Chapter 17
Cassian arrived at Threadgill’s at half past two with his coat slung over his arm and a particular intention to hit something.
He had never been a man much given to drink. Drinking did not make him feel the small, forgetful warmth other men reported. It instead gave a worse clarity, an unhelpful sharpness about whatever it was he had been trying to forget.
He had given up on it as a tool some years ago. However, he had retained the other tool. He had retained boxing. He had retained the particular fact that a body that had been thrown at another for forty minutes was a body too tired to do anything but sleep afterward.
Today, he meant to sleep.
He had not slept the previous night. He had not slept the morning he had ridden home from Westbury House with the smell of the orange trees clinging to his coat and his hands not entirely steady on the reins.
He had ridden home with a careful neutrality, and he had not, for the time being, meant to discuss the matter with his coachman. The coachman had not asked. Cassian had not slept since.
Richard was already in the ring. He had taken off his shirt and wrapped his hands. He had been there for an hour and was now warming up the next opponent who had the misfortune of walking in. He grinned when he spotted Cassian.
“Langton.”
“Sutton.”
“You look as though you intend to murder someone.”
“I do.”
“Good. I have not had proper exercise in three days. Wrap your hands.”
Matthew was not present today. He had sent a note that morning explaining that his eye had been giving him trouble and that he would be at home with a poultice and a Wordsworth and a glass of brandy and that he hoped Cassian would have the sense, in his absence, not to break Richard’s nose which Richard could not afford to be broken before Lady Pevensey’s musical evening on Thursday.
Cassian had folded the note and put it in his pocket. He had no intention of attending Lady Pevensey’s musical evening. In fact, he had no intention of going anywhere that did not involve Alice, an altar, and the eight days that separated him and his wedding.
He took off his coat, his waistcoat, and his shirt.
He stood in his breeches and his bare feet in Threadgill’s small back room with the smell of leather and lamp oil and chalk around him and wrapped his hands in the slow, careful way Matthew had taught him when he was fifteen years old and angry about something.
He climbed into the ring.
He hit Richard hard in the second round. Richard hit him back.
They went at each other, easily and with the particular intimacy of two men who had been hitting each other across a ring for ten years and knew by now exactly what they were and were not permitted to do to one another’s faces, for a quarter of an hour.
At the end of the quarter of an hour, Cassian had a small cut in his lip, and Richard had the beginning of a bruise above his left eye, and Cassian had not, in the whole quarter of an hour, thought about Alice for more than two seconds at a time.
It was the longest he had managed in four days.
“Stop,” Richard said, panting. “Stop, you are not paying attention.”
“I am paying attention.”
“You are paying attention to your right hand. You have hit me with your right hand twelve times. You have not hit me once with your left. You are slow tonight, Langton, and I would very much like to know why.”
Cassian dropped his hands. “I am getting married, Richard.”
“I have heard.”
“At the end of next week.”
“I have heard of that as well.”
“I have secured a special license.”
Richard, who had been wiping his face with a small linen towel, paused. His eyebrows flew up. “Have you, indeed?”
“I have.”
“In how many days from this afternoon?”
“Eight.”
“Cassian.”
“I know.”
“You said three weeks.”
“I know what I said.”
“You said three weeks four days ago. Now you have moved up your wedding from three weeks to eight days, and you have come into Threadgill’s with the look of a man planning to murder somebody, and you have only hit me with your right hand.
I would like to know, my friend, what has happened in the last four days that has led to these particular circumstances. ”
Cassian did not answer at once. He went to the side of the ring, picked up the small cup of water that had been left for him on the post, and drank it. He set the cup down and looked at Richard.
Richard was a great many things, but he was not, on any account, a stupid man.
“I went to the orangery this morning.”
“Whose orangery?”
“Westbury’s.”
“With his eldest daughter.”
“With his eldest daughter.”
Richard waited.
“On the whole, it was not an orangery sort of visit.”
Richard laughed. “Cassian.”
“Do not start, Richard.”
“I shall start. I shall start with a great deal of pleasure. You have been a betrothed man for seven days. Seven. And you have, in the space of those seven days, gone from informing me in this ring that you intended a three-week courtship, a civil wedding, a brisk consummation, and a removal of your wife to Langton by the end of the month to a special license, a house party, and a not-on-the-whole-an-orangery-sort-of-visit. What did you do to that girl in the orangery, Langton?”
“Richard.”
“What did you do?”
“It is not your business.”
“Cassian, we have known each other for twenty years. It is exactly my business. What did you do?”
Cassian wiped the small bead of blood at his lip with the back of his wrist. “I did not do enough.”
Richard stared at him. Then he laughed. He had, on present evidence, been waiting some long time to see a particular thing happen, and now, he had seen it.
“Cassian Arnolds.”
“Richard.”
“You are besotted.”
“I am not besotted.”
“You are absolutely besotted with her. You are besotted with her, you have not slept in four days, you have moved up your wedding to eight days from today because you cannot last the three weeks, and you came here this afternoon to hit something because you do not dare go back to her parents’ house and ask her father if you might sit in his drawing room and look at her for an hour. ”
“Richard.”
“Do not deny it.”
“I almost liked her better when she was my rival.”
Richard stopped and set the linen towel down. “What?”
“I almost liked her better when she was my rival,” Cassian repeated evenly.
“For two years, she has been the bane of my existence. For two years, she has been the bright disaster I have been managing at the edge of every ballroom Joanna has attended. For two years, I have been telling her, in every drawing room and at every supper, that she ought to behave herself, and she has declined on every occasion. I had a system, Richard. I had a perfectly good system. I disliked her. She disliked me. We were both very satisfied with it.”
“And now?”
“And now…”
“Cassian.”
“And now, she has written me a letter in disciplined handwriting demanding to be courted. And now, she has worn a green dress to Almack’s and made a fool of me on a balcony.
And now, she has, in her father’s orangery on a Friday morning in May, stood with her back against an orange tree and said my Christian name as though she had been thinking it for a long time and had only just decided to say it out loud. ”
“Cassian.”
“And I have moved up the wedding.”
“Yes.”
“And I will not be moving it back.”
“No.”
“And I do not know what to do with any of it.”
Richard whistled very low between his teeth. “Liking your future wife is a blessing, my friend.”
“Not when you do not want children, Richard.”
Richard’s expression changed. The humor vanished from it, and what came in its place was the careful attention he wore when he was being asked by a friend to take a thing seriously.
On three separate occasions in the last ten years, he had sat in this ring while Cassian had told him, in the careful, unanswerable way Cassian told him things, that he did not intend to have an heir.
And on those three occasions, he had said nothing.
He had said nothing because he had decided some time ago that Cassian’s reasons were not to be argued against.
This afternoon, he looked as though he might be reconsidering. “This again.”
“Yes, this again. We have not finished the conversation.”
“We have finished the conversation, Cassian. We have finished it many times. You said the line you always say. The line about your father. I shall say it back to you if you have forgotten it. No child deserves to give up everything just to be someone’s son.”
“Yes.”
“You will hold to it.”
“I will hold to it.”
“Even with her?”
Cassian did not answer. In fact, he did not immediately understand the question.
The question seemed to have an obvious answer.
It was the same question he had been answering for sixteen years since the moment he had stood at the door to his father’s study at fourteen and seen the small heap of black-edged canvases in the grate and the blackening smoke of the things he had loved going up the chimney.
He had stood there, with the smell of smoke filling his nostrils, and had decided that he would never give a child of his anything to lose.
He had not, in sixteen years, revised that decision.
He had not, in sixteen years, been asked to revise it by anyone who had any standing to ask.
“Richard.”
“Yes.”
“It does not matter who she is. It does not change my decision.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You are certain?”
“I am certain. Which is why I will not sire children, Richard. Even if my father had not burned everything I cared for, society would have. I have watched it happen. I will not, in my own house, do it to a child of my own.”
Richard looked at him for a long second.
Then Richard, who had not in all the years of their friendship lost a single argument by losing his temper, said, “Cassian, you are better than your father. That has been true for a long time. I have been telling you it is true for a long time. You have not been listening. I will not say it again this afternoon. I will only say that the woman you are marrying next week will not let you avoid the conversation.”
Cassian opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. He climbed out of the ring instead.
He pulled his shirt down over his head and sat on the bench at the side of the small back room. He unwrapped his hands slowly, the way Matthew had taught him when he was fifteen, and looked at the bloodied spot between his knuckles where the skin had split the third time he had hit Richard.
“I almost liked her better when she was my rival,” he said again to the wall.
He had said it twice. He did not believe it either time.
It was perhaps the first thing in sixteen years that he had not been able to lie himself into believing on the third try.