Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
The house was quiet in the way of houses after midnight, the particular settled silence of a building that had finished its work for the day and was resting, the fire banked in the grate, the candles at their last inch, the staff long since gone to their rooms above the kitchen wing.
Alice had expected Kenneth to bid her goodnight in the entrance hall with the brisk formality he still occasionally deployed when the evening had cost him something.
He did not.
He stood at the bottom of the staircase with the single candle the butler had left in its holder on the newel post. He looked at her, then looked up the stairs and said, “Come with me.”
It was not a question. It was not precisely an instruction either, or the kind that expected compliance without interest. But the kind that carried, beneath the economy of it, something she had not heard before: a hesitation he had folded away before it could show, and which showed anyway in the slight pause before the words arrived.
She followed him up the first flight and then the second, where the family rooms gave way to the servants’ passages and the air lost the warm cedar and beeswax smell of the main house and became something cooler and closer and older.
He took the left corridor rather than the right, past the linen press and the housemaids’ stairs, and she realized with growing curiosity that she had not been in this wing before. She had explored the house methodically in the past few weeks, but she had not come this far.
The staircase at the end of the corridor was narrow and uncarpeted. He held the candle higher and climbed, and she gathered her skirts and followed. The house rose around them through the last of its inhabited floors into the attic.
She heard the dormer windows before she saw them.
Then the candle illuminated the room in pieces: the sloped ceiling where the roofline met the walls; the telescope positioned at the central window on its brass mount, dark with use and careful handling.
Star charts were tacked to the timber framing, some of them yellowed at the edges, some still crisp.
Two chairs that had been carried up from somewhere sat beside each other with an old wool blanket folded over the arm of one.
Around and between and beneath everything else was an accumulation of small things: a leather observing journal with a split spine, a pencil wedged in the pages, a mug that had clearly been left and forgotten and left again, a shallow dish of charcoal stubs.
Alice stood in the doorway and looked at all of it and said nothing.
“I found the telescope in my father’s effects,” Kenneth said.
He had crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, looking out at the low orange haze of the city beneath the dark sky.
“He had no use for it that I could find. No charts, no journals, nothing to suggest he had ever looked through the thing. I think he acquired it because it was expensive.” He set the candle on the broad sill, where it threw warm light across the nearest chart. “I was twelve.”
Alice moved further into the room. She touched the edge of the nearest chart with one finger: Aquarius, the lines connecting the stars drawn in faded brown ink, the names lettered carefully beside each point of light.
“You taught yourself,” she said.
“There was a book in the library. There are always books.”
He turned away from the window, and the candlelight found the line of his jaw and settled there. She suppressed the involuntary pull of it with the efficiency of much practice.
“I came here when the house became unmanageable. When I could not think downstairs.” He looked at the charts, the telescope, the things he had accumulated over what must have been years of solitary nights. “I have not been up here since before the wedding. Either wedding.”
She understood what he was telling her without quite saying it: that he was showing her something he had kept from everyone, not merely from her. That the showing was deliberate. That it cost him something she was not yet sure she could measure.
“Which constellation do you know best?” she asked.
He turned back to the window, positioned himself at the telescope, and made one small adjustment to the mount.
“Come here,” he said.
She crossed the room. He stepped aside, and she bent to the eyepiece. The sky opened.
She had seen stars before, naturally. One did not spend years in the English countryside without developing a passing acquaintance with the night sky.
But this was something else. The stars resolved into points of cold precise fire, the dark between them deeper and more absolute than it had any right to be.
She held very still and let her breathing slow, feeling the peculiar dislocation of understanding, suddenly and completely, why a twelve-year-old boy with a demanding father and no one to teach him anything had carried a telescope up to an attic and stayed there.
She straightened. Kenneth was close, closer than she had realized, his shoulder near her own. She felt the warmth of it across the narrow distance and did not step away.
“Cassiopeia,” he said.
He reached past her and adjusted the mount a fraction, his arm crossing her line of sight. She was aware of his sleeve and the scent of him, wool and cedar and something warmer beneath.
She kept her gaze on the eyepiece with something akin to desperation.
“The W shape. Five stars, low in the north,” he pointed out.
“The queen,” she said. “I know the myth.”
“Tell me which version you know.”
She thought of the library at Peltbury House, the shelf of mythology she had worked through at the age of fourteen while her sister had her pianoforte lesson.
“Cassiopeia boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the sea nymphs,” she started. “Poseidon was offended on their behalf. She was placed in the sky as punishment, fixed to her throne, rotating around the pole so that half the year she hangs upside down.”
“That is the standard version.” His voice came from just above and to her left, unhurried, and she became aware that she was not looking through the telescope at all. “My book gave a different one.”
She waited.
“The book said that the throne was not punishment.” He reached past her again to make some small unnecessary adjustment, and she felt the brush of his coat sleeve against the back of her hand and stilled.
“It said she chose it. That she knew what she had done and sat down anyway, because the alternative was to run. Cassiopeia was a great deal of things, but she was not someone who ran from what she had made.”
Alice looked at the star chart on the wall before her, at the figure traced in faded ink, the queen on her throne with the W of her crown tilted toward the horizon.
She turned to look at him. He was closer than she had thought, and the candlelight was doing things to the planes of his face that she had taken care not to look at directly all evening.
His eyes, which had been on the star chart, moved to hers with the unhurried attention of a man who had been waiting for her to turn.
“Kenneth,” she began.
“Sit down,” he urged and moved to the chairs.
He lifted the blanket from the arm of one, held it until she sat, and placed it over her lap gently. Then he sat beside her.
The window before them framed a section of sky between two chimney stacks, and the stars were visible at the edges of the city’s haze: Cassiopeia low and to the left, the Plough higher and to the right.
Alice pressed her hands flat beneath the blanket and looked at the sky, feeling the accumulated weight of the evening make itself known in her chest.
“Kenneth?”
“Yes?”
“What did you want to tell me?” she asked. “At the ball.”
The candle flame moved in the draught from the open window.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I have not brought anyone else here.”
She turned to look at him.
“Not Theresa,” he said. “Not the boys. Not Jonathan, who would make a thorough nuisance of himself with the telescope and never let me hear the end of it.” His gaze was on the window, on the sliver of sky between the chimney stacks, and his hands rested open on his thighs. “No one.”
The room was very quiet. The candle burned lower.
“Why did you bring me?” Her voice came out soft.
He turned his head. His eyes found hers and stayed there, and she felt the gravity of his attention.
“Because I find that I am running out of reasons not to.”
The back of her eyes warmed before she had any say in the matter. She looked away at the star chart, at Cassiopeia on her tilted throne, at the queen who had chosen to sit down. She pressed her lips together and breathed carefully through her nose.
“Alice.”
“I am perfectly well,” she said, which was what she always said, and it had never been less true.
He did not press. He did not offer the brisk retrieval of the moment that she had half-expected, the careful stepping back from what had been said and the restoration of the usual distance between them. He simply sat and waited.
The dam, as it turned out, required very little additional pressure.
She felt the first tear before she knew it was coming, quick and involuntary, and her breath came out unsteadily. She pressed the back of her wrist to her face, mortified.
She was in a dusty attic, at half past midnight, coming apart in front of the one person she had been most determined not to come apart in front of.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I do not know why I am—”
“Alice.”
“It is nothing. It is the evening, it has been a long—”
“Stop,” he said softly. He leaned forward and took her gloved hand, but she felt the warmth of his touch everywhere anyway. “You do not have to explain it.”
She looked at him. Her vision was blurry, which was infuriating.