Chapter 28
By the second morning, Alice had cried so much that she had begun to feel faintly ridiculous about it, which did not, as it happened, stop her crying.
She sat at the window in the breakfast room at Westbury in yesterday’s shawl, with her tea going cold and her toast untouched, and watched the rain that had fallen overnight drip from the edge of the orangery roof.
She was distantly aware that her family had arranged themselves around her grief like furniture around a fire.
Her mother sat very close, patting her hand at intervals and saying, every quarter of an hour or so, that there were other dukes, which did not help at all.
Daphne sat on her other side with red-rimmed eyes, having decided, with the fierce loyalty that Alice loved her for, to be as miserable as her sister whether or not she understood why.
And in the corner, with the stiff awkwardness of two men who had no idea what to do with a weeping woman and would rather charge a cannon, sat her father and the Marquess of Dowton.
Isaac, who had come to call on Daphne and found a house in mourning, had stayed anyway which Alice thought rather decent of him.
Currently, he was attempting to interest her father in a point of natural philosophy concerning the migration of a particular moth.
Her father, who did not care for moths, was nodding at all the wrong moments.
It was her father who undid her in the end, not the moths.
A footman had come in at eight with the morning papers on a salver, the scandal sheets among them. Alice had seen the top one and gone white because she knew, the way one knows the weather, exactly whose name would be in it and exactly what would be said.
Before she could so much as reach for it, her father had stood up, crossed the room in three strides, taken the entire stack off the salver, and thrown it straight onto the fire.
The room had fallen silent. Her father, who had never in his life done a single thing without deciding first whether it was correct, had stood with his back to them and watched the scandal sheets curl and catch and burn.
“There,” he had said gruffly to the fire. “Damned things. Bad for digestion.” He had not turned around. “Eat your toast, Alice.”
And Alice, who had spent twenty-five years failing to make this man love her in any way she could see, put her face down on her folded arms on the breakfast table and wept harder than she had wept since the chapel.
She would have laughed if she had not been so wretched because she understood now, far too late and far too well, that her whole family loved her in their cramped and clumsy and inarticulate way and had loved her all along.
She had spent her life so busy ensuring their happiness that she had never let them try, however badly, to ensure hers.
“There is a caller, My Lady,” the footman announced from the door.
Alice lifted her head. For one wild, ruinous instant, her whole body went still, and her heart leapt up into her throat. She hated it for leaping, and she hated herself for its leaping.
“Who is it?” she asked in a barely steady voice.
“Lady Joanna Arnolds, My Lady.”
Of course. Of course, it was Joanna. Not him. It would never be him. She had made sure it would never be him; that had been the entire point.
She pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes for a moment and then got up because Joanna was the one person in the world she most wanted and least deserved to see.
She stepped out into the hall to find Joanna in her traveling cloak with the rain still on it.
Joanna took one look at Alice’s swollen face and did not say a single one of the words Alice had been bracing for. She simply opened her arms. Alice walked into them and let herself be held.
“You absolute idiot,” Joanna murmured into her hair. “You wonderful, self-sacrificing, infuriating idiot. Come for a ride; the rain is stopping. You have not had air in two days, and you smell slightly of grief and old tea, so I am taking you out before you turn entirely into a Bronte heroine.”
“I cannot, Joanna. I look a fright. I cannot see anyone.”
“You will see me, the inside of a carriage, and a great deal of dull wet countryside. Mama Lockwood.” Joanna turned her considerable charm on Lady Westbury, who had appeared in the doorway. “May I steal her for an hour? I will return her improved or at least aired.”
“Oh,” said Lady Westbury, who had been frightened for two days and was glad to see someone with a plan. “Oh, yes. Yes, please do. Take her, dear. Air… Air is the thing.”
So, ten minutes later, Alice found herself bundled into Joanna’s carriage in her crumpled gown, her face hastily sponged and her bonnet askew, rolling out through the gates and into a clearing gray morning.
Joanna kept up a determined, cheerful patter about nothing and everything—the weather, a hat she had seen, a scandal involving someone Alice had never met.
Alice leaned her aching head against the squabs and let the patter wash over her and thought that perhaps in a year or ten, this might become bearable, this dull rinsed-out feeling, if only Joanna would keep talking and never once say her brother’s name.
Joanna, to her credit, never once said her brother’s name. She talked instead about the wedding gowns she had ordered and would now, presumably, cancel, and did not let the word wedding hang in the air long enough to wound.
She talked about a horse she meant to buy and a book she had begun reading and a dreadful soprano they had both endured at a musicale in the spring, and she reached across at intervals and squeezed Alice’s cold hand, and she did not ask a single question.
Alice understood dimly, through the fog of her grief, that this careful, determined patter was love too.
Joanna had decided the kindest help she could offer her was to fill the silence with harmless nothings so that there was no room left in it for the grief itself.
Alice loved her for it but could not say so, so she only turned her hand under Joanna’s and held on.
“You are very quiet,” Joanna noted gently at one point.
“You need not talk. I shall talk enough for both of us; I always have. Mama used to say I was born talking and have not since drawn breath. Only, Alice…” She paused.
“You did a brave thing. I want you to know that. Whatever anyone says in the days to come—and they will say a great deal—you did a brave thing, a true thing. I am proud to call you my friend, and I shall call you my friend until we are both very old, whatever else does or does not come to pass. Do you hear me?”
Alice’s eyes filled. “I hear you,” she croaked.
“Good.” Joanna briskly turned back to the window. “Now, I saw the most absurd bonnet on Bond Street. It had an entire pheasant on it. A whole pheasant, Alice, as though the woman had caught one on the way to the milliner’s…”
It was some time before Alice realized that the scenery outside the window had stopped being unfamiliar.
She sat up. She knew that line of limes, the same that ran down from the chapel.
She knew that long gravel sweep. She knew, with a lurch that went straight through her like cold water, the gray stone front of the house rising at the end of the avenue because she had stood in its attic two nights ago with a paint box in her hands and given away her whole heart and called it a parting gift.
“Joanna.” Her voice came out strange. “Joanna, where have you brought me?”
“Home,” Joanna said.
Before Alice could so much as reach for the door, the carriage had swept up to the steps and stopped. Joanna leaned across, opened the door, planted one firm hand on the small of Alice’s back, and shoved her onto the gravel.
“I am so sorry. I am the worst friend in England. I will make it up to you for the rest of my life. Go inside, Alice.”
“Joanna, you cannot—I will not—”
But the door had banged shut, and the whip had cracked. And Joanna, the worst friend in England, was already wheeling the carriage in a wide spray of gravel and bowling back off down the avenue of limes at a speed that suggested she had no intention whatsoever of being caught.
Alice was left standing alone on the front steps of Langton Manor in yesterday’s gown with her bonnet askew and her lips parted and nowhere on earth to go but in.
She looked down to steady herself… and stopped.
There were small arrows painted on the steps. Dozens, in bright careless color—the blue of cornflowers and the yellow of gorse—all pointing toward the great open doors.
And around the arrows, painted with no care at all for the perfect gray stone of a house that had never in its life been permitted a single object out of place, was a riot of flowers.
Painted flowers everywhere. Splashed up the steps and across the threshold and trailing through the hall in a bright impossible mess, made by a hand that did not seem to care in the least who saw it, leading her in and on and up.
Alice stood very still on the steps of the chapel she had run from with her heart skittering like a hare and followed the painted flowers with her eyes all the way to the open doors.
For the longest moment of her life, she could not make her feet move at all.
Then she lifted her wrinkled skirts and stepped inside.