Chapter 27
The guests were gone by four.
Joanna had gotten rid of the last of them, and the house had settled into the particular ringing silence of a place where something large had happened and stopped.
Cassian sat in the studio at the top of the house in an armchair that still smelled of Alice and did not move.
He had pulled a sheet over the painting. It was the first thing he had done when he had come up. Before the drink. Before anything.
He had walked into the studio she had made for him with the easel and the canvases and the small flat paint box with the dragonfly on the lid.
He had seen the half-finished canvas on the easel, the long pale shape of a woman in candlelight that he had started on the night before and had not finished for obvious reasons.
He had taken a dust sheet from the corner and thrown it over the easel so that he would not have to look at her looking at him. Then he had sat down.
Then, after a while, he had poured himself a drink because it seemed the thing a man did, but he had not drunk much of it. It sat in his left hand, warming. In his right hand, where it had been since the chapel, was the pendant.
He had not opened his right hand since he had left the chapel. He was aware that this was not entirely sane, but he found he did not care.
The light stretched gold across the dusty floor and slowly began to dim.
She is well away by now. She will be at Westbury by dark. Her father will rage, and her mother will weep. In a month, it will be a story the ton tells at dinners—the Lockwood girl who jilted the Ice Duke at the altar.
They will say she was brave, or they will say she was mad. Either way, she will be free of me which is what I wanted, which is what I gave her. The one decent thing in this whole sorry business.
All his life, he had wanted to do right. He had not known it would feel exactly like dying.
The knock, when it came, was not a knock so much as an assault. It was a fist, a large one, slamming against the wood, hammering on the door with a cheerful violence.
Whoever stood on the other side had climbed four flights of stairs at the end of a long day and plainly meant to make it the door’s fault.
Cassian did not answer.
The fist hammered again.
“I know you are in there, boy,” called a voice through the wood, a deep, cracked voice with the parade ground still in it after thirty years. “I can hear you not answering. It is a very loud silence. Open the door before I put my shoulder to it and ruin a perfectly good shoulder.”
Cassian set down the warm glass. He crossed the studio, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door.
And there in the dim of the stairwell, leaning on his cane, with his one good eye and the black patch over the bad one and his white hair standing up where he had pushed his hat off, was Matthew Turner, the Viscount Greencliff.
He had taught Cassian to box and to take blows and to stand back up. He was, in every sense of the word, the only father Cassian had ever had.
“There you are,” he said. “You look dreadful. Are you going to offer me the chair, or am I to die on my feet like a soldier?”
Cassian stood aside.
Matthew came in, surveyed the studio—the easel under the sheet, the abandoned glass, the closed right fist of the man who had let him in—and lowered himself into the armchair with a grunt and the long sigh of old bones meeting upholstery.
“Well…” He propped his cane against the armrest. “I will ask you one question, then I will say my piece, and then you may throw me down the stairs if you wish. Though I would not advise it. I am heavier than I look, and I will take a banister with me.” He fixed his one good eye on Cassian. “Why did you let her go?”
Cassian stood by the cold easel. “I gave her the choice.”
“That is not what I asked. I am old, not deaf.” A pause. “I am, occasionally, deaf. This is not one of the occasions. I asked why.”
“Because she wants what I cannot give her.”
“Go on.”
“A family. Children. She told me so in the orangery with her whole heart on her face, and I told her I would give her no heirs. I meant it, Matthew. You of all men know why I meant it.” His voice did not rise.
He had been trained too well to let it rise.
Instead, it came out very flat and level which was worse.
“I will not sire a child for the purpose of making it into something. I had a father who did that. I will not be him. She deserves the children she wants, but I cannot be the man who gives them to her, so the only decent course was to let her go to a man who can.”
“I see.” Matthew folded his hands on the head of his cane. “She was the one for you, you know.”
“Don’t.”
“I knew it the evening of the card game at the house party. The two of you sat at my elbow and lied to my face and everyone else’s about how you had fallen in love. You told three different stories between you and could not keep them straight.
“And then she said her favorite thing about you was your scowl, and you, my boy, who have not smiled since you were fourteen years old, smiled. The corner of your mouth. I saw it. I have been waiting sixteen years to see it.”
The old man’s voice gentled. “A man does not smile like that at a woman who means nothing to him. I knew it then. I have known it ever since. I rather thought you knew it, too.”
Cassian said nothing.
“Let me ask you a soldier’s question,” Matthew said.
“I am good at asking soldiers’ questions; it is the one thing the army taught me that the poets did not.
” He leaned forward. “Picture it. A year from now. Two. Lady Alice is married to a steady, sensible gentleman. She is happy—let us grant her happy—and she is round with his child. Full of it. Glowing with it. Another man’s child, growing under the place where your pendant used to sit.
” His good eye did not blink. “How does that picture make you feel, son? Be precise. I will know if you lie. I have been lied to by experts, and you are not one of them.”
Cassian’s right hand, the one holding the pendant, tightened until the small clasp bit into his palm.
“Like I would gouge my eyes out,” he gritted out, “sooner than see it.”
“Ah.”
“But if she is happy—”
“Yes, yes, if she is happy. You are very noble. It is exhausting.” Matthew waved a dismissive hand. “I have a better question. Easier. Would you ever, for the rest of your life, be happy without her?”
“No,” Cassian said. It came out of him before the trained part could stop it. “No. But that is not the point. The point is what she needs, and what she needs is a family, and I—”
“And you have decided, all by yourself in your tidy little head, that you cannot give her one.” The old man’s voice lost its dryness and found what had made a frightened boy of fourteen follow him into a boxing ring and out the other side of his grief.
“Listen to me, Cassian, because I am going to tell you the truth, and I will only say it once.
“You have spent your whole life so afraid of becoming your father that you have let him control you from the grave. He is dead. He has been dead for two years. And you are still living under his rules, painting in secret in your studio like a guilty boy, because somewhere inside you, the boy still believes that wanting is the same as being made to give up everything for it.”
He shook his white head slowly. “That girl will not be your father. Have you watched her with her younger sister? Have you watched her with the maid’s boy, whom she gathered up and rocked as if she had been born to it?
She will not force a child to be anything.
She will let them be terrible at painting and loud at dinner and themselves entirely.
And you, you great fool, you will not be your father because the proof that you will not be him is that you have spent thirty years being terrified of it.
“He never once in his life was afraid of becoming cruel. You are. That is the whole difference, and it is the difference between a man and a monster, and it is everything.” He sat back. “Now, think about the future you could have. Properly. Do not flinch from it. Think.”
And, God help him, Cassian thought hard.
He had not, in two years of disciplined refusal, let himself build the picture even once. He built it now all at once, and it came with a terrible clarity, like cold water after a thirst he had spent two years imposing on himself.
He saw a morning. He saw the studio with the sheets off the windows and the light pouring in.
He saw a dark-haired child, three perhaps, painting on the walls because no one had told them not to.
He saw a smaller girl, dark-haired and green-eyed like her mother, shrieking with laughter as they were chased across the gallery by a tall man in his shirtsleeves who moved with a boxer’s ease and laughed out loud as he had not let himself laugh in sixteen years.
And he saw Alice.
He saw Alice in the middle of it all, standing in the golden light, round again with another child, her hand resting on her belly, watching the chase and laughing her great, loud, uncareful laugh.
It was the one she had told him she had taught herself on purpose so that her sister would learn it was allowed.
The picture did not frighten him. It made him want to weep with how badly he wanted it.
“That is what I thought,” Matthew said softly.
Cassian opened his right hand at last. The pendant lay in his palm, gray and bright, the warm shape of it pressed into his skin where he had held it for six hours.
“What if it is too late?” he rasped.
“It is never too late for true love, you ridiculous boy. It is the only thing in the world there is always time for.” Matthew reached for his cane and, with a great show of difficulty, levered himself out of the chair.
“Provided you do not stand here feeling sorry for yourself. Go and show her properly, with both hands and no dignity left, that you know exactly what you almost threw away. Grand gestures, Cassian. I never married, so I would not know, but I am told women are fond of them.”
“I would do a great deal more than a grand gesture,” Cassian said.
Matthew straightened, planted his cane, and looked at him with his good eye. “Then what in the name of God are you still doing up here, talking to an old man, when there is a girl at Westbury crying her eyes out and a great deal of work to be done before morning?”
Cassian was already moving toward the door.