Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Your Grace.”
She had been standing near the long windows with a glass of ratafia she had not touched, watching the next set begin, when a woman materialized beside her.
The woman from the refreshments table. She was as composed up close as she had been from across the room, her manner well-bred and her smile the particular variety that arrived already prepared.
“Forgive me. I am Lady Haverstock. We have not been introduced. But you are the Duchess of Bearmoor, and everyone in this room knows who you are.” She paused. “That must be rather novel for you.”
The inflection on novel was, in isolation, entirely neutral. Alice was quite good at isolation.
“It is,” Alice said pleasantly. “And everything in London is novel. One adjusts.”
Lady Haverstock tilted her head. “Indeed. You seem to be adjusting remarkably well, considering.” She glanced toward the dance floor, where the next set was starting.
“Though I wonder—and forgive me, this is perhaps impertinent—whether it was very difficult to step into the late Duchess’s shoes.
She was very accomplished. Played the pianoforte exquisitely.
Danced magnificently, people always said.
” A small pause, perfectly placed. “One does wonder how a second duchess manages the comparison.”
The fair-haired young woman had drifted to Lady Haverstock’s side. She held a glass of champagne and looked at Alice with the bright attention of someone who had been brought specifically to witness this.
“And tonight,” Lady Haverstock continued pleasantly, “it was your first dance in public. How very brave, especially given what people have been saying.”
Alice held her glass and looked at the woman, at the practiced warmth of her expression and the careful calibration of her cruelty, which was nothing like the Cheswick sisters, nothing like her father, and nothing like anything she had faced before, because it came dressed in perfect civility and delivered its knife in a place she had not thought to protect.
“… danced magnificently… One does wonder.”
“People say many things,” she replied, her voice even. “I find most of it grows less interesting the closer one examines it.”
She looked at the dance floor. The dancers moved through their figures with the practiced ease of people who had been dancing since childhood.
“The late Duchess was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. I hope I do her memory credit.” A pause. “And I do dance, Lady Haverstock. Rather well, as it happens. My husband was kind enough to say so just now, which is the only opinion on the subject that concerns me.”
Lady Haverstock’s smile did not waver. The fair-haired young woman had gone slightly pink.
“Of course,” Lady Haverstock said. “Of course. How sensible.”
She drifted away. Alice watched her go and then looked down at her glass of ratafia and noticed that her hands were perfectly steady.
She was, she thought with a dim surprise, actually perfectly steady. She had shut that down quietly and without raising her voice. The satisfaction of it was a small and uncomplicated thing she allowed herself to feel for exactly the time it took to set the glass on a passing footman’s tray.
She turned to find Lucy at her elbow.
“Well,” Lucy said, in a tone of considerable admiration.
“It was nothing.”
“It was very much something.” Lucy’s eyes were bright. “Who was she?”
“Lady Haverstock. I believe she and the late Duchess were acquainted.” Alice smoothed the front of her gown. “It does not matter.”
“Alice.”
“I mean it. It does not.” She looked out at the room and was surprised that she did.
She had stood in a garden with her eyes squeezed shut and felt the weight of those words like stones in her chest. Tonight, she had returned them at the same altitude at which they had been thrown, and the world had not fallen.
She was still standing. The chandeliers were still burning. The musicians were playing the opening bars of the next set.
“Lord Fenwick is here,” she said, to give Lucy something else to look at. “I believe I saw him near the musicians.”
Lucy straightened. Her eyes moved across the room with a speed that suggested the strategic distance she had maintained during Alice’s conversation was not, in fact, purely altruistic.
“The one with the blue coat,” Alice added. “He is looking this way.”
Lucy did not move immediately, which for her was equivalent to a declaration. “I shall stay.”
“You shall not.” Alice pressed her gloved hand briefly against Lucy’s arm. “Go. I am utterly fine, and Lord Fenwick is running out of courage.”
Lucy went.
Alice watched her cross the room toward the musicians, feeling the faint warm ache of friendship, of having a person who appeared without being summoned.
She turned back to the room and arranged herself against the window frame and prepared, quite consciously, to be alone for a few minutes.
The few minutes lasted four, approximately. Then a voice she did not recognize sounded at her shoulder.
“Your Grace. Forgive the intrusion.”
She turned and found Baron Tidswell behind her.
“Your Grace.” He bowed. “How lovely to see you again.”
“How do you do, My Lord.” She curtsied.
He smiled. The smile reached his eyes, which made it harder to name what was wrong with it rather than easier. “I must congratulate you on your marriage, Your Grace. The Duke of Bearmoor is a formidable man. Though I imagine you know that.”
“I do.”
“Of course.” He glanced across the room with an ease that was, Alice thought, slightly performed. “I had the pleasure of knowing his first wife, briefly. Theresa. A remarkable woman.”
“I have heard that about her.” Alice kept her voice pleasant.
“And the boys? The twins, Frederick and Charles.” He turned back to her, and his eyes held a glint she could not place, a warmth that was too particular, too focused.
“They must be what, seven now? Eight? I have not had the opportunity to meet them. Theresa spoke of them constantly, before—” He stopped.
His voice had roughened, and the roughening was genuine, which made the conversation more troubling rather than less. “She would have been so proud of them.”
“They are wonderful boys,” Alice said.
“I imagine so.” He looked at her with that too-warm attention.
“I wonder whether I might pay a call at Bearmoor House at some point. Simply to meet them. I have no one left who knew Theresa, you understand. The boys are her legacy, the last—” He stopped again, collecting himself with visible effort. “It would mean a great deal.”
Alice looked at him. His face was earnest, and his grief seemed real. Her hands, she realized, had curled slightly against her skirts.
She did not know precisely what was wrong, but she knew that something was.
“My husband manages the boys’ schedules,” she said. It was the truest and most neutral answer she had.
“Of course.” He nodded, accepting this. “Of course. Would you—Might you mention it to him?”
“I would not want to raise a hope I cannot confirm,” Alice said. “My husband is very particular about the boys. As he ought to be.”
Tidswell’s face shifted, barely. The pleasantness did not leave it, but something beneath adjusted, recalibrated.
“Naturally,” he said. “One would expect nothing less from Bearmoor.” He paused. “Though I wonder if he is perhaps too particular, given the circumstances. Boys ought to know where they come from. Who loved their mother.”
“The Duchess of Bearmoor,” said a voice directly behind Alice, quiet and carrying the weight of a door being shut, “manages her own schedule.”
Kenneth stepped up to her side. He did not touch her. He simply stood beside her, close enough that the sleeve of his coat brushed against her arm, and stared straight at Tidswell.
“Tidswell,” he said.
“Your Grace.” The Baron’s smile held. “We were just speaking of your late wife. Her Grace and I were—”
“I heard.” Kenneth’s voice was quiet, and the quietness was not gentle. “My wife mentioned she would not raise a hope she could not confirm. That is also my answer.”
Tidswell’s expression did not crumble. It adjusted, smoothed over, rearranged itself with the speed of a man who had practiced rearranging it. “Of course. I understand entirely. I hope I have not caused any offence. My attachment to the late Duchess’s memory—”
“Is your own affair.” Kenneth looked at him with the particular quality of attention that had, Alice had observed, the same effect as a raised voice without any of the noise. “Not my family’s. Not my sons’. If you wish to remember her, I suggest you do so privately.” A pause. “Good evening.”
Tidswell bowed. He walked away across the ballroom with the unhurried ease of a man who had suffered no particular defeat. Alice watched him go and felt a strange, cold chill skitter down her spine.
Kenneth was very still beside her. She could feel it, the specific quality of his stillness that was not calm but its opposite, all of it held motionless by will.
“He is no one,” she said quietly.
She did not know why she said it. She had not been afraid of Tidswell.
“Indeed,” Kenneth agreed. His voice had not changed.
She turned to look at him. His jaw was set, and his eyes, following Tidswell’s retreat across the room, had the focused quality of a man filing something away rather than letting it go.
Then he looked at her, and his expression shifted into something that was not entirely composed, the edge of whatever lived beneath the control visible for a moment, the way a candle flared before it settled.
“We are leaving,” he declared.
Alice looked at the room, the chandeliers and the silk and the musicians who had not yet finished the second hour of a program that had at least one more.
Kenneth held out his arm. “Unless you prefer to stay?”
She looked at his arm. At the white of his sleeve, the set of his jaw, and his controlled stillness. He clearly wanted to be elsewhere.
She took his arm.
They were in the carriage in twelve minutes.
The city blurred past the windows in the way it always did at night, the gas lamps tracing lines of orange light along the wet pavement, the late traffic still moving on the main roads.
Alice sat with her hands folded in her lap and listened to the wheels on the cobblestones and the distant sound of London going about its business, and felt the quiet of the carriage settle around her.
Kenneth sat across from her. He was looking out the window, his jaw still set, his hands open on his thighs in the deliberate way she had come to recognize as him preventing his hands from curling into fists.
He turned away from the window. His eyes found hers and stayed there, and she felt the force of his attention the way she always felt it, close and deliberate.
“He had no right to approach you.”
“He was civil.”
“He was calculating.” His voice was even, and the evenness had the quality of something held still by pressure. “He has been writing to the house. I have not replied. I did not anticipate—” He stopped for a moment. “He should not have come near you.”
Alice held his gaze. The carriage moved through Mayfair, through the familiar geometry of squares and terraces, and she thought about Tidswell’s face and the way his warmth had felt like an instrument, and about Kenneth’s voice arriving at her shoulder before she had heard his step.
She thought also about what she had been told, in a conversation at a stream weeks ago, while three boys ate sugared almonds on a bank: that Kenneth had never loved his late wife, that he had married her out of duty, that guilt was not grief but had worn grief’s face for seven years.
She thought about a man who had written letters to the house that Kenneth had not replied to, and who had appeared at a ball and asked to meet the last living pieces of the woman he had loved.
“He was in love with her, wasn’t he?” she realized aloud.
Kenneth looked at her for a long moment. “Yes,” he confirmed. “Before. She did not return it.”
“He resents you for that.”
Another pause. A longer one.
The carriage turned the corner onto Park Lane, and the horse’s pace steadied on the wider road.
“He has made that clear,” Kenneth said.
“And you did not tell me.”
“I did not wish to worry you unnecessarily.”
“Kenneth.” She said his name with the quiet emphasis of a woman who has had a great deal of practice pressing the point without pressing too hard.
“He approached me tonight and asked me to bring his request to your attention. He wanted me to advocate for him with you. Whether he intended it or not, that was the position he put me in.”
“You are right.” It arrived without preamble or qualification. “I should have told you.”
The carriage slowed before Grosvenor Square.
Alice looked at his hands, still open on his thighs. “You said that you wanted to tell me something. At the ball.”
He looked at her.
“What was it?”
The carriage had stopped. The footman was at the door. Kenneth did not move.
“Not here,” he said.
She could have pressed. She considered pressing and decided against it, not out of fear, but because she recognized the line between a door being closed and a door being held. She had been learning that distinction for months.
She descended from the carriage and let the house swallow her into its familiar warmth, and she heard his footsteps behind her in the entrance hall.
She climbed the stairs with her heart behaving in a manner she had entirely given up attempting to govern.