Chapter 3 #2
She told herself it was practical. She told herself, drawing on her gloves, calling for the carriage, that the Duke of Westfield moved in the right circles and carried the right name and might be prevailed upon to say a word to Edmund on Caroline’s behalf.
It was a small thing to ask of an acquaintance.
She rehearsed it on the drive across Mayfair until it had the shape of something reasonable, something a woman might ask without losing a single inch of her dignity.
The butler showed her into a drawing room and left her there. It was a long while before he returned.
When he did, he did not show her out. “His Grace will see you, My Lady,” he said, “in the nursery. If you would be so good as to follow me.”
She followed him up the stairs. She heard the child before they reached the top of them, a thin furious wail that filled the upper floor and showed no sign of stopping, and her rehearsed reasonable speech went very quiet inside her.
The nursery door stood open.
Marcus was pacing the length of the room with his sister’s child screaming against his shoulder. He had no coat, and his cravat hung loose and undone at his throat, his dark hair was a ruin, and there were shadows beneath his eyes deep enough to have been put there by a fist.
Cecilia had seen Marcus Ellington perform charm in a hundred rooms. She had never seen this. He looked stripped, worn through to something underneath, and still, stubbornly, on his feet. It dismantled her composure more thoroughly than Edmund had managed in a year of trying.
He saw her in the doorway and recovered with the speed of long habit.
“Lady Cecilia. You will forgive me if I do not give you a proper greeting. The lady would take exception.” He looked her over, the screaming child notwithstanding.
“You have the expression of someone who has walked into a scene she finds personally offensive.”
“I find very little personally offensive, Your Grace.”
“No. I don’t suppose you do.”
She did not decide to cross the room. She simply found that she had, and that her hands had come up, and that she was lifting the child out of his arms before either of them had quite agreed to it.
She settled the small furious weight against her shoulder, turned her, found the angle, and the wailing stuttered, dropped, and within the space of a dozen steps gave out altogether into a few hiccupping breaths and then nothing at all.
Marcus stopped speaking. He had been halfway into some remark, and it died in his mouth, and he stood watching her with an attention that was not the light, glancing kind he gave a ballroom. It was something else. It rested on her and did not move.
“Good God,” he said. “The ton would be shaken to its foundations. If it were ever to learn the Marble Lady kept a heart concealed about her person.”
“The ton,” Cecilia said, not looking up from the child, “would be equally unsettled to learn the Duke of Westfield had spent two consecutive nights beneath his own roof.”
“Three, now. And it already has learned it. There is a column. I am compared, unfavorably, to a game bird.” He dropped into the chair by the fire as though his strings had been cut, and dragged a hand down his face.
“They are all of them quite certain what I ought to do. Engage a proper nurse, a good firm woman, hand the whole business over, and go back to my clubs before I am declared mad. It is what is done. Everyone is in perfect agreement that it is what is done.”
The child was a warm small weight against her. Cecilia looked at him over Violet’s dark head.
“Then perhaps,” she said, “you ought to stop letting what is done make your decisions for you.”
The silence that followed was not an uncomfortable one. It was a weighted one. He looked at her across it, and she let him while the child slept between them.
“Does she have a name?”
“Violet.”
Cecilia allowed herself a secret smile. “Quite the temperament for a violet.”
“Indeed. You did not come here to advise me on infants,” Marcus said at last. “You arrived looking ready to fight someone, and the nursery is not, as a rule, where people choose to do it. What is it, Lady Cecilia. What has brought you to my house?”
Her pride held for the length of a breath. Then it gave way, because Caroline’s face was in front of her, pink at the rims and trusting, and pride was only feeling with a better vocabulary, and feeling had never saved anyone.
“My brother is selling my sister,” she said.
“To Lord Fenwick. He is three-and-fifty and he has buried one wife already, and Caroline is seventeen, and the engagement is to be announced within the week. Edmund moved the date this morning. There is nothing I can do to stop him. I have no guardianship, no standing, no claim the law would so much as glance at. I have asked. I have argued. He finds it entertaining.”
“Then he will find me less so,” Marcus said. At once. Without a beat of consideration. “I will speak to him. Westfield has a voice in a great many ears Ashbourne would rather keep. Consider it done.”
She had the thanks half formed. She felt them rise. And then the whole shape of the thing reasserted itself before her, cold and complete, the way it had in the drawing room.
A conversation would not hold Edmund. However grand the man having it.
Edmund would smile and agree to nothing and wait, and find another angle, another lever, another date moved quietly forward when no one was watching.
What stopped her brother was not persuasion.
It was power that matched his own and exceeded it.
A title. A household. A claim on Caroline that he could not simply override.
She heard herself speak before she had finished deciding to.
“Marry me,” Cecilia said.
The words were out, exact and irreversible, and the nursery went very quiet. The sleeping infant rested between them, warm against her shoulder. Marcus stared at her, and said nothing at all.