Chapter 23
The small library was at the far end of the east corridor. It was not much used.
The great library was at the other end with the comfortable couches and the proper desks and the long windows overlooking the orchard.
The small library was a leftover, a low paneled room with three walls of unloved books and a fourth wall of bow windows that looked out over the stable yard.
It had been his grandfather’s library. Since coming to Langton at eighteen, Cassian had not done anything with it.
The child was on the floor. He was perhaps six years old with very fair hair and brown eyes. A small white shirt hung on his frame, and his bare feet stuck out under the hem of breeches that had been let down at least twice.
He was lying half on his side, with two books and a toppled library steps across his left leg, and was crying and hiccupping. He had just discovered, for the first time in his short life, that gravity was not on his side.
Alice was already kneeling beside him.
“There, sweet boy. There. Hush, my love. We have you. Cassian, the books—”
Cassian, who had not until this moment heard Alice call him by his Christian name without immediately using the next four words to apologize for it, lifted the volumes off the boy’s leg.
They were not very heavy. They had landed hard, however, and they had brought the library steps down with them. The steps had clipped the boy’s ankle on the way down. Cassian could see it redden just above the bone.
“My ankle hurts.”
“I know, my love.”
“I just wanted to climb.”
“I know. Hush. We have you.”
“It hurts very much.”
“Of course, it does. You have fallen on it. Brave boy. Very brave boy. What is your name?”
“Lucas.”
“Lucas, I am Alice. This is the Duke.”
The boy, who had not until this moment registered that there was a duke in the room, looked up with very large eyes. “Your Grace.”
“Lucas.”
“I am sorry, Your Grace.”
“Why are you sorry, Lucas?”
“I was climbing. Mama said I was not to climb. The library steps are not for climbing. The library steps are for the Duke’s books that are too high, Mama said.”
“Your mother was correct, Lucas.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“You shall not climb again.”
“No, Your Grace.”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“Is his ankle broken?”
Alice, who had her hand on the boy’s ankle and was pressing very gently on the bone, shook her head once. “It is not broken. It is bruised. He shall not walk on it for the rest of the evening. Lucas, can you put your arms around my neck?”
The boy nodded and put his arms around her neck.
With his bare feet against the front of her pristine bodice and the library steps still lying where they had fallen, she picked him up.
She picked him up with a thoughtless competence, the unthinking ease of someone who had clearly done it a great many times before.
She settled him on her hip. She braced his weight on her forearm, cradled the back of his fair head with her free hand, and kissed his temple with a grave, practiced tenderness that looked like long habit.
She did not, at any point, register that Cassian was looking at her.
He was looking at her. He had been standing at the door to the small library for perhaps thirty seconds and had not, in any of those thirty seconds, breathed.
Alice was holding a child.
Alice was holding a child in his house, bouncing him on her hip without seeming to realize it, and cradling the back of his head.
Just like that, he was transported to a place he had not previously been.
He saw very clearly a dark-haired, gray-eyed boy on her hip, her hand on the back of his head, and her lips just above his temple, and she was saying Hush, my love in the soothing way she had just said it to Lucas.
He could not breathe.
“Cassian.”
“Yes?”
“Where is his mother?”
“In the kitchens. She is one of the kitchen maids. Her name is Mrs. Halliwell. Her sister—” He stopped and tried again.
“Her sister has been taken ill this week. The boy has been staying at Langton with her. She leaves him here in the evenings while she works. He has been told not to climb, I gather.”
“You knew he was here?”
“I did.”
“You let him be here.”
“Yes.”
“Cassian?”
“Yes, Alice.”
“That was very kind.”
“It was not kind. It was—Mrs. Halliwell has been at Langton for fifteen years. Her sister is dying, and she has had to bring her own boy to the house because there was no one to leave him with—”
“Cassian.”
“Yes?”
“It was kind.”
He could not answer.
He could not answer because Alice was looking at him over the boy’s small fair head with her arm around the child, and the look on her face was the look she had worn in her father’s orangery on the morning he had told her, with the brutal courtesy of his decided mind, that he wanted no heirs.
Back then, she had not looked at him the way she was looking at him now. He did not know what to do with that look.
Suddenly, a small clatter sounded at the door to the library.
It was a woman of perhaps thirty-five, with a bright flushed face and fair hair, and she was wearing a kitchen maid’s apron. Someone had evidently run to the kitchens to tell her that her son had fallen. Mrs. Halliwell.
She stopped in the doorway when she saw her son in Alice’s arms. “My Lady, Your Grace—”
“Mrs. Halliwell. He has fallen. His ankle is bruised but not broken.”
“My Lady, I am so sorry. He was not to—”
“He was not to climb. I know. He has told me.”
“Yes, My Lady—”
“Mrs. Halliwell, he is a brave boy. He has not cried since I picked him up. He has had a very long evening, and so have you, I think. Go and put him to bed. I am sure His Grace would not mind if you took the rest of the night to sit with him.”
“Yes,” Cassian said quietly. “Yes, of course.”
“Your Grace—”
“Mrs. Halliwell, take your son to bed.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Alice gently put the boy into his mother’s arms. She kissed the top of his fair head one more time before she let him go. As soon as he was in his mother’s arms, he began crying again in the small, soft way children cry when they have been frightened and are now safe.
After bobbing a small curtsey that Alice acknowledged with a grave nod, Mrs. Halliwell carried him out of the room and down the corridor.
Then Cassian and Alice were alone with the fallen books and the particular silence of a house that had just stopped holding its breath somewhere down the corridor.
Alice did not look at him.
She did not look at him because the whole time she had been holding Lucas, she had been imagining a different place, and she was having difficulty snapping herself back to reality.
He stepped toward her.
Alas, he did not reach her because Victor, who had followed them from the drawing room at perhaps a minute’s distance, had arrived at the door.
Victor had not come alone. Joanna was behind him.
She had risen from her table when her brother and her future sister-in-law had not returned, and now, she was wearing the bright expression of a hostess managing a thing she had not been warned of.
Mrs. Pendleton was behind her. Two ladies from the third card table, who had come up out of curiosity, were behind Mrs. Pendleton.
In the corridor outside the door, there was a crowd that had heard a child cry and had not yet been told what the matter was.
Victor stood in the doorway. He had a civil smile on his face, and he was standing with the particular attention he had turned on Cassian for the entire evening.
In the clear voice he had spent the last minute ensuring the assembled crowd behind him would hear, he said, “What a shame, Lady Alice. You would have made such a fine mother.”
The library went very still.
The small crowd in the corridor went still in a different way.
Alice did not turn around. She stood with her back to the door and her hand on the front of her bodice where Lucas’s small fair head had been, and her face went very pale.
As he watched her, Cassian understood with a slow clarity what Victor had just done.
Victor had just told her with a single sentence that what Cassian had said to her in private had not been private at all.
He had just told her that Cassian had been discussing her marriage prospects in the smoking rooms and the boxing parlors and the dark corners of clubs at which his oldest friend was, by ancient right, also a member.
Victor had just told her that in front of two ladies, his sister, and his housekeeper in such a manner that the story would be in three drawing rooms in London by the end of the week.
He had just told her that because he had decided, at some point in the past week, that he no longer wished Cassian well.
Alice straightened. She did not turn around.
She set her shoulders in the disciplined way she had set her shoulders against her father in his study a fortnight ago, lifted her chin, and walked to the door with the bright composure she had been wearing for the better part of a fortnight at every dinner.
She paused at the door. “Lady Joanna.”
“Alice.”
“I am very tired this evening. Would you forgive me if I retire to my room?”
“Of course, Alice.”
“Mrs. Pendleton.”
“My Lady?”
“My maid is in the south corridor, I think. Would you be so kind as to fetch her for me?”
“Of course, My Lady.”
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Alice.”
Alice did not look at Cassian. She did not look at Victor either.
She walked past him with the particular courtesy of an earl’s daughter who had been raised to do a great many things except acknowledge a man who had just made her a public spectacle in another man’s house.
She walked past the small assembled crowd without acknowledging it and went down the corridor toward the stairs.
The crowd began to disperse awkwardly.
Joanna shot her brother a look that said, We’ll talk about this in the morning. Then she turned and followed the others out.
Cassian did not register any of it.
He stood in the middle of the library until the corridor was empty. He waited until the two ladies had gone, and Mrs. Pendleton had gone to fetch Alice’s maid from the south corridor, and Victor was alone in the doorway with that civil smile still on his face.
Then he crossed the room.
He closed the door very quietly, turned the key in the lock, then set the key on the small console table by the door, the way he had set down the key in the gallery an hour ago.
He turned around. “Victor.”
“Cassian.”
“You said that in front of the whole house.”
“I said what was true, Cassian. You have been saying it yourself for fifteen years. I was not mistaken on the matter.”
“You were not mistaken. You were not, however, speaking in private. You were speaking very deliberately in front of my sister, my housekeeper, and two ladies whose names I have not yet committed to memory. You were speaking very deliberately in front of my bride.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Victor smiled. It was the same smile he had worn all evening. It was, Cassian understood with a slow clarity he had not quite allowed himself for twenty years, the smile Victor had been wearing around him for twenty years.
Victor had never been his friend.
The lamp on the console table guttered slightly in a draft from the corridor.
“Because you will never change your mind on the matter.”
“You are certain?” Cassian asked.
“I am certain. I have known you for twenty years. I knew you when you were ten. I knew you when your brother died, I knew you when your father burned your paintings, and I knew you when you inherited the title at eighteen. You cannot change.
“You have not, in twenty years, changed. A sweet little wife who is good to bed cannot change you, Cassian, because you are not the sort of man a woman changes. You are the sort of man who decides a thing and then becomes the thing. You have been deciding to be your father since you were fourteen. You will not stop now.”
“Victor.”
“You have lain with better-looking women, Cassian. I was there for several of them. You have lain with a great many better-looking women, and you did not in any of those cases decide to change your mind. You will not do it now.”
Cassian looked at him. Until this moment, he had prepared to forgive a great many things. But not anymore.
He hit him.
He hit him with the clean efficiency he had been hitting Richard with that afternoon—with his right hand on the corner of his jaw where the bone meets the skull.
Victor, having not been expecting it, stumbled back against the doorframe and slid in a surprised heap to the floor.
Cassian stood over him. “Victor.”
“Cassian—”
“You are leaving Langton tonight. You will be on the road within the hour. Mrs. Pendleton will pack your trunk. You are no longer my guest. You are no longer my friend. You will not set foot in any house of mine for the rest of your life. You will never speak Lady Alice’s name ever again. Is that understood?”
“Cassian—”
“Is that understood, Victor?”
“Yes.”
“Get out.”
Cassian unlocked the door and opened it.
He stood at the door while Victor picked himself up off the floor, one hand on his jaw and a grimace on his lips, and watched him go down the corridor toward the south stairs without looking back.
When Victor rounded the corner, he closed the door again.
He stood there alone with the scattered books and the overturned library steps and the spot on the carpet where Lucas had been crying when they had arrived, and he finally understood that he did not know what he wanted anymore.
He did not know what he wanted.
He was about to find out.