Chapter 14
The chess pieces were on a low table by the morning room window, in their usual arrangement, with Daphne’s white side in slight disarray from the previous evening’s defeat. By eleven o’clock, Alice was eight moves into the game and losing on purpose.
She was losing badly.
She had moved her queen three moves ago into the precise square from which Daphne’s bishop could take it.
Daphne had not, however, taken it. Instead, she had moved her knight at the far edge of the board absently, slowly, the way one moved when one’s mind was not on the chessboard at all.
Alice had been obliged, on her next move, to leave the queen there with even more conspicuous availability, and Daphne had not taken her then either.
“Daphne.”
“Mm?”
“You may take my queen.”
“What? Oh.” Daphne looked at the board. She did, in fact, see the queen. Her face, however, registered nothing of it. “Yes, of course.”
She moved her bishop and took the queen with the slow, polite indifference of a person at a tea party accepting a biscuit she had not particularly wanted. She set the queen down on the edge of the board next to the other captured pieces, but she did not seem to notice she had done it.
Alice looked at her sister.
Daphne looked at the window.
“Daphne,” Alice said again, more softly, “what is the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Daphne.”
“It is your move, Alice.”
“Daphne.”
Daphne lifted her face. Her cheeks went pink in two small particular places at the corners of her mouth in the way they did when she had been thinking about Isaac for a quarter of an hour and did not wish to be asked about it. “Alice.”
“Yes?”
“He is calling at noon today. Lord Dowton.”
“Is he?”
“To see Mama, he said. About something. I do not know what. He sent his card an hour ago.”
“To see Mama,” Alice repeated solemnly.
“To see Mama.” Daphne nodded once, very dignified. Then her face cracked, very briefly, in the small uncontrollable way it had when she was twelve. She let out a small laugh and bent over the chessboard, putting her face in her hands. “Alice, I do not—I do not know what to do. He is so very…”
“Sweet?”
“He is so very interested in things, Alice.”
“I am aware. I have suffered three-quarters of an hour of leafhoppers.”
“They are not all leafhoppers. There are beetles as well.”
“I am aware of the beetles, Daphne.”
Daphne made a small, strangled sound behind her hands.
Alice could not help it. She threw back her head and laughed loudly, all of her in it, the laugh that had been described to her on three separate occasions by three separate governesses as unbecoming of a young lady of quality and which she had, since the age of thirteen, decided was the part of her she liked most.
Daphne laughed too.
They laughed at each other. They laughed until their mother’s voice drifted up the corridor, asking what had got into the morning room. They stopped laughing with the very poor success of two grown women who had not properly laughed at one another in a great many months.
“Daphne—”
“My Lady, the Duke is here.”
It was the butler, standing in the doorway, slightly flushed.
He had been instructed to admit Lord Dowton for his usual morning hour with Lady Daphne, to take coats from the Dowager Lady Pevensey and her two daughters, to send a maid up for the silver tea set, and now, to announce the Duke of Langton, who was waiting on the front steps and who, the butler’s tone implied, would not be turned away.
Alice rose quicker than she had meant to. “Show him in, please.”
“Very good, My Lady.”
Cassian was shown in.
That morning, he wore a dark gray coat that suited him less than the blue one which Alice noticed at once because she had been thinking about the blue coat at intervals since two in the morning.
He was holding his hat in his hand. He had not, the butler informed her in a small undertone afterwards, been at all certain he would be received.
He had given his name as though he had expected to be told that nobody was at home.
He bowed. “Lady Alice. Lady Daphne.”
“Your Grace.”
Daphne stood up and bobbed a small curtsy. She looked briefly between Alice and Cassian and then, having clearly decided to make herself useful, said, “I have just remembered I promised Mama I should help her with the menu for tonight. Please do excuse me,” and left.
She closed the door behind her.
She did not, Alice noticed, close it entirely. She left it open by two inches in the small kind way she had of being a chaperone without being asked.
“Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“I should—”
“Shall we walk in the orangery, Your Grace? It is somewhat warmer there. The morning room is rather cold.”
Alice did not know why she had said it. She had not planned to say it. In fact, on the way down to the morning room, she had briefly considered that if Cassian came to call, she would have the butler tell him she was not at home.
She had not done it. She had not done it because she had wanted to see him. More than that, she had wanted to be seen by him.
It was Hyde Park all over again but with a worse precedent because in Hyde Park, she had at least been able to plead surprise.
“The orangery,” he repeated, very carefully. “Yes. Yes, that would be agreeable.”
She led him out.
The orangery was a long glass room at the rear of the house, fitted on the south side of the morning room and the conservatory.
At this time of morning, it was full of the pale March sunlight and the heavy scent of the orange and lemon trees the Lockwoods had been keeping there for three generations.
The room had been a great favorite since Alice was a child.
It had three doors, each one of which had a glass top, and overlooked the kitchen gardens behind the house.
It was visible from the windows of every upstairs room on the east side of the house, the back kitchen, the laundry, and the gardener’s potting shed.
In short, it was a room in which a young woman could conduct a fifteen-minute private discussion with a gentleman without being unchaperoned.
Cassian noticed at once. “This is—”
“It is very well-watched, Your Grace. The cook can see us from the larder. The upstairs maids can see us from the linen room. The gardener, if he is at his potting shed, can also see us. We are perhaps the most chaperoned couple in London in this room.”
“That is very well-arranged of you, Lady Alice.”
“It is a quality I learned from my betrothed, Your Grace. The deliberation.”
“Touché.”
She led him through the trees. The path was narrow, so he had to walk slightly behind her in some places and at her elbow in others, and once or twice, his shoulder brushed against hers among the leaves.
Alice felt each of the small touches go down her arm into her wrist and her palm, and she pretended, with a discipline she had been practicing all morning, that she had not felt any of them.
“Your Grace,” she said, after the second time their shoulders brushed.
“Yes.”
“You have come to call on me. This counts among the list of things you owe me by way of a proper courtship.”
“It does. It is one of the reasons I came.”
“What are the others?”
“There is one other.”
“Only one?”
“Only one, Lady Alice. I am a man of discipline. I came with two purposes. I have already accomplished the first.”
She glanced at him.
They had walked behind a small group of three orange trees.
The trees were old and taller than both of them, and they formed a small alcove at the back of the orangery which was not visible from any of the doors or any of the upstairs windows or the gardener’s potting shed or the cook’s larder.
Alice had not entirely forgotten about it while considering the walk.
Cassian took something out of the inner pocket of his coat. It was a small box, small enough to fit in his hand. It was wrapped in a dark blue velvet that Alice recognized at once as the velvet famous jewelers on Bond Street used for their best work.
“Your Grace.”
“You said I had not yet given you a gift.”
“I said you had not yet given me a puppy.”
“I would not bring you a puppy, Lady Alice. Certainly not in the orangery. It would frighten the cook. This is something else.”
He opened the box.
For a moment, Alice did not see its contents. She was too aware of the box. She was too aware of the man holding the box, who in two years of knowing her had never struck her as a man who would have come to her parents’ house with a small dark blue velvet box from a Bond Street jeweler.
Then she looked at what was in the box and stopped breathing.
It was a pendant. It was not large or gaudy. It was, in fact, very plain. A small oval-cut stone on a fine silver chain, the kind of thing that a sensible older woman might have selected for her daughter’s nineteenth birthday with the main expense in the stone itself rather than in the setting.
The stone was gray. It was not, she realized after a second look, an ordinary gray. It was a cool slate gray that, in the morning light filtering through the glass, did a thing she had not seen any stone do before.
It looked back at her with Cassian’s eyes.
“Cassian—”
She had said his name without meaning to. She had said his Christian name in a room with three glass doors and an unspecified number of maids at the linen room window. She put her hand briefly on her mouth and then lowered it again.
“Your Grace, it is too much.”
“It is a betrothal gift.”
“It is—”
“Don’t you like it, Lady Alice?”
“I like it very much, Your Grace.”
“You are pale.”
“I am pale because it is gray.”
“Yes.”
“It is the gray of your eyes, Your Grace.”
“I had hoped you would notice.”
She did not look at him. She did not look at him because if she did, she was going to drop the pendant or step back or say a thing that would make whatever this was a great deal more dangerous than it had so far been, and her hand was already shaking on the open lid of the box.
“You did not, then…” she said softly. “You did not come merely to call.”
“I did not.”
“You came to mark me.”
“I came to give you a gift.”
“It is the same thing, Your Grace.”
She heard him draw a breath.
She did not look up. She did not dare look up. She knew that the moment she did, whatever was between them in this small alcove would come crashing down. So, she kept her eyes on the pendant.
“Will you wear it, Alice?”
“You have a habit of dropping my title, Your Grace.”
“I am aware.”
“Why do you do it?”
“For the same reason I came here this morning, Lady Alice. I cannot help it.”
She looked up. She had not meant to. Her face had, just like the night before during the dance, decided to look up of its own accord.
Cassian was looking down at her, and the small distance between them suddenly became the distance she had not been able to call by any honest name before now.
“Turn around, Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace?”
“If you mean to wear it, turn around. I shall fasten it for you.”