Chapter 26
The chapel was full of flowers and people, and Alice could not, for the life of her, remember a single face in it.
She remembered the doors. She remembered the weight of the doors swinging back, the cool stone breath of the place coming out to meet her, and the sudden turn of every head, like wind blowing over a field of barley, all of it bending in one direction at once.
She remembered her sister’s hand, warm and trembling, tucked into the crook of her arm. She remembered, most of all and against her will, the gray pendant resting at the base of her throat, warm now from her skin, pulsing faintly in time with her heart.
And she remembered Cassian.
He was standing at the altar in dark blue with his hands at his sides and his shoulders set.
And he was looking at her the way he had looked at her across Mrs. Hatcher’s back room and across the lake and across her father’s orangery, as though he had decided, against all his careful planning, to want her.
He did not smile.
He had never, in all the time she had known him, smiled at her in any way she could put a name to. But he looked at her, and he did not stop looking at her.
Alice walked toward the only man in England she had ever loved, in order to leave him.
“Oh, Alice,” Daphne breathed beside her. “I have never seen a man look at a woman the way he is looking at you. You are so loved. You are so terribly, terribly loved. I am so happy for you, I think I will cry the whole way down.”
Do not, little one. Please don’t. I cannot do this and listen to you at once.
“Hush,” Alice said gently. “You will spoil the flowers.”
Daphne gave a wet laugh and then fell quiet.
It was the cruelest walk Alice had ever taken, and she had taken some unkind ones.
She had walked into her father’s study a week before her betrothal to be told whom she would marry. She had walked her little sister to the schoolroom on the morning their mother had said in front of both of them that it was a pity Daphne had not been a boy and twice the pity Alice had not.
She had thought that she knew the full range of difficult walks. She had been wrong.
The full range of difficult walks ended here on the warm stone of a chapel with her sister gushing into her ear and her heart breaking very quietly and very completely in time with her slow, careful steps.
She walked toward a man who was looking at her as though she were the answer to a question he had spent thirty years refusing to ask aloud.
She loved him.
She had known it for nine days. She had decided it against an orange tree and confirmed it in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room and surrendered to it in his studio with a paint box in her hands.
And she had spent the whole ride to the chapel telling herself the single reason that her love did not matter.
It was the only reason that had ever mattered to her: she loved him too much to take from him what she wanted.
A wife. Children. A house full of small, loud people that he had told her, in a quiet voice, he could not give her because the cost of being made into something one was not had already been paid once in this family by him.
She would not let him pay it twice. She would not become the woman who made him do it.
That was her reasoning.
She had gone over it so many times over the past two days that it had worn smooth in her mind like a stone in a pocket. And it was sound, it was good, it was the kindest course.
The trouble with it, the single fatal trouble, was that her body did not believe a word of it. Walking down the aisle, her body wanted only to reach him.
Her feet wanted to carry her the last ten steps and put her hand in his and stay. Her heart, the traitor, was beating out his name against the warm stone of the pendant.
She had to remind herself with every step that what the heart wanted and what love required were two different things and that she had learned that lesson so early and so thoroughly that it ought to come easily by now, but it was not easy at all today.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she was doing it in front of two hundred people. She could not even let it show on her face because if it showed, Daphne would see, and if Daphne saw, she would understand.
The purpose of it all, from the staged kiss in the ballroom to this moment, had been to hide from her what it had cost.
She reached the altar. Daphne, beaming through her tears, brought Alice’s hand to Cassian’s the way she had been told, the way custom required, so that the bride might be given over.
Alice did not take his hand. Instead, she reached up with hands that she was distantly amazed to find were steady and unfastened the small clasp at the back of her neck.
She drew the gray pendant free, the diamond the precise cool color of his eyes, the thing he had given her in her father’s orangery and called nothing and meant everything by. She took his extended hand, turned it over, pressed the warm pendant into his palm, and closed his long fingers around it.
“I am sorry,” she whispered so that only he could hear.
The whole chapel had fallen into a particular silence that was louder than noise.
Cassian looked down at his closed hand. Then he looked up at her. Whatever it cost him—she would think for a long time that it must have cost him a great deal—he did not let it reach his face.
His face stayed exactly as it always was—cool, composed, and neutral. The face that had earned him the name the Ice Duke. Except his eyes, the gray of the diamond now warming in his fist, were not cold at all.
“I am sorry too,” he said.
He turned slightly and lifted his chin toward the small door at the back of the chapel.
Beyond it stood a carriage with its door already opened and a driver already up on the box, exactly as he had promised her in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room nine days ago.
Whispers spread through the chapel like fire through dry grass.
Alice looked at the carriage. Then she looked at him. For one ruinous, unforgivable moment, she let herself wish that he would say no. That the Ice Duke would, for once in his disciplined life, lose control of the situation, take her by the wrist, refuse the offer he himself had made, and keep her.
He did not.
He stood with her pendant in his hand and her freedom standing open on the gravel, and he gave her the one thing he had in his power to give—choice.
Alice understood far too late that this was what love looked like in a man who had been taught it was weakness. It looked like a man handing you the door.
She ran.
She heard her mother cry out.
Behind her, she heard her father’s voice, sharp and rising. “Alice, you will stop! You will stop this instant!” She heard the heavy scrape of his chair and his quick, furious step coming after her down the aisle.
And then she heard nothing of him at all because the Duke of Langton had stepped directly into his path and stood there, a wall in dark blue, and let his bride run.
She did not look back. She did not dare.
She gathered her skirts and burst through the great doors and into the cool morning air. The driver unfolded the steps, she climbed in, the door was shut, the whip cracked, and the wheels caught the gravel and turned down the long avenue of limes.
Only then did she let herself look.
Through the small carriage window, she saw the chapel doors standing open. And in them, very straight, very still, stood a man in a dark blue coat, his hand hanging at his side and something gray and bright closed inside it, watching her go.
She pressed her hand flat against the glass.
She did not mean to. She did not decide it. Her hand simply came up and pressed against the cool window, fingers spread, as though she could reach back across the distance she was putting between them.
For one moment, she thought she saw his hand lift, and her heart leapt up so hard it hurt. Then he stilled it. She watched him master it, watched the famous control come down over him like a portcullis, watched him keep the promise he had made her in that back room nine days ago.
He was doing for her the single cruelest thing she had ever asked of anyone which was to stand still while the person he loved drove away and make it look, for her sake, like a kindness rather than a wound.
The limes came between them. The avenue turned. Then he was gone.
And Alice, who had spent her whole life making certain that everyone around her was happy before she would permit herself to feel anything at all, dropped her face into her gloved hands in the dim of the moving carriage.
She was alone at last with no one left to be brave for, and finally, finally, she let herself cry.
She cried the whole way to Westbury.
She cried for the man in the doorway, and for the children she would never have, and for the great, loud, happy life she had glimpsed for three weeks and handed back.
Most of all, she cried because she got exactly what she had wanted. Her sister was free, her sacrifice was complete, the deal was discharged, and the debt was paid.
And she had never in her life been so perfectly, so thoroughly, so successfully miserable.