Chapter 2
Two
“You might at least have told me before you made the decision.”
Cecilia set down her cup with great care, because the alternative was to set it down hard, and a cracked saucer would only please Edmund.
The breakfast room of Ashbourne House held its usual chill, the kind no fire ever quite drove out, and her brother sat at the head of the table with the morning’s letters fanned before him like a hand of cards he had already won.
“I was not aware,” Edmund said, slitting a seal with his thumbnail, “that the disposition of our sister required your approval.”
“It is hardly a disposition, Edmund. She is a girl, not a parcel of land.”
“She is seventeen, and she will make a most respectable marchioness. Lord Fenwick has been more than generous in his terms.”
“Lord Fenwick is a widower of three-and-fifty with the gout and a temper that has already outlived one wife.” She had slept poorly, and she heard it in her own voice, the edge of it showing where she would normally have kept it smooth.
“Has she been consulted? Has anyone troubled to ask Caroline what she might want?”
Edmund did not look up. He read his letter to the bottom, folded it, and set it upon the stack. Only then did he lift his pale eyes to hers, and there was in them that particular patience he reserved for arguments he considered beneath the effort of having.
“What a child of seventeen wants,” he said, “is of no consequence whatsoever to anyone in possession of sense. I am her guardian. The match is advantageous. The settlements are arranged, or near enough, and the engagement will be announced within the fortnight. There is nothing in any of this that wants your opinion, Cecilia, and I confess I find your interest in it rather tiresome.”
“My interest.” She kept her hands in her lap, where he could not see them. “She cried herself sick at the very mention of his name last month. You were not there. You are never there. You arrange these things from this room and let the consequences happen to other people.”
“I arrange these things,” Edmund said, “because someone in this family must, and you have shown no aptitude for it whatsoever.”
She looked at him a long moment. She had learned, in this house, when a thing was worth saying aloud and when it was wiser kept behind the teeth. She decided, this once, to say it.
“You are selling her, Edmund. To Fenwick. To cover debts you will not name in this room or any other, and you are calling it an advantage so that you need not call it what it is.”
The chill in the room seemed to deepen, though that was only a feeling and feelings were unreliable. Edmund’s expression did not change. That was the dangerous thing about her brother. When he was angry, nothing moved.
“You are meddling,” he said, “in matters that sit a great deal higher than your authority, and I would advise you to recall that you have none.” He turned his cup a quarter inch upon its saucer.
“Though I do find it remarkable, I will own, that you should appoint yourself the arbiter of a good marriage. You, who have refused every offer worth the name these eight years. The Marble Lady. They have a saying, you know, the gentlemen. That courting you is like laying siege to a house with no one living in it.”
He smiled, and it did not reach his eyes. “You are six-and-twenty, Cecilia. There will come a season, and it is not far off, when you will cease to matter to anyone at all. I should think a woman in your position might be slower to lecture another on her prospects.”
The room went very still.
She did not flinch. She had taught herself that years ago, in this very room, at this very table. She felt the words land somewhere beneath her composure, where he had aimed them, because he always aimed well. But her face gave him nothing, and she made certain of it.
“I will not,” she said, and she said it quietly, more quietly than she had said anything all morning, “allow Caroline to be locked into a wretched arrangement for the rest of her life merely to mend a thing you broke. Whatever you imagine your authority to be.”
For one moment something moved in Edmund’s face after all. Not fear. He was incapable of fear where she was concerned. Irritation, perhaps, that a piece he had counted as settled had spoken out of turn.
He rose. He gathered his letters.
“If you are so very determined to protect her,” he said, pausing at the door, almost as an afterthought, almost kind, “you might consider marrying someone powerful enough to be worth something. It is the only useful thing you could possibly do for her. Do let me know if you manage it.”
He went out. The long-case clock in the corridor marked the hour as the door closed behind him, each stroke clean and cold.
Cecilia sat where she was. She laid her hands flat upon the cloth, one and then the other, and looked at them, and waited until they were steady. They had been steady the whole time. She had simply needed to be sure.
Then she went upstairs.
The nursery was at the top of the house, a small forgotten room that no longer held any children and was the only place in it that held any warmth, because Edmund did not come here and so it had escaped his arrangement.
Caroline sat on the window seat with her knees drawn up and her sketchbook closed in her lap, both hands resting upon the cover as though to keep it shut.
Her eyes were pink at the rims. She had stopped crying, which was somehow worse than if she had still been at it.
Cecilia crossed the room and sat down beside her on the seat. She did not say it would be all right. Caroline would have known it for a lie, and Cecilia had never lied to her about anything that mattered, which was the only reason her word still meant something in this house.
For a while she said nothing at all. She let the silence sit, because there were times when silence said more honestly that a thing was bad than any amount of speaking could.
“He has set it, hasn’t he,” Caroline said at last. She did not look up from the sketchbook. “Fenwick.”
“Near enough.”
“I heard the front door. The lawyer’s man.” Caroline’s thumb moved along the edge of the cover, back and forth. “Cecilia. Is there anything to be done?”
She turned her head then. She looked at her sister, who looked back at her the way she had looked at her since she was a very small girl, as though Cecilia were the one fixed point in a house full of cold and shifting things, the one thing that did not change no matter what else did.
“Yes,” Cecilia said. Without pause. Without the smallest crack to show through.
She had no plan. She had nothing at all but the word, and the word was a performance, a thing offered out of love because the truth would have done no good and the love was real even when the certainty was not.
But Caroline’s face changed at the word.
The fear in it loosened, just a little, just enough, and Cecilia understood that she had now promised a thing she did not know how to keep, and that she would keep it regardless, because there was no version of herself that could have left that look unanswered.
“I do not know how, yet,” she allowed, because she would not lie outright. “But yes. I will see to it.”
Caroline leaned against her shoulder. Cecilia put an arm around her and held her, and said nothing more, and waited, and after a long while the girl’s breathing went slow and even against her side. She stayed until she was certain of it.
Then she rose, and tucked a stray curl back from her sister’s brow, and went back down the stairs into the cold of the house, carrying with her the full weight of a promise she had not the first notion how to honor.
She had turned the thing over the whole of the afternoon and found no edge to it she could grip.
A marriage. That much was plain enough, for it was the only currency the world recognized, and Edmund had said as much himself, sneering it across the breakfast cloth like a thing she would never manage.
Marry someone powerful enough to be worth something.
The trouble was that he was right, which was the most galling part of any of it, and Cecilia sat in the cold drawing room with a book open and unread in her lap, hunting through every connection she possessed for a single name worth more than her brother’s authority, and finding none.
The footman appeared at the door. “Lady Victoria Ravenscroft, My Lady.”
Cecilia set the book aside and rose. “Show her in.”
Lady Victoria came into the room the way she came into most rooms, without ceremony and entirely herself, pulling off her gloves before she had quite finished crossing the carpet.
There were few women in the ton whose company Cecilia actively sought, and Victoria was one of them, for the simple reason that she said what she meant and did not require to be flattered for it afterward.
“I shall not stay long,” Victoria said, “and I shall not pretend I have come merely to admire your drawing room, which is, forgive me, the coldest room in London. How you do not turn to stone in it I cannot think.”
“It suits the reputation,” Cecilia said. “Do sit. Will you take tea?”
“No. Thank you, no.” And Victoria, who was so rarely without something to say, was for a moment without anything, and that more than anything told Cecilia that whatever had brought her was not small.
“Cecilia, I have come because I thought you would wish to hear it properly. From someone who would tell it to you straight, rather than from some half of it whispered over a card table by a woman who has the particulars wrong.”
Cecilia sat. “Hear what?”
“The Duke of Westfield’s sister is dead.
Lady Helena. And her husband with her.” Victoria said it plainly, as one ought to say such things, without softening it into something gentler that would only have to be unsaid.
“A fever, they say. It came on fast and it took both of them inside a week. Down at their place in the country. It is only just come to town.”
For a moment Cecilia did not say anything at all.
She had not known Lady Helena well, had met her perhaps twice, a bright laughing young woman some years younger than herself, married into the country and seldom in town.
And yet the fact of it settled over the cold room with a weight that had nothing to do with acquaintance. A young woman, dead. Inside a week.
“When,” Cecilia said.
“The burial was some days past already. There was no waiting, in the heat of it.” Victoria’s mouth pressed thin. “The husband had no family living, you understand. Which leaves the matter of the child.”
“There is a child.”
“A daughter. An infant, scarcely come into the winter. She did not take the fever, by some mercy.” Victoria turned her gloves over in her hands. “There is no other guardian named. None to be named. The whole of it falls to Westfield. He has the keeping of her now, entire.”
Cecilia found she had gone quite still in her chair. “The child is well? Is she cared for?”
“Well, and with her nurse, by all accounts. It is Westfield himself I should worry for, if I were given to worrying over dukes. Which, as a rule, I am not.” Victoria rose and drew her gloves back on.
“There. Now you have it, and you have it true. I will not sit and pick over it, for that is precisely the thing he will be made to endure from half of London by the end of the week, and I would not begin the practice in your drawing room.” She paused at the door.
“I thought you would want to know. I cannot have said why. Only that I did.”
“Thank you, Victoria,” Cecilia said, and meant it more than the words could carry. “Truly.”
When she had gone, the room was very quiet. The long-case clock in the corridor went on with its cold accounting of the hour.
Cecilia sat without moving and let the fact of it work through her.
A young woman dead and a child left behind in the world with no mother and no father, only an uncle, and a roomful of strangers who would shortly be turning the whole tragedy over their teacups for the entertainment of a dull afternoon.
It was a thing that should have stayed with her as such things did, in the general way, as a sorrow held at the proper distance.
But that was not where her mind went. Her mind went, against all sense, to the ball.
To last night.
She understood it now.
He had received the worst news of his life within the hour.
Within the very hour that he had stood before her and made her laugh about the chandeliers, while she traded clever nothings with him across a square yard of floor, a messenger had been waiting in some quiet room with mud to his knees and the whole of Westfield’s world already overturned in his keeping.
And the man had bowed to her at the door at the end of it, and smiled, and bid her good night, and gone out smooth and warm and giving away nothing.
Cecilia rose and went to the window.
The street below moved as streets did, a carriage, a crossing sweep, a woman in gray with a basket, and she watched all of it without seeing any of it.
Edmund’s voice was still in the room with her, where it had been all afternoon.
Marry someone powerful enough to be worth something.
She was not forming a plan. She told herself that, plainly, the way Victoria had told her the news, without softening it into something it was not. She was forming nothing.
She was only aware, with a discomfort she could not name cleanly however she turned it, that Marcus Ellington, the Duke of Westfield, whom she had spent years regarding as a charming irrelevance and nothing more, had become, in the space of a single afternoon, a man she could not stop thinking about.