Chapter 13
Alice had read the same page of the same novel four times when her mother knocked on her door.
It was not the sort of knock her mother usually made. She generally entered her daughters’ rooms without ceremony. She had been the lady of this house for thirty years; she would not be kept on the threshold by a chambermaid.
This knock was tentative. It was, Alice realized after a moment, exactly the knock she would have expected if a chambermaid had been by just now and told her mother that she had been crying.
She had not, in fact, been crying. She had been very close to it.
She had been very close to it for nearly three hours since she had come back from Hyde Park and been led upstairs by Sally, who had said, “You shall lie down for an hour, My Lady. The headache shall pass,” in the way Sally said things when she meant, “I have noticed, and I will not say anything.”
Alice had not lain down. She had sat in the window seat with the novel open on her knee and had read the same page four times.
“Alice, may I come in?”
“Yes, Mother.”
The Countess walked in and closed the door behind her.
She did not immediately make herself comfortable as she usually did.
She did not sit at the dressing table. She did not pick up Alice’s brushes.
She did not begin to chat. She crossed the room, sat down at the foot of Alice’s bed, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at Alice in the window seat.
Alice recognized the look at once. It was the look her mother had given her when she was eleven on the day she had cracked her elbow on the nursery stairs and had hidden the bruise from Sally for three days because she did not wish to be grounded.
“Sally tells me you have a headache.”
“I do.”
“Sally also tells me, having been pressed on the matter, that there is no headache.”
“Then Sally has betrayed me.”
“Sally has been with you for sixteen years, Alice. She has never betrayed you. She is a great deal more devoted to you than I am on most days, and the fact that she has today walked herself down to my parlor and stood in the doorway and said My Lady, you must speak with Lady Alice means that whatever happened in the Park is not a headache.”
Alice closed the novel. She did not put it down. She kept it on her knee, with her fingers between the pages, as a small shield against the conversation. “Mother.”
“Alice.”
“What did Sally tell you?”
“She told me that you and the Duke of Langton walked among some plane trees, that the Duke spoke to you in private for the better part of a quarter of an hour, that you came back with your face composed in a manner that has, since you were nine, meant you were not going to admit to anything for at least a fortnight, and that she could not on her honor say what you had spoken about. Sally is a discreet woman. I do not require her discretion, but I require yours.” She paused. “What did the Duke say to you, Alice?”
Alice looked at the novel. She did not know how to begin.
She did not exactly know what she had been told.
She had been told that he did not want to have children.
She had been told that he would not be swayed.
She had been told that he was sorry. She had not been told the reason.
She had been told that there were reasons.
She had been told, by silence, that the reasons were not things he meant to speak of in a public park or perhaps anywhere.
She had been told, at the dinner table three nights ago by the way he had pressed his thigh against hers in steady, silent reassurance through the soup course, that he had begun to care about her.
She had been told, on a terrace at the back of Almack’s by the small, wounded stillness of his body when she had said his Christian name, that he had not, in the time she had known him, been kissed by anyone for whom he had cared before.
She had been told, in Hyde Park by his face when he had said I am sorry, that he was, in some private way she had not yet looked at, breaking his own heart to tell her.
She did not know how to say any of that to her mother. In fact, she did not know how to say any of that to herself.
“He has told me he does not want to have children.”
Her mother went still.
It was not a grave stillness. It was a small one.
It was the stillness of a fifty-year-old woman who had spent thirty years in drawing rooms and knew exactly which sentence had been spoken and how to receive it without giving her feelings away.
The stillness lasted perhaps two seconds.
Then her mother breathed out, folded her hands again, and tilted her head slightly.
“Has he, indeed?”
“He has.”
“And how was the subject broached, Alice?”
“I broached it.”
“You broached it?”
“Mother—”
“Alice, my love, I am not scolding you. I am asking. I am asking because if there is a young woman of twenty-five in England who would have raised the subject of an heir to her betrothed in plain words on the gravel of Hyde Park, it would be you, and I am only confirming that it was you.” She paused and drew the slow, patient breath of a woman of fifty who had seen a great deal. “Did he give a reason?”
“He said there were reasons.”
“That is not a reason.”
“He said he would not speak of them on the gravel of Hyde Park.”
“That is closer.”
Alice set the novel aside. She put her hands in her lap and looked down at them.
“Alice.” Her mother’s voice was very gentle. “On the day your sister was born, you brought her every toy you had.”
Alice did not lift her head. “I know,” she muttered.
“You were five. You had wanted a sister since you were three.
The maids had told me. You had asked the maids three times if the next baby would be a girl, and each of the three times the maids had told you that nobody could promise such a thing, and each of the three times you had told the maids that, in that case, you would simply require the baby to be a girl because you had decided. You had decided, Alice. At five.
“And when Daphne was put into your arms—your father has forgotten this, I think, but I have not—you were not at all surprised. You behaved as though a package you had sent for had arrived on the appointed day. And then you went up to the nursery, packed up every toy you had ever owned, and brought them down. You laid them on the rug at the foot of my bed and said very seriously, They are hers now.”
“Mother.”
“I am not done, Alice.”
“I know.”
“You were five then, but you have been doing the same thing ever since.” Her mother’s voice broke on the last word.
Alice kept her eyes down because if she looked up, she would see her mother’s face, and her composure would shatter in two seconds and would never recover.
“Alice, I know what you have done. I know why. I am not Sally. I am not Daphne. I have known you for twenty-five years, and I have known what you would do for your sister since you were five, and I knew when Lord Dowton came to dinner what you would do, given a small opening. I did not think it would be a kiss at the Worthington ball—I will admit you were creative—but it does not surprise me that you have done it.”
“Mother—”
“Alice, look at me, please.”
She looked up.
Her mother was not crying. She was looking at her with a face Alice did not recall ever seeing before.
It was a face that was very tired and very kind.
It was a face that, Alice realized with a twist in her chest, had not in twenty-five years been turned this way on her because she had not in twenty-five years given her mother any cause to turn it this way.
“Alice, are you certain of what you are doing?”
“Mother.”
“You said to me, in this room when you were nineteen, that you wished one day to marry for love. You said it again when you were one-and-twenty. You said it again at three-and-twenty. You have not said it for the past two years, but you have not stopped wishing it, Alice. I have seen your face. I have watched it for twenty-five years. You wish it still.”
“Mother—”
“And today, he has told you that he will not give you children. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you propose to do, my love?”
“There are worse fates,” Alice heard herself say, “than marrying a duke.”
It was exactly what her mother had once said to a young cousin at a wedding breakfast. It was, in fact, what her mother had been saying her whole life.
It was a sentence Alice had often despised her mother for using. She used it now deliberately because she could not think of any other thing to say and because if she did not use it, she was going to cry, and crying was not a thing the Lockwoods did.
Her mother studied her. She did not contradict her. She did not press her. She did not, in any of the dozen ways Alice had imagined the conversation going, attempt to argue her out of what Alice had just said.
Eventually, she spoke. “Alice, if you could go back to the night before Daphne was born, would you choose differently?”
“I—”
“Would you not bring her your toys, Alice? Would you, having known what you would later choose to do for her, have chosen otherwise?”
“Mother—”
“Would you, Alice?”
Alice did not answer.
She did not answer because she did not know how to.
She did not know how to because she had never, in twenty-five years of being Daphne’s older sister, considered the question.
She had never been required to. She had been five at the time.
She had decided then. That decision had been the foundation of her whole life since then.
Her mother nodded once. “That is what I thought.”
She stood up. She did not come over and embrace her which was kind of her because Alice would not have survived being embraced.
Instead, she crossed to the small writing table by the window, picked up the brush Alice had left there earlier, and ran her thumb across the bristles idly, the way a woman does when she is composing a thought she is not yet ready to voice.
“Alice.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I am going to say one thing. It is the only thing I shall say. I will not raise the matter again after tonight. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Your father gave me two beautiful girls, so I would not go back. I would not change my choice for anything because the cost of changing it is the two of you, and the two of you are the greatest work of my life.” She set the brush down very carefully.
“But that is the only reason. I want you to know that. That is the only reason. There is no other reason in the world that a woman of any sense should marry a man who will not give her what she has known she wanted since she was a child.”
She kissed Alice on the top of her head and then left. The door closed very softly behind her.
Alice did not get up from the window seat.
She did not move at all. She sat with the novel beside her and her hands in her lap and the particular silence of her bedroom around her, and she counted after a while the iron rosettes she could see on the back of the brass fender in the fireplace. There were nine of them.
She thought, with an absurdity she did not have the strength to laugh at, that it was the same as the railing on the balcony at Almack’s.
Then she thought, less absurdly, that nine was a great many rosettes for one young woman to count when she was trying not to make a decision and that she would have to make one in the morning whether she had counted them all or not.
She did not sleep that night.