Chapter 21
“We cannot stay like this.” Rosaline’s voice was scarcely a breath, her forehead still resting where his heart slammed against his ribs.
“Nay.” His hand slowly traced down the length of her spine. “We cannae.”
And yet neither of them moved.
The candle on the far shelf had guttered low, and in its failing light, Rosaline could not make herself care about the door, the party, the whole ordered world waiting for her on the other side of it.
There was only the warm dark and the steady thunder under her cheek and the astonishing, ruinous fact of what she had just let happen in her brother’s house.
Her body did not feel like her own. It felt remade, tender in places she had never before had cause to consider, humming still with the memory of his hands and his mouth and the low wrecked sound of her name in his voice.
A week ago, she had been a wallflower who counted windowpanes to keep from weeping. She no longer knew what she was.
Then, from somewhere down the corridor, footsteps sounded.
Rosaline went rigid in his arms. Magnus’s head came up, all the languor gone out of him.
“Rosaline?” Samuel’s voice called, the measured tread of his boots drawing nearer. “Rosaline, are you back here? The Hargraves have been asking after you this quarter hour.”
Three hard raps sounded at the library door.
Rosaline could not breathe, but Magnus had already moved, and where her hands shook uselessly at her sides, his were quick and certain.
He drew the shoulder of her gown back into place, smoothed the crushed silk down her waist, turned her by the hip toward the thread of light at the door, and lifted his fingers to her hair, finding the pin that had come loose and sliding it back into place.
“Breathe,” he whispered in her ear. “Slowly. Ye were faint, ye came for quiet. That’s all. Ye’re perfect. Go.”
“A moment,” she called, and her voice came out miraculously level. “I am coming.”
When she looked back, Magnus was already gone, melted into the shadows behind the tall shelves as though the room had swallowed him whole.
She opened the door to her brother.
Samuel filled the frame with a branch of candles in his hand, and their light spilled past her into the dim room and found nothing, because there was nothing to find. His eyes moved over her all the same, over the color in her face she could not command down.
“What are you doing back here, in the dark, alone?” he asked.
For the space of a breath, she could not form a single word.
“The rooms were so warm.” She pressed a hand to her temple and did not have to feign unsteadiness. “I felt faint. I only wanted a moment out of the crush, somewhere quiet, and I did not think to bring a candle. I’m sorry, Samuel. I’ll come along now.”
He did not answer at once. He looked past her into the library, at the two chairs, the cold hearth, the shelves giving up nothing, and something flashed across his face that she could not read and did not like.
For one endless moment, she was certain he knew, that he would step past her into the room and call Magnus out of the dark by his name, and that everything she had spent her whole life guarding would come down at a stroke because she had been too weak to keep her hands to herself.
Her pulse struck so hard against her throat she was sure he would hear it.
“You will not disappear again,” he said. His hand closed around her upper arm, not gently, and drew her out into the corridor and the light. “Not once more this evening. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
He steered her back toward the music, and only at the bend in the corridor did he glance over his shoulder at the dark doorway they had left behind.
Samuel watched her after that, not bothering to hide it.
The suspicion took root in him the way frost took a window, spreading fine and silent until the whole pane was rimed over. He had no proof of anything, but he did not need proof. He needed only the memory of her flushed face in a doorway and he set about tightening every rein he held.
Three mornings later, he summoned her to his study, and she stood before his desk while he attended to his correspondence.
“You have been strange for weeks,” he remarked. “Distracted. Careless. I have watched you make progress this Season, and I have lately watched you begin to squander it. I will not have it, Rosaline.”
He set down his pen and looked at her then, which was worse.
“Do you think any of this is easy for me? It’s Beatrice’s first Season.
Then I have Ivy’s in just a few years. Everything those girls will ever be offered rests on the name you carry into a marriage, and every hour you spend mooning and vague is an hour you steal from their futures.
Is that what you want? To be the ruin of your own sisters? ”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“Then behave as though you love them.” He returned to his correspondence. “You will attend every event I choose. You will be charming. And you will stop wandering off into dark rooms as though you have something to hide. That will be all.”
He took up his pen again, and she understood she had been dismissed like a servant. He had not once asked how she felt or whether her head still ached from the faintness she had claimed in the library. It had not occurred to him to wonder.
It never did.
She carried the words out with her, and they did their work because they were built precisely for her, keyed to the one lock in her that always opened—her sisters. It had always been her sisters.
And so she did the only thing left to her.
She hid.
The night of the Ashfords’ dinner, when the maid came to dress her, Rosaline was already beneath the counterpane with the curtains drawn.
Samuel came to the door himself, and she made her voice small and frayed and told him that the light hurt her eyes, that she could not think for the pounding in her head, that she would do nothing but shame them all by fainting into the soup.
He stood over her bed a long moment, searching her face in the dimness. She kept her eyes half shut and her breathing shallow until at last he turned on his heel and left her to the dark.
The next day, he found her in the morning room, where she had arranged herself pale and wilting over a breakfast she had no intention of eating. “The card party is this evening. You will be attending.”
“I will try.” She did not look up. “I have been dizzy since I woke. If I must stand over cards in a hot room for three hours…” She pressed her fingertips to her temple and let the words trail into nothing, as though the effort had cost her the rest of them.
“You are always dizzy of late.” His gaze moved over her, cataloging. “How convenient that it troubles you only on the evenings I have need of you.”
“You think I enjoy this?” She lifted her eyes and let them swim and lose their focus.
It was not wholly a performance; she had slept perhaps four hours in the week.
“I want nothing so much as to be well. Give me until the Selbys’ rout.
I will be recovered by then, I promise you, and twice as charming for having missed tonight. ”
He considered it for a long moment, the bother of hauling a swooning sister through a card room set against the bother of waiting, and as she had gambled, he chose to wait.
“The Selbys’,” he agreed. “Not a day past. My patience is not infinite, Rosaline. Nor is your usefulness.”
Then he left her to her cold toast.
She let herself breathe.
It was a coward’s strategy, and she knew it. But every event was a room Magnus might walk into, and she did not trust herself within twenty feet of him, not anymore, not after their kiss in the library.
Distance was the only safety she had left. She clung to it and told herself the hollow ache beneath her ribs was relief, and did not for a moment believe it.
“You are not sick.”
Rosaline looked up from the book she had not been reading.
Ivy had crept in first, as she always did, and was already burrowing under the coverlet against Rosaline’s side. But it was Beatrice who had spoken, who stood at the foot of the bed with her arms folded and her sharp eyes doing their careful arithmetic.
“I have a headache,” Rosaline said.
“You’ve had a headache for eleven days. That is not a headache. That is a tenancy agreement.” Beatrice came and sat on the edge of the mattress. “Even Samuel has stopped believing you, and Samuel believes whatever is convenient.”
“I brought you a picture.” Ivy produced a folded paper and pressed it earnestly into Rosaline’s hands.
“It’s Scotland. That’s a castle, and those are the mountains, and that’s a stag, though he came out rather like a dog.
I used nearly all the good blue on the sky, but I am not sorry.
Beatrice says stags are enormous. Is it true? ”
Rosaline smoothed the drawing flat on her knee—the crooked castle, the dog-shaped stag, the mountains drawn taller than the sky. Something turned over painfully in her chest.
“It is beautiful, sweetheart,” she praised. “Truly. The finest stag I have ever seen.”
Ivy beamed and tucked herself in closer, satisfied, and began telling a long-involved story about a fairy who lived in a loch and granted wishes only to children who were kind to frogs.
Rosaline let the small warm weight of her sister settle against her side, stroked her hair, and asked, “And then what happened?” in all the right places.
“When you are married,” Ivy said sleepily, arriving by her own crooked logic at the one thing Rosaline wished to think of the least, “will you live in a castle like that? With the mountains? And will there be a stag?”
“I do not know, dearest.” Rosaline kept her voice even. “No one has decided anything about my marrying at all.”
“I hope it is a beautiful castle.” Ivy was half asleep by now. “I would like to visit somewhere that might have dragons in it.” And then she was out, breathing slow and even, one small fist curled tight in the fringe of Rosaline’s shawl.
Over the top of Ivy’s head, Beatrice was watching her.
“She misses you,” she said quietly. “When you shut your door for days, she thinks she has done something. I tell her you are only tired. I have told her that a great many times now.”
“I am sorry.” The words came out thick. “I did not mean for her to. I would never want her to think that.”
“I know.” Beatrice reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind Ivy’s ear.
For a moment, the sharpness went out of her entirely, and she looked younger than her eighteen years and older than them at once.
“That is the trouble with you, Rosaline. You would set yourself on fire to keep the two of us warm and call it nothing, and never once notice you were the one burning.”
Rosaline said nothing. She did not trust her voice.
For a while, neither of them spoke. The lamp hissed. Somewhere below, a door closed on the last of Samuel’s guests.
Rosaline thought of all the things she could not say: the unmarked carriage in the dark, the cleared room, the wine-red gown, the library and the door at her back.
A whole reckless architecture of secrets she had built without once meaning to, and how very tired she had become of holding it up alone.
Beatrice let the quiet sit for a moment. Then she rose, carefully gathered the sleeping Ivy up into her arms with the ease of long practice, and paused at the door with the little girl’s head tucked against her shoulder.
“You can lie to Samuel,” she said, not unkindly.
“You are very good at it, and he deserves it. But you cannot lie to me, because I have shared a wall with you my entire life, and I have never once heard you cry into your pillow until these past eleven days.” Her eyes held her sister’s, steady and certain in the lamplight.
“So, you will tell me when you are ready. But you will tell me.”