Chapter 8
On the morning the letter arrived, Cassian was on his second cup of coffee and his third attempt at the same column of figures and not making progress with either.
He had not slept. He had not, strictly speaking, expected to.
He had spent the night before at White’s which was a thing he ordinarily did to clear his head and which had this time done nothing of the kind because every man he had drunk with had eventually congratulated him on his betrothal, and every congratulation had reminded him of the betrothal which was a thing he had been attempting not to think about all day.
He had not been successful at that either.
When the letter arrived, he had been thinking of his dining table. Specifically, the corner where Alice had been seated two nights ago. He had been thinking about her gloved hand on the silver. He had been thinking about the shaking spoon.
He had been thinking about how, if a great many things had been different, if there had been no servants in the room and no Joanna and no Matthew, and if he had been a different and worse man, he might have set his wineglass down and stood up and walked the four paces to her chair.
How he might have lifted her onto the polished mahogany table and how he might have done a great many other things besides.
He stopped quite deliberately, picked up his pen, and set it back down.
He had been having this particular thought in various forms for three days. The most recent form involved a hand pressed flat against her mouth so that Joanna would not hear from the corridor.
He was, he had decided some time around four in the morning, going to have to do something about himself.
Beadle scratched at the door to the study. “A note, Your Grace. From Westbury House.”
Cassian held out his hand. He did not look up from the page. He did not need to look up. He had recognized the seal from across the room which was a thing he was going to think about later, when he was alone, or possibly never.
He waited until Beadle had withdrawn. Then he waited for three more breaths. Then he broke the seal.
The handwriting was small. Disciplined. Pretty. It had clearly been shaped by a strict governess in girlhood and then made over by the writer into something her own.
Your Grace,
I am told that, between persons of fashion, a proper courtship requires the gentleman to call on his betrothed. You have not called. This does not, I think you will agree, present the image of a man who is patiently in love.
I shall be at Almack’s this evening. I hope to see you there. If you find yourself unable to attend, I shall be obliged to conclude that the appearance of patience has, after all, defeated you.
Your devoted betrothed,
Lady Alice Lockwood.
He read it twice. He read it a third time, and halfway through, he understood that he had begun to smile.
He stopped smiling.
He laid the letter on his desk with great care, as though it might detonate, and sat very still in his chair and stared at it.
Your devoted betrothed. The little wretch. The handwriting was demure. The letter was not. The letter was a glove laid flat on a dueling table, and they both knew it.
She was demanding to be courted. By him.
The thing he had been thinking about on and off for the past two days—the thing about the dining table, the wineglass, the hand against her mouth—moved in him again with renewed and quite unhelpful clarity.
He had learned several things about Lady Alice Lockwood over the past two years which Joanna had told him in fits and starts and which he had pretended every time to be uninterested in.
He knew she played the pianoforte well enough to be invited to play at his sister’s last birthday supper.
He knew her stitch work had taken a small premium at the Westbury parish fair.
He knew, because Joanna had crowed about it for a fortnight, that she had once managed the entire Westbury household for two months while her mother was in Bath.
He also knew, because Joanna had laughed for a quarter of an hour the first time she had told him, that Lady Alice could not, on any account, paint.
She had once, at the age of fifteen, been asked by her drawing master to render a vase of daffodils, and she had returned the page to him blank and said, in the tone of a young woman explaining a perfectly reasonable thing, that she did not see why she should paint something she could already see.
He had liked the daffodil story very much, but he had, of course, not said so.
Suddenly, the study door banged open.
Joanna did not knock. She had never knocked. He had decided, some years ago, that this was a battle not worth picking and had stopped fighting her about it.
“Beadle says you have received a letter from Alice.”
“Beadle is a gossip.”
“Beadle is a treasure.” She crossed the room and sat herself on the corner of his desk in a manner that no respectable young lady ought to sit on any piece of furniture belonging to a duke. “What does it say?”
“It is from my betrothed. It is private.”
“It is from my best friend. It is half mine.”
“That is not how letters work, Joanna.”
“It is how all the letters in this house have worked since I was nine. What does it say?”
He studied her. She was wearing a morning dress the color of cream, her hair was coming down at the back as it always did before noon, and she was looking at him with the particularly bright expectance of a younger sister who had not, in years of trying, learned how to be put off.
“We are going to Almack’s tonight,” he announced.
“Almack’s?” She blinked. “But you hate Almack’s.”
“I have changed my mind about Almack’s.”
“You have not changed your mind about Almack’s, Cassian. You have changed your mind about a particular person at Almack’s.”
She plucked the letter off his desk and read it. He let her. He had decided some time ago that there was no point in trying to keep a letter away from Joanna once she had heard it existed. She had a way of finding them even in locked drawers which he had given up trying to investigate.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Oh, that is very neatly done.”
“Is it?”
“She is angry with you.”
“She is bored, Joanna. She is at Westbury House with her sister, her mother, and that father of hers, and she has had three days of being looked at, and she is bored.”
“She is angry with you,” Joanna repeated patiently. Apparently, she believed she knew her best friend better than him. A fair assumption. “Cassian, you have not called on her once. You have not sent flowers. You have not sent a note. You have not—”
“She has not sent me a note either.”
“She has now.”
He did not have an answer to that.
Joanna folded the letter very neatly along its original creases and laid it back on his desk. “What are you going to wear?”
“To Almack’s?”
“Yes. We must consider it. You cannot wear the black coat; you wear the black coat to everything. You must wear the dark blue, the one Bessborough made for you. You have not worn it because you said it was vain. It is vain. You should wear it.”
“Joanna.”
“And you must escort her to supper. The whole room will be watching. If you do not escort her to supper, they will say that you are bored with her already, and then Alice will be sad, and I will be required to be cross with you, and I do not want to be required to be cross with you. Escort her to supper, Cassian.”
“I had planned on it.”
She brightened. “Had you?”
“I had planned on doing very little else.”
She looked at him then. Whatever she saw on his face made her go briefly still in the way she did when she was working out a thing she had not quite worked out before. Then she smiled. It was a small smile. It was a smile he did not, on balance, entirely like.
“Cassian…”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She slid off the desk. “Wear the blue coat and tell Beadle to have the carriage ready by eight o’clock.”
She was gone before he could think of a reason to call her back.
He sat in his study for a long time after she had left.
The letter was on the desk. Your devoted betrothed. He picked it up, read it once more, and then set it down.
Eventually, he went to find Beadle and gave instructions about the carriage, the blue coat, and a particular bottle of champagne that he wished to have sent ahead to King Street.
On the way, he did not look at himself in any of the mirrors because he was almost entirely certain that he had begun smiling again and that he did not know how to stop.
The ballroom at Almack’s was, by ten o’clock, already too warm.
Cassian had taken up a position near the second of the great windows, with a glass of indifferent ratafia in his hand that he had no intention of drinking. He had been there for three-quarters of an hour, and Alice had not yet arrived.
The orchestra was playing the third quadrille of the evening. The room was full of muslin and white satin and the kind of polite chatter that filled rooms in which everyone present was being watched by everyone else.
Joanna had gone off ten minutes ago to greet a friend whose name he had not caught and did not care about. He had been alone for those ten minutes, which had been a small mercy, and he had spent them watching the doorway.
“Langton.”
He did not turn.
“You look,” Lord Everlong said, settling beside him at the window with a fresh glass of his own, “like a man waiting for a hanging.”
“I look like a man at Almack’s.”
“It is the same thing. Some hangings, however, are at least quick.” He smiled.
Victor Hamilton had a particular kind of smile he saved for ballrooms. It had not quite reached his eyes since they were nineteen.
“Are you waiting for her?”
Cassian did not reply.
“Cassian, I am asking as a friend.”
“Then ask as a friend about anything else.”
“Very well.” Victor took a sip from his glass. “I was going to congratulate you on the betrothal if you will permit it. I have not had the chance. I was, I think, less than gracious at the dinner. I should like to amend it.”
Cassian turned then. He looked at the man he had grown up with. At the dark hair going slightly silver at the temples earlier than it ought to and at the mouth set in its accustomed shape of dry amusement. He could not tell whether Victor was being sincere.
“You are forgiven,” he said. “Such as there is to forgive.”
“You are very gracious, Your Grace.”
“Don’t.”
“As you like.” Victor’s eyes flickered past him, toward the door. They sharpened briefly before returning to him. “Ah, there she is.”
Cassian did not turn around.
He did not need to turn around. He could tell from the change in the atmosphere—the small dip in conversation, the slight retraining of attention toward the entrance—exactly when she had arrived, exactly where she was standing, and exactly how many heads had turned to look at her.
Despite himself, he counted how many he could feel turn.
Then he turned.
She was at the top of the small flight of steps that led down into the ballroom, and she was waiting, with her father at one elbow and her mother at the other, while the Master of Ceremonies announced her.
She was in a gown of pale celadon green that Cassian, who knew nothing about gowns, knew at once was the right color for her.
It was the color of her eyes. Her hair was very dark against it.
Her gloves were white. She had a small spray of something on her shoulder that he could not identify at this distance and a closed fan in her hand.
She came down the steps, and the room looked away.
She did not look at him. She did not, he understood in the next several breaths, have any intention of looking at him.
She greeted Lady Sefton at the foot of the steps.
She greeted two other ladies whose names he did not know and had no interest in learning.
She allowed Daphne, who had come in behind her, to take her arm.
She crossed half the floor with her sister and her mother in a small protective formation, and she did not once look toward the window where he stood.
She knew exactly where he was.
Victor gave a low whistle through his teeth. “That, my friend, is a woman who means to make you work for it.”
“Mm.”
“How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?”
“To be at Almack’s in love in public. Like the rest of us.”
Cassian set the ratafia down on the windowsill. He had not drunk any of it, and he was not going to.
“I shall let you know,” he said.
He stepped away from the window and crossed the room.