Chapter 31
Cassian spent the week after learning how to ask for things.
He had never, in his adult life, asked for anything.
He had taken, or he had been given, or he had done without in cold silence.
But he had never asked because an ask could be refused, and a man who had been refused his father’s love at fourteen had decided, somewhere in the wreck of that year, never to put himself in the way of a refusal again.
It had been a tidy way to live. It had kept his pride in very good order.
It had also, he was coming to understand, kept him alone in a swept-clean house for sixteen years.
And now, he found, with paint under his fingernails and a badly behaved dog asleep on his bed, that he no longer had the smallest interest in his pride.
So on the second day, he had himself driven to Westbury Hall and asked.
It was not a comfortable interview. Lord Westbury received him in his study as he had three weeks earlier in London when Cassian had stood before him and informed him flatly that he intended to marry his daughter.
It was the room where the Earl had threatened Alice with banishment to the country, and where Cassian had told him in front of her that he would let no man disrespect her again, not even her father.
Neither of them sat down this time. They stood on opposite sides of the cold hearth, two tall hard men who had taken a profound and immediate dislike to one another.
The Earl looked at the Duke who had let his daughter run from a chapel in front of the whole ton, and the Duke looked at the Earl who had burned the scandal sheets before his daughter could read them. A long, uncivil silence stretched out between them.
Lord Westbury broke it first.
“You let her run.”
“I did.”
“In front of two hundred people. You stood in my way. You laid your hands on me in your own chapel.”
“I stepped in front of you, but I laid no hands on anyone.” Cassian held his eyes.
“And yes, I let her run. I gave her a carriage and let her run because I got it into my head that loving a woman meant handing her the door. But I was wrong. It was the single greatest mistake of my life, and I have come to ask whether I can fix it.” He paused. “Properly.”
He took a deep breath. “I asked you once for her hand as a man closing a bargain. I am asking you now as a man who cannot sleep. There is a difference, and you are entitled to mark it.”
Lord Westbury looked at him for a long time.
“Alice,” he said at last, and his gruff voice caught strangely on the word, “is the best of my children. I am aware that a father should not say so. I have two children, and I love them both, but Alice is the best. She has been the best since she was a small thing carrying her toys to her baby sister because she had decided all on her own, at the age of five, that the baby should not feel unwelcome. She has spent her whole life like that. Carrying her toys to other people.”
He turned and looked into the dead fire.
“Her mother and I did not make it easy for her to want things for herself. We meant well. We’ve always meant well.
But she learned, somewhere under this roof, that her wants meant nothing.
I have watched her carry everyone else’s happiness on her back for twenty-five years like a girl carrying water and never once set the buckets down. ”
He was silent for a moment.
“When she ran from the chapel, do you know what I felt under the rage? Under the shame?”
“No.”
“I felt glad.” Lord Westbury said it to the fire, as though it were a confession. “For one moment, before the shame caught up with me, I thought at last she had done something for herself, even if it would ruin us. And then I was ashamed of being glad, and then I went home and burned the papers.”
He turned back. His eyes, Daphne’s blue eyes, were not entirely dry which neither man acknowledged.
“If you can teach her to set the buckets down, if you can be a man who lets her want things out loud in her own house without making her feel she has stolen them, then you may have her, along with my blessing. I will stand in that chapel on Thursday and give her to you with a happy heart, and I will never mention the carriage again so long as I live.” He held out his hand. “Can you do that, Your Grace?”
“I have a house,” Cassian said, taking it, “painted entirely with flowers because she likes to make a mess and a dog I swore I would never own because she wanted one and a studio I reopened because she gave it back to me. I have been letting her want things for a week. I intend to do it for fifty years. I am rather good at it. It is the only thing I have ever been good at that my father did not teach me.”
Lord Westbury let out a laugh. It was a short, rusty bark of a laugh, like a gate that had not been opened in years, and it startled them both.
“Stay for dinner,” he offered. “My wife will faint with joy, and my younger daughter will ask the Marquess of Dowton forty questions about beetles, and you will be bored to the bone. It will be your first taste of the family you are marrying into. Consider it a fair warning.”
Cassian stayed for dinner.
He was, in fact, bored to the bone.
He watched Daphne and Isaac bend toward one another over the fish course, shy and bright and entirely lost in some shared rapture concerning the wing of a beetle.
He watched Lady Westbury weep happily into her soup three separate times, and he watched Lord Westbury be gruff and awkward and, underneath it, plainly relieved.
He thought of his father’s dinners, the cold correct silence of them, the terror of using the wrong fork, and understood that he was being shown, across this loud, untidy, overflowing table, the exact opposite of everything that had made him.
He would give a great deal to raise his own children in a house that sounded like this one, and not like the house from his childhood.
Afterward, he found Isaac in the hall while the ladies went upstairs.
“Dowton.”
“Your Grace.” The young Marquess flushed and bowed.
He was a slight, scholarly, gentle creature, and Cassian, who could have broken him over one knee, found that he liked him enormously because Daphne looked at him the way Alice looked at what she meant to keep.
“You mean to marry the younger sister.”
“I—That is, I have not yet. I had thought to wait until after your wedding, so as not to… That is, I would not for the world presume to—”
“Do not wait.” Cassian regarded him. “I waited. I waited, and I refused, and I handed the woman I love the door, and I have spent every hour since undoing it. I am the cautionary tale that the poets will write about. Do not be cautious.
“Speak to her father, who is, you may have noticed, in an unusually agreeable humor this evening on account of the soup and the beetles, and ask Daphne tomorrow before the mood passes. Take it from a man who knows. Caution is the most expensive thing a coward buys, and he buys it on credit, and the bill comes due all at once.”
Isaac looked up at him with his mouth slightly open. “That,” he said, “is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Do not repeat it.”
“I shall repeat it at every dinner for the rest of my life.”
On the fifth day, he gathered his friends at Threadgill’s.
Matthew sat on the long bench against the wall with his cane between his knees and his one good eye on the ring while Richard stripped down to his shirtsleeves and put up his fists.
Victor—restored, forgiven, a little quieter than he had been but more himself for it—leaned on the ropes and hurled insults that had no edge of envy underneath them this time.
And Cassian boxed the way he always had to express everything he could not say. Except now, there was less that he could not say, so he boxed badly, distracted, smiling, and Richard got past his guard three times in a row and crowed about it.
“You are hopeless,” Richard said, dancing back. “You used to be the best blade in this room, and now, you box like a man thinking about his woman.”
“I am thinking about my wife.”
“She is not your wife yet.”
“She will be on Thursday.”
“Are you sure this time? You will not give her a horse and a head start and a fond farewell?” Richard grinned to take the sting off it.
Cassian, who would have flattened any other man for the joke a week ago, only dropped his guard entirely and let Richard tap him gently on the jaw.
“I am sure,” he replied. “I have spoken to her father. I have her hand and his blessing and a special license. And if you make one more reference to the carriage, Richard, I will set her dog on you. It has eaten two of my boots, and it is only just beginning.”
Victor laughed from the ropes. “Let me attend this one,” he said. “The first wedding, I missed the best part, having been told to sit with Joanna and hold her fan, and then it was canceled. Let me come to the one that holds.”
“You will stand up with me.”
The room fell quiet. Even the men sparring at the far end seemed to pause. Richard looked at Cassian and then at Victor, whose charming face had gone still.
“Cassian,” Victor said. “I hit your oldest friendship in the teeth at a house party and spoke of your bride in a way I am ashamed of now. You do not have to—”
“You are my oldest friendship, Victor. We made our peace. Stand up with me.” Cassian wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “We were nothing once, you said. Two second sons and no future between us. Well, you will stand up beside me on Thursday while I marry the best thing that has ever happened to me, and you will be the first to congratulate me, and then we will all go and get extravagantly drunk, the way nothings do. And you will forgive yourself, Victor, because I have, and it is tiresome being forgiven by everyone except oneself. I should know, I have only just stopped.”
Victor turned his face away for a moment, toward the high dirty window. When he turned it back, it was wet. He did not pretend otherwise.
“Thursday,” he said roughly. “I will be there. Sober, even, until it is done.”
Suddenly, Matthew cleared his throat. They all looked at him. The old man had been silent the whole match, watching with his one good eye the way he had watched ten thousand matches.
He levered himself up on his cane and surveyed the three of them, the Duke and the Duke and the Earl, all of them grown, all of them his in a way, all of them better men than the boys he had first taught to put up their fists.
“I will tell you the only thing I know about love,” he said. “And then I will need someone to buy me a very large dinner, for I have earned it. I have done more matchmaking this fortnight than in my whole previous life, and it is exhausting work for an old soldier.”
He planted his cane. “A man spends the first half of his life learning to hold himself together. Discipline. Guard up. Take the blow, give nothing away. It is a fine art that the world rewards, and I taught it to every one of you, God forgive me.”
His voice gentled, the way it did when he stopped being dry and started being true.
“And then, if the man is very lucky, he meets the one person in the world in front of whom it is finally safe to come apart, and the whole art reverses.
He spends the second half of his life learning to put his guard down, to let himself be seen, to be at last a man and not a fortress.
You have found her, boy. The hard half is behind you.
“Now comes the part the poets write about. I never got it for myself, the youngest son of a baron with one good eye and a borrowed title. But by God, I have watched you get it, and that is nearly as good, and I find I am content.”
A brief silence fell over the room.
“That,” Richard said thickly, “is the most you have ever said at once in eleven years.”
“Yes.” Matthew nodded. “And I will not say so much again, so you had better remember it. Now, my dinner.”
They bought him dinner.
All four of them got extravagantly drunk, the way nothings did. But they were not nothings, not any of them, not any longer.
Cassian walked home through the late summer dark, across the Langton park to a house painted over with flowers and a dog that had eaten his boots and a studio with the windows open. He stood for a long while in the empty hall, looking up the great staircase, and thought, Two more days.
For the first time in his life, he found that he felt only joy at the thought. The simple, uncomplicated joy of a man counting down the days to the best day of his life.
Two more days.
He could hardly wait.