Chapter 33
Alistair was waiting before midnight, unsure if she would come out but prepared to stay there for an hour or two all the same, just in case. This time, Cecilia came down the steps to him, cloaked and booted. ‘Let’s walk a little,’ she said. ‘I am restless tonight.’
He hoped she did not think that his interest in her was entirely sexual.
But perhaps she had little reason so far to believe that it was not.
‘Gladly,’ he told her, following her down onto the shore and falling into step beside her.
He was aware almost immediately that she was going slower than she might otherwise have done, out of consideration for him, but he did not comment on the fact.
‘I only came to enquire about the picnic. I’ve been worried about you – all of you.
I have sought the reassurance that nothing could happen in broad daylight, with you forewarned, but I did not fully convince myself of the truth of it. ’
She told him the tale of her adventures as they strolled together, and he was smiling by the end, though still not entirely untroubled.
‘I am delighted that you were able to direct the situation in a manner that gave you control of it, and I would have given much to see you in full spate, but at the same time, you should not be obliged to go to such lengths to make yourselves safe.’
‘Women have always had to do such things,’ she said soberly. ‘And I don’t suppose it always works. Our new wealth makes us targets, but we are protected – to some degree – by our standing in society, where other girls in the same situation would not be. That can’t be right.’
‘Of course it is not.’
They walked on a little in silence. After a while, Cecilia said musingly, ‘My brother-in-law, Allegra’s husband, is a politician, a leader of the party agitating for social change, and since she married him, my sister, who was once so awkward and unsure of herself, has become an influential political hostess.
It is a shared passion for them. His family history is complicated, and it has given him a great hunger to see the world’s injustices addressed.
The immediate battle is to bring down the rotten boroughs and give more men of middling rank the franchise, but he and Allegra believe that it should be extended to women too.
I agree; how could I not? But even that would not help deal directly with men like Lord Pallant, would it? ’
How wonderful it was to be alone with her in the darkness, saying exactly what they thought, not cooped up in some damn drawing room exchanging polite nonsense.
‘Not directly, and not overnight. But if society were to be reformed, root and branch, men like him would have less power. The near-universal habit of deference to the so-called Quality is to blame. If a farmer or a prosperous Debenbridge merchant tried to do one tenth of what he’s done over the last fifteen years, they’d find themselves in the pillory, if not in gaol.
Even if matters never progressed so far as a charge of rape, life would be made impossible for them here, and they’d have to mend their ways or flee.
His station in life is a pure fiction, and yet remarkably robust despite that.
It’s not even as though he could bribe himself out of trouble, as richer men of rank so shamefully do, because by all accounts, he’s close on bankrupt.
Cecilia, I would be delighted to set the world to rights with you, and walk all night doing so, but you do realise that they will call on you soon, to see if you are recovered?
Indeed, they must, or show themselves deplorably uncivil, and be censured for it, by your family and everyone else who comes to hear of it.
Especially, I am sorry to say, those who turn a blind eye to his other activities because he has a title.
Tomorrow, probably, they will come, and inveigle themselves into your company again. ’
She snorted. ‘I won’t be recovered, I assure you, sir.
I shall be in my chamber, unable to see visitors, with Bianca at my bedside.
Bea and Miss Macintyre can receive them, and I hope their reception will be of such a nature that they will not stay long.
But you’re right, it’s not a long-term solution.
They will come back, and I will be obliged in the end to see him.
I would very much like to tell Oliver Pallant what I think of him, and send him away forever. But I don’t think I can.’
Alistair sighed. ‘Nor can you keep throwing a fit of the vapours every time he approaches. I don’t know if anyone has spoken to you of it yet, but there is an assembly of sorts in Debenbridge.
It is on the night of the full moon next week, to make the journey there and back easier for those of us who live outside the town.
It is a traditional spring celebration, which everyone of all ranks generally attends.
Even if you avoid him till then, he will be there, asking you to dance.
Can you doubt it? You are in mourning; perhaps you can avoid him to some degree.
But then you won’t be able to dance with anyone else either – any of you.
How can one sister be in deep mourning and the others not? ’
‘I did not know; thank you for telling me. Do you dance, Alistair?’
She said this last in carefully neutral tones, and even so, he might have returned some sharp answer just a few days ago.
He had known her such a short while, and yet it seemed he was already changed by the knowing.
‘It is a long time indeed since I essayed it, for obvious reasons. I cannot promise to do so well or gracefully. But I should like to – if you would be my partner. Early in the evening, before the country dances grow riotous. It can be a wild sort of an affair, you know – most unlike the assemblies you may be used to.’
‘That sounds promising.’
Alistair thought that might have been a moment for him to say that nothing would please him better to take her aside on that evening and kiss her till the world whirled around them both.
Or now, for that matter, here under the night sky with all its myriad stars.
It was true. But his need to show her that he was not panting after her like some savage beast restrained him.
She had described a most uncomfortable afternoon, in which she and her sisters had felt themselves under constant threat of unwelcome male advances, and been harshly reminded of the limits of their power, even now they were rich women.
He could not bear that she might think he’d take advantage of her now, under the cover of sympathy.
The last thing in the world he wished for was to be placed in the same category of man as Oliver Pallant.
No, that was wrong – the last thing he wished for was to suspect, even for a moment, that he belonged there.
‘Shall we go back?’ he asked. ‘You’ve had a most trying day, it seems to me.’
‘Yes, thank you. I really have. I was amused, when we got home – pleased with myself, I suppose, at having tricked Lord Pallant and thwarted his schemes, at least temporarily. But afterwards, I felt a little… soiled. I wondered, and maybe it’s fanciful of me, how a village girl who had been taken advantage of by him would feel, if she saw us passing by with him in our fine new clothes, off on a careless expedition of pleasure.
It would seem to her that her suffering was worth nothing and his actions had no consequences.
And as far as I can see, they don’t. I’m not asking you to comfort me; there is no comfort for such a thought.
But being out here has made me feel cleaner somehow. Probably I’m talking nonsense.’
‘Not at all. Never that. I too find being out on the sands at night can put my troubles in perspective. Look at the sky above us; how much significance do our brief lives really have, in the face of all that magnificence? What we do counts for little, and what we say for even less.’ It was something he’d felt before, and which had helped him in his lowest moments, when self-pity and useless regret had threatened to overwhelm him, but he wasn’t certain he was being entirely honest now.
If he felt insignificant out here, she did not.
Not to him. She had kissed him and made everything different.
They tipped back their heads and stood in silence, gazing up at the heavens above them.
It was a clear night, and in the sections of the sky where the rising moon was not, the dark-blue velvet was embroidered with more brilliant points of light than it was possible to count.
Nothing that man created could ever be as beautiful – not the jewels of a queen or empress.
Cecilia’s hand came out and reached for his, and he held it in a firm grip.
In that moment, he knew with blinding certainty that he loved her.