. It is perhaps too pointed, but if I am going to do this properly, I had better mean it.
She was there to find a husband. She was there to find love, or the nearest approximation. She needed to be stirred, to be challenged. She had enough pleasant exchanges to last a lifetime, she decided after her chance encounter with Frederick at the park.
There is nothing to be gained from half-measures.
She had paid for the ivory silk and the wreath in full, and she wore them now with her hair loose down her back in the classical Greek fashion. She set her shoulders back and walked in through the glittering front entrance.
Here goes nothing.
The Fairfax masquerade took her breath away.
Candlelight pooled gold over silk and secrets.
She inhaled the particular drunkenness of a room where no one was who they claimed to be.
Anna held her mask an inch from her face and let the current of the crowd carry her past a svelte fox in a burgundy velvet gown, a buxom, and a devil who bowed too low to be polite. It was a bacchanalia.
She counted feathers and painted eyes instead of counting the minutes.
It was all so extravagant and otherworldly.
She told herself the tightness under her ribs was only the stays, laced too well for a woman who meant to be forgotten tonight.
She found Thomas and Rachel almost immediately, which required no effort at all.
Rachel, as Cleopatra, was the most immediately identifiable woman in the room.
She had kohl lining her bright amber eyes, her hair straight and back.
Thomas had naturally gone as Antony, not Caesar.
“Venus,” Rachel said, delighted, holding Anna at arm’s length. “Of course.”
“You are magnificent,” Anna told her, meaning it entirely.
Thomas bowed. “Antony, at the goddess’s service.” He glanced past her into the crowd with the expression of a man scanning for something specific. “And who has come as Mars, I wonder?”
“I have no idea,” Anna said, pleasantly, and moved on before Rachel’s face could ask the question her mouth was politely restraining.
She found Lord Wexford near the refreshment tables. He had come as Henry the Eighth, broad and elaborately costumed, jewels sewn into the. He bowed deeply when he saw her.
“Lady Birchall.” He seemed pleased with himself, and with her. “How appropriate a costume.”
“And yours,” she said, because she had to say something as she took in his costume.
Two executed wives, a poor omen for an evening on which a man was likely thinking of matrimony. Surely it was only a costume to him. It means nothing.
The music swelled, and so they danced. He was a competent dancer, which she had established several weeks ago. He steered them through the other couples. She had gotten lost in the steps when she became aware of a figure in dark red on the far side of the room.
Mars.
He was clad in red and dark leather that made him seem even taller than usual.
He stood over the crowd, dominating it as only Mars can.
He wore a mask that covered his face, but did nothing whatsoever to disguise the particular set of those shoulders, the controlled way that man moved through any room he occupied.
She looked back at Lord Wexford.
“You mentioned last week,” she said, fishing for something to continue their conversation, “that your sister’s youngest had been unwell. Is she recovered?”
He brightened that she had remembered, which she knew pleased him.
“My niece is quite well, thank you. She still has a bit of coughing, but is expected to be back to normal next week. Thank you so much for asking.”
This is something. This is a man who speaks of his family with warmth. This is not nothing.
She looked at him, and waited for something to happen in her chest. She prayed to Venus for it, and yet nothing happened. The figure in dark red moved through the periphery of her vision, and she looked away from it again. The dance ended.
“Thank you, Lord Wexford,” she said, and he bowed.
Someone she did not recognize claimed him for a conversation, and Anna stood alone for approximately forty-five seconds before a voice came from behind her left shoulder.
“The next dance, Venus?”
She closed her eyes for one breath. Then she turned. Frederick had truly come as Mars.
Upon closer look, the costume was dark red with gold at the cuffs, and the mask only covered the upper part of his face. This rendered his expression somewhat more difficult to read than usual, which was a feat.
“Yes,” she said, because there was no other answer available to her. The word escaped her lips before she thought to say it.
He offered his hand. She took it. The music was a waltz, and there was nothing to be done about that either.
She did not look at his face. She looked at his shoulder, which was close enough to her own that she was acutely aware of every inch between them.
She leaned into his arms, letting her hands hold onto the muscles beneath.
“Venus,” he said, at last.
“Quite by accident, I’m sure,” she said, which was not true of her own costume but was possibly true of his.
“Entirely.” A brief pause. “Though I understand Mars and Venus have some history.”
“In mythology, yes.” She kept her voice pleasant. “It rarely ended well for either of them.”
“No,” he agreed. “It rarely does.”
The music grew louder, and the room moved around them as couples crowded the lacquered floor.
Somewhere in the movements, Anna stopped trying to maintain a careful distance.
She simply let herself have this one moment.
For two minutes, the warmth of his hand and his presence would be hers and hers alone.
She fell into the gravity of being so close to him, feeling things she had pretended for too long not to feel.
I will not feel this again after tonight.
After tonight, I will go back to being sensible.
I will double my efforts, or accept Lord Wexford, or find some third course of action.
But for the length of this waltz, I am Venus, and he is Mars, and the music is doing something quite unfair, and I am powerless against it.
She looked up at him once, near the end.
He was looking down at her. Beneath the mask his jaw was set familiarly, and his eyes held something she also knew.
She had seen it a few times before, the thing he wouldn’t say.
She looked away first because she had to, because the alternative was considerably worse.
The music ended. He stepped back and bowed, correct as ever, and she curtsied, and that was that.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Anna—”
“Thank you, Frederick.” She whispered, and made herself smile.
Her heart was breaking, and she let herself be moved away into the crowd. She knew, with complete clarity, that if she stood there one more moment she was going to say something she could not take back.
She had been standing near the far window, composing herself with a glass of punch, when Lord Wexford found her again.
“Lady Birchall. Would you permit me a few minutes of quiet? I find I’ve rather had enough of the noise.”
She followed him to a small alcove off the main ballroom, where the music was muted, and the candlelight didn’t reach as far. She stood beside him and assumed the expression of a woman who was composed, which she was, or would be, momentarily. She took another sip of punch.
“I must say,” Lord Wexford began, and there was something different in his voice, something she identified a second too late.
“You look extraordinarily beautiful tonight. Venus was very well chosen.” He smiled.
“I have been thinking that the goddess of love at a masquerade is an omen I should not ignore.”
She went very still as stone.
“I have been fortunate,” he said carefully, “to have had the opportunity of your company this Season, and I hope that company has been… That is, I have come to feel, in the course of our acquaintance, that you and I might suit very well. I am a man of settled habits, and I hope of settled character, and I would very much like… If you are willing… I would like to ask you to do me the honor of becoming my wife.”
He was looking at her with the same warmth he always had, and behind it, she could see that he meant it. This was not a casual offer or a convenient one. Anna knew that he had genuinely come to want this, and she stood in the dim alcove and felt her entire life arrange itself before her.
I should accept him. She should marry a good man, a kind man, a man who will give me children and treat me well. A man who will never once make me feel the way I felt three minutes ago on that ballroom floor.
She would live a life that was quiet and decent, but hollow at the center. Every morning, she would wake up next to a man she did not love and could not love.
She knew this, suddenly and completely, the way she knew very few things with that kind of certainty. She knew it in her chest, in her hands, in the specific ache that had been sitting deep inside since a dark carriage, and an unanswered question, and a waltz she should not have agreed to.
I cannot go through with it.
The thought arrived not as drama but as plain fact, the way the floor is there when you step on it. She could not do it. She was not, it turned out, as practical as she had been telling herself for a year. She had tried, and failed.
“Lord Wexford.” Her voice was steady, which surprised her, and she was grateful for it.
“I am deeply honored by your offer. Truly, and without qualification. You are a good man, and any woman who accepts you will be very fortunate indeed.” She paused, and met his eyes directly, because he deserved that much.
“But I must decline. I am so sorry. I am not able to accept you, and I would not do you the disservice of agreeing to a marriage in which I could not give you the whole of what you so richly deserve.”
Lord Wexford was quiet for a moment. His expression shifted.
“I understand,” he said, and she believed him.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything this Season. Truly.”
She walked away before either of them could say anything further, through the alcove and back into the brightness of the ballroom that mocked her. She cut right through the ballroom, through the hall, and past the startled footman who offered to fetch her carriage.
Venus walked out of the party, and out through the front door into the cold summer’s night.
It was beginning to pour. It did not matter to her, for she felt nothing.
She kept on walking.
Within half a minute her ivory silk was ruined, and her hair was soaked flat.
The gilded laurel wreath was equally ruined, and she could not make herself care even a little.
The streets were quiet, and the lamps made yellow smears on the wet cobblestones.
She walked through all of it with her arms wrapped around herself.
She needed to hold onto something, and there was nothing else to hold.
She was walking away from having nearly made a terrible mistake for the rest of her life.
She wanted a husband she loved. She had said so in a market on a bright morning, and she still meant it, meant it rather more now than she had then, meant it in a way that had teeth in it, and she was not going to apologize for it.
The rain came down. She kept walking.