Chapter 25
On the morning of his wedding, Cassian dressed with great care and no expectation.
He stood in front of the long mirror in his room while his valet did the small, precise work at his cuffs and his throat. He watched the man do it and thought of nothing he was willing to keep.
His coat was the dark blue he had chosen because Joanna had said the gray one made him look like a headstone.
His cravat was tied in the arrangement his father had favored which Cassian had not bothered to change in twelve years because changing it would have required thinking about it and thinking about it would have required remembering the hand that had first tied it.
His boots had been polished twice. His room was very neat. Everything was exactly where it should be which was how he had always wanted it. But this morning, it gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.
There was a carriage standing ready behind the chapel. He had ordered it himself. He had decided on it nine days ago in the back room of a modiste’s shop on Bond Street with Alice standing in front of him in a length of pale silk that he had not since then managed to forget for even one hour.
He had told her in the cold, reasonable voice he kept for what cost him most that she was not trapped. That on the morning of their wedding, a carriage would be waiting. That she could run away. That he would, if she asked it of him, drive her away himself.
He had meant it. He still meant it.
That was the trouble with telling the truth in a cold voice: a man could not afterward pretend he had not meant it.
“Your Grace.” His valet stepped back. “If I may.”
“You may.”
“It is a very nice knot.”
“It is the only knot you know.”
“It is a very nice one.”
Cassian looked at the man in the mirror, and the corner of his mouth twitched without his permission, which was happening a great deal lately and which he blamed entirely on a woman who would likely not be standing beside him in an hour.
Suddenly, the door opened, and Joanna entered.
She was wearing a gown the color of apricots with her red hair already coming down on one side and her face lit up like a window with the whole house on fire behind it.
She came in the way she had come into every room since she was four years old, which was to say all at once with no regard for whether the room had been ready for her or not.
“She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life,” she gushed.
Cassian turned away from the mirror. “You have seen her, then.”
“I have seen her. They will not let me stay. Her dragon of a maid has decided I am a distraction, but I saw her for one moment, and Cassian—” Joanna pressed both hands flat against her chest. “She is wearing your pendant. The gray one, the one you said was nothing, the one you said you had not thought about. She looks like she has not slept in a week, yet she is the loveliest sight in England. Cassian, if you ruin this, I will never forgive you. Now, I am going back to her because she asked for me.” She paused at the door. “Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a man at a funeral.”
“Go back to your dragon, Joanna.”
She left, and the door banged shut.
For one moment, the room was very quiet and very tidy and very empty.
Cassian stood in the middle of it and let himself think what he had not let himself think since five past eleven the night before when a woman in a pale wrapper had kissed him in his studio and said good night and left without looking back.
She is wearing the pendant.
It meant nothing. It meant she was kind. It meant she had decided, in the careful way she decided everything, that it would be cruel to leave it behind a second time, and that the kindest course was to give it back to his face.
In his life, he had returned exactly one thing he loved to the man who had a right to it, and he had not enjoyed it. He recognized the shape of the kindness coming toward him and set his jaw against it.
The door opened again. This time, a knock sounded first which told him it was not Joanna before he had finished turning.
It was Richard. And behind him, treading carefully, not certain of his welcome, was Victor.
“They are seating the guests,” Richard said.
“Your sister is crying. Your future mother-in-law is also crying. A small boy at the back threw up in his hat. It is, by every measure, a wedding.” He paused, taking a longer look at Cassian, and the easy humor vanished from his face. “You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it as a friend. You look like the painting your father did not burn.”
“Richard.”
“I am only saying.”
Victor had stopped just inside the door. He had a small package in his hand, wrapped in paper, and he was turning it over and over.
“Cassian.” He had rehearsed this on the road; that much was plain.
“Victor.”
“I will be brief because they are seating the guests and because I find I do not do this well.” He set the package down on the table by the door.
“I was jealous. There. That is the whole of it. I have spent a fortnight finding a longer way to say it, but there is no longer way that is also true. We were second sons together. We were nothing together, and I liked you better when you were nothing because it meant I was not nothing alone. And then your brother died, and your father made you into something, and you let him because what else was a boy to do? I have spent sixteen years angry at you for surviving in the only way that was left to you.”
He stopped. His charming face, for once, was not doing anything charming.
“What I said to you in the small library about your bride, about her being good to bed and nothing more, was cruel. And it was even more cruel when I embarrassed her in front of everyone. I knew it was when I said it which is the worst kind of cruelty. I am sorry. I am truly, on my honor, happy for you. That is all. I will go and sit at the back where I belong.”
Cassian looked at him for a long moment.
He had known Victor for twenty-eight years. He had bled with him in a boxing ring and gotten drunk with him at Cambridge and stood next to him at the grave of his brother when he was fourteen, and he had hit him in the jaw a fortnight ago and had not until this moment been sorry for it.
He found that he was sorry for it now. In fact, he found that he could not afford, on this morning of all mornings, to keep one more grievance locked in the cold, tidy room of himself where grievances were kept because the room was full.
And he was tired, and a man on his way to the altar should not go there carrying his oldest friend’s name as a grievance.
“Sit where you like,” he said. “But not at the back. You will sit with Joanna, and you will hold her fan, and you will keep her from saying anything to the bride.”
Victor’s throat worked. “That is more than I deserve.”
“It is. Take it before I reconsider.”
Richard made a small sound that he quickly masked with a cough. “Well,” he drawled, “now that we have all wept, it is time to go down.”
Cassian looked once more in the mirror, at his dark blue coat, at the knot his father had taught him, at the face that Richard had said looked like a funeral.
He thought of the carriage waiting behind the chapel which he had ordered and which he could not now unorder and which might or might not be empty.
And he understood that in a little under half an hour, he was going to learn which in front of two hundred people, with no warning and no defense, the way he had learned every important thing in his life.
He went down to find out whether Alice would come to him or run.