Chapter 11
Cassian had been at Almack’s a good many times in his life, and he had never before found a glass of champagne so difficult to drink.
He was leaning against the wall near the fourth window with his shoulder against the paneling.
He had been watching Alice dance for forty minutes.
He had not put his name on her card tonight, a restraint that was looking worse with every dance.
She had danced the first dance with Lord Sefton.
She had danced the second with a man Cassian did not know and had decided, at the third bar of the cotillion, to dislike.
She had danced the third with Lord Dowton, which had been a quiet, civil affair in which both of them had appeared to be relieved to be dancing with someone they were now permitted to find unremarkable.
She was presently dancing the fourth with a young viscount who had a great laugh and not many ideas, and who was now laughing at something she had said while looking at her mouth.
Cassian was not, as a rule, a man who broke glasses. He had not broken a glass since he was nineteen. He slid his fingers down the bowl of his glass to the stem where the glass was less susceptible to breaking.
“You will break it,” Joanna murmured at his elbow.
“I will not.”
“You are squeezing it like you are wringing the neck of a chicken.”
“Joanna.”
“I am only saying. Lady Sefton is watching. She has been watching for ten minutes. If you break the glass, she will tell everyone in London that you broke it, and then they will ask why, and then they will guess why, and then I will have to find you a new club because you will have been thrown out of all the ones you already frequent.”
“I am not going to break the glass.”
She fell silent. She did not, however, leave. He could feel her at his elbow like a small, steady weight. She had decided to be present until she said what she had come to say. He let her stand. She would say it, eventually. She always did.
The young Viscount was laughing again. His hand, Cassian noticed, was a quarter inch higher on Alice’s back than the figure required.
“Joanna.”
“Yes.”
“Who is the boy?”
“Which one?”
“The one currently dancing with my betrothed.”
Joanna glanced over. “Lord Marbury. He is a friend of Lord Sefton’s nephew. He is twenty. He has a very large estate in Hertfordshire, no sense whatever, and a remarkably high opinion of himself.”
“He is dancing too close to her.”
“He is dancing as close to her as the music requires.”
“His hand is too high.”
“Hmm. All right, maybe you’re right. His hand is indeed half an inch too high. I wonder if you noticed it only because you have been watching it for the last six minutes.” She paused. He felt the pause settle. “Cassian.”
“Yes.”
“Is it the dance that troubles you or the dancing partner?”
“That is an absurd question.”
“It is not.”
“It is.”
“Cassian.”
“What?”
She did not answer immediately.
He turned his head to look at her. She was looking at the dancers, not at him, which she did when she was preparing to say a thing he was not going to like.
“She is beautiful,” she said.
“She is.”
She turned to him. “You said it without thinking.”
He had said it without thinking. He had not even registered that he had said it.
He had said it because Alice was beautiful.
Because the young Viscount, whose name he was now determined to remember, was looking at her mouth and because her face under the chandelier was very pale and very dark-eyed and very alive.
Fourteen minutes ago, on a balcony at the back of this building, Alice had whispered his Christian name against his lips, and he had not yet recovered from it.
“I said it because she is beautiful.”
“You said it because you cannot help saying it.” Joanna’s voice was very small now.
He recognized the smallness. It was a smallness she had used at the age of nine when she had told him she did not mind that their father had not come to her birthday supper. It was a smallness he had not been able to bear at nine and could not bear now.
“Cassian, may I ask you a question?”
“You will ask it, whether I permit it or not.”
“Why are you helping her?”
“What?”
“Why are you helping her, Cassian? I have been mulling it over for three days, and I do not understand the shape of it. She did what she did at the Worthington ball, and you did what you did, and the two of you could have parted ways there. You could have called for your carriage and gone home.
“She would have been ruined and sent to the country, and that would have been the end of it. You did not have to propose to her. You did not have to put the banns in for next Sunday. You did not have to write your name in all eleven slots of her dance card the other night. Cassian, why are you helping her?”
Cassian took a slow breath. He had many answers prepared.
He had been preparing them for three days.
He had prepared the one about Joanna’s reputation, which was true.
He had prepared the one about his own reputation, which was true.
He had prepared the one about Alice having been about to throw herself on some unsuitable man at the ball, and his having done her the small civility of intervening, which was also tru, and which he had polished in his head until it gleamed.
He looked at his sister and did not give her any of them. “I do not know.”
“You do.”
“I do not, Joanna.”
“You do, and you are not going to tell me, which is your own business, but you must at least tell yourself. You must tell yourself, Cassian, bBecause if you do not…”
“What?”
“Then this will end very badly. For both of you.”
He looked back at the dance floor. Alice was finishing the dance, before the young viscount led her off. Her face was composed in the particular way it had been for the past forty minutes. She was holding something very large just out of view.
She had not looked at him since the other night on the terrace.
She had not looked at him as she had returned to the ballroom.
She had not looked at him as she had gone to her mother, made an excuse about the heat, and accepted a glass of lemonade.
She had not looked at him tonight as she had taken Lord Sefton’s hand for the first dance.
She had not looked at him as she had laughed at the young viscount’s dull face.
She was, he realized, doing it on purpose.
It was not avoidance. It was discipline.
She had decided, on the way back to the ballroom, that she was not going to let the room see what had happened on the terrace, and she was holding the line of that decision with the same disciplined neatness with which, he was beginning to understand, she did everything that she actually cared about.
For three days, he had told himself he wanted to mark her with a diamond and that it was a possessive impulse he would have to manage.
He understood now that he had been wrong about the shape of it.
He had wanted to mark her because he had wanted very badly to see her wear something of his and acknowledge it in public.
She was not going to be marked. She was going to be married to him, by license or by banns, before the Season was out. She was going to walk down the aisle. She was going to take his name. She was going to allow him, on the day of their wedding, all the things one was allowed.
But she was not going to be marked.
He set the glass down on the windowsill very carefully. “Joanna.”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean, both of you?”
Joanna did not look at him. She did not look at him for some time. When she did, her face reminded him of her sixteen-year-old self, standing in the doorway of his study, having come to ask him for advice that he had not had any idea how to give.
“I meant what I said. This will end very badly, Cassian. You will survive a thing like a man like you survives anything—you shall close a door and not open it. But she will not survive it as you do. She is not made to. She will break, Cassian. Slowly and over a great many years in a great manor house out of London. She will break very gracefully because she does everything gracefully, but she will break. She is doing it for her sister, you are doing it for the look of it, but you are both lying to yourselves about why. One of you is going to find out you were lying. I would very much prefer that you found out before you married her, and not in twenty years.”
He looked at her. “That is a remarkable speech for a girl of twenty-three.”
“Twenty-four next Tuesday. You always forget.”
“I do not forget.”
“You do. But it is only Tuesday; you have time.”
She put her hand briefly on his sleeve. She did not look at his face. She did not require him, in the small kind way she had, to say anything to her. Then she squeezed his sleeve once, dropped her hand, and moved away, disappearing among the dancers and the matrons and the chaperones.
Cassian found himself alone at the window with a glass he was not drinking and a sentence sitting in his chest he was not going to be able to dislodge.
“… you are both lying to yourselves about why.”
He picked the glass up again. He set it down again.
He looked at Alice. She was standing with her mother at the far end of the room, smiling at something Lady Sefton had said. She still had not looked at him.
He understood, calmly and at once, the way a man understood an unwelcome piece of correspondence on its third reading, that he had got himself into a thing he had not until this moment understood the shape of.
He had thought he was rescuing her. He had thought he was protecting his sister’s reputation, Alice’s reputation, his own peace of mind, and the orderly set of arrangements that he had been making painstakingly for ten years.
In short, he had thought that this was a business.
It was not a business.
He looked at his sister, who was now laughing at something with a friend across the room, and then at Alice, who was now laughing at something with her mother, and he understood for the first time that Joanna was not afraid for Alice.
She was afraid for him.