Chapter 24
For the next five days, Alice did not leave her rooms.
She sent down word the morning after the library incident that she had a slight headache and that she begged the indulgence of the house. She sent down word the next morning that the headache was no better.
She sent down word the morning after that she would, with regret, be missing the day’s riding party, and the morning after that that she would, also with regret, be missing the morning service in the small chapel at the edge of the orchard.
By the end of the week, the house had stopped expecting her at meals.
Joanna sent up trays. She sent up notes. Once, she even sent up a small bunch of late tulips from the long border. Alice answered the notes in her disciplined handwriting and ate two bites of the toast on a good morning, but it did not go down.
She was not ill.
She was, in fact, working. She was working in the careful way she had worked at every difficult thing in her life: by herself behind a closed door with no one watching.
She had her maid bring up parcels from the village.
She had her maid bring up paints and brushes and small jars from the saddler.
She had her maid, who had been with her family for sixteen years and had not once asked a single question she had not been asked to ask, bring up a box from a particular shop on High Street that Mrs. Halliwell, when consulted in the kitchens at half past five on the morning after the library incident, had identified by name.
The box arrived on the afternoon before the wedding.
It was a paint set. It was a flat wooden box of perhaps twelve inches by eight with a brass clasp and a small painted dragonfly on the lid, and inside it was the careful arrangement of pans and brushes and stoppered jars of a proper artist’s paint set.
The kind a young gentleman might have been given by his governess when he was twelve.
The kind that, on a particular Tuesday in October sixteen years ago, might have been gathered up by the housekeeper and put on a small heap of canvases in the back grate of the master’s study.
Alice put it on the small table by the window.
She looked at it for a long time. She had not been certain she would have the nerve to give it to Cassian.
The week’s small private liturgy had been: I shall decide on the morning of the wedding.
I can still take the carriage. The offer he made me in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room is still open.
I have until the chapel bell to make up my mind. I do not need to decide anything now.
She had been telling herself that for five days. She had not believed any of it.
In fact, she had decided when Victor Hamilton had made that remark in the library.
She had decided when Cassian had said, I do not know.
She had perhaps decided much earlier than that, against an orange tree in her father’s orangery on a Friday morning in May.
This week, she had been deciding only how to tell him.
She had decided this evening.
She had decided this evening because tomorrow was the wedding, and because she had, at five in the afternoon, looked out the window in her bedroom and seen him walking across the lawn with his coat draped over his arm and his head bent.
The set of his shoulders suggested he was not sleeping any better than she was, and at the sight, she decided that she could not let him go to bed tonight without speaking to him.
She put on the silk nightgown Mrs. Hatcher had laid out across the velvet stool a week ago which she had not looked at since.
Over it, she put on a long pale wrapper of her mother’s that had been packed in her trunk by mistake.
Then she clasped the small gray pendant that had not left the small velvet box on her dressing table since the orangery around her neck and settled it at the base of her throat.
She picked up the paint box, wrapped it in a square of brown paper, and walked out of her room.
The house was quiet. The other guests had retired to their rooms after dinner. The maids had finished their work. The small clock at the end of the corridor read five past eleven.
She walked past the door to Joanna’s room, which was dark. She walked past the door to her mother’s room, which was also dark. She walked past the landing where, on the day she had arrived, Cassian had taken her gloved hand and bowed over it and not kissed it.
She knew the careful geography of his nights. She knew because Joanna, in the bright unguarded confidence of a future sister-in-law who had been trying very hard to be useful all week, had told her on the second day.
“He has a study on the third floor at the south end. He sits in it most nights. He has not been sleeping this week. The attic is two more flights above the study. The key to the attic is on a hook on the back of his study door, but he never uses it. I keep the room clean because I am sentimental.”
Alice had thanked her and not asked any further questions.
That day, she had not known what she was going to do with the information. But this evening, she knew.
She climbed the small back stairs to the third floor and made for the small, paneled door of his study. Light came from under the door. She could faintly hear the crackle of a fire that had not yet gone down for the night, and the slow tread of a man pacing across the carpet on the other side.
She drew a breath and knocked.
The pacing stopped. “Enter.”
She turned the handle, opened the door, and entered.
The study was a small, low-ceilinged room with a single shaded lamp on the desk, a low fire, and a long window with the curtains drawn back to the late spring dark.
Cassian was standing by the window in his shirtsleeves with a glass in his hand. His coat was draped over the back of a chair, and his cravat was undone. He had not been expecting any visitor at this hour on the night before his wedding. He had been expecting none at all.
He turned and saw her.
At first, he did not say anything.
He stood by the window for the amount of time required to register that the woman standing at the door was wearing a long pale wrapper over what was very plainly a silk nightgown.
At her throat, restored to its rightful place, was the gray pendant he had given her in her father’s orangery ten days ago.
He set the glass down. “Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“You are—”
“I have—”
“Are you feeling better, My Lady?”
She looked at him for a careful second, in the disciplined way she had been looking at him for ten days, and apparently decided to take the mocking and give him nothing back.
“I am feeling well enough to give you a gift.”
“A gift?”
“Yes.”
“At this hour?”
“At this hour, Cassian.”
“On the night before our wedding?”
“On the night before our wedding.”
“Alice.”
“No matter what happens tomorrow, I have enjoyed our time together. It is only fair that I give you a gift.”
He looked at her. He looked at her for a long minute. He did not break their stare until she very nearly broke it for him.
“You still plan to leave, then?”
Alice did not answer at once. She had not, in her careful planning, decided how she would answer this question. She had assumed that he would not ask.
“Not tonight.” She held out her free hand, the one not holding the wrapped paint box, and waited.
Cassian looked at her hand, then at the wrapped box, then at her face. Then he crossed the small study and gently took her hand in his.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Where?”
“To the top floor.”
“If you plan to murder me, I have to inform you that I am much stronger than you.”
“Stronger than I am? I doubt it. In fact, I think I am considerably stronger. I have been the eldest sister for twenty years. I should put you on the floor in under a minute.”
A small smile, the smile he had worn on the dance floor and in the orangery and on the small wooden landing at the lake, curved the corner of his mouth.
“I do not doubt that.”
“Then come.” She plucked the long-unused brass key off the small hook on the back of the door.
Cassian did not stop her. He watched her take it. He had not, in sixteen years, allowed any person in his house to remove that particular key from that particular hook.
She did not say anything about that.
She tugged him out of the study with the small, wrapped paint box in her free hand and his hand in the other, and led him up the back stairs to the top floor. She did not say anything else along the way.
The studio was on the south side with two long windows under the eaves. It had been swept. In fact, it had been swept very recently. The white sheet over the easel was very fresh, and the floor had been mopped.
Joanna, Alice realized with a slow warmth at her chest, had been preparing. She had been preparing for whatever Alice had decided to do in this room, and she had decided to be on Alice’s side.
Alice unlocked the door, opened it, and led Cassian inside before closing the door behind them.
She lit the candles in the two great branched candelabras with a taper that had been waiting on the windowsill since that afternoon, and two pools of warm yellow light slowly spread across the studio.
Cassian stood by the door.
He had not moved.
He saw the easel. He saw the canvas. He saw the small wooden palette lying on the table by the window. When she set down the wrapped parcel beside the palette and undid the brown paper, he saw the small flat wooden box with the brass clasp and the small painted dragonfly on the lid.
He went very still as if he hit somewhere he had not been expecting.
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“That is…”
“It is a paint set, Cassian.”
“You—”
“I thought since your father is not here, there is no reason you cannot paint. You can do whatever you want with it. Or nothing. It is yours.”
He did not answer.
He did not even move.
He stood by the door in the candlelit studio at the top of his house, looking at the small wooden paint box on the table by the window, and did not say anything for a long, careful while.