Chapter 21 #2
“Tidswell,” she said. “And Lady Haverstock, who told me at the refreshments table with the most perfect manners that Theresa played magnificently and danced flawlessly.” She pressed her wrist to her face again.
“And Rachel… I do not know whether she’s safe, or frightened, or cold somewhere.
And your sons, who I am very fond of, and who will always be her sons and not mine. And—”
She stopped. She was not going to say the last part. She had held the last part at arm’s length since the ball, since Lady Haverstock’s careful smile, and she was not going to say it in an attic at midnight with her face already betraying her.
“And?” Kenneth coaxed.
She closed her eyes. “The Cheswick sisters,” she said quietly. “At the garden party. I told you I was fine, and I was fine, I managed it. Only tonight, Lady Haverstock said the same things in different terms, and I found I had…” She breathed. “Less practice with it than I thought.”
He was very still beside her.
“What did she say?” he asked.
“Nothing I have not heard before.” She pressed her lips together and looked at Cassiopeia on the wall. “Nothing that was not said more plainly during the dinner at Harcourt Hall. Only she said it at the Worthington ball, after I had danced in front of two hundred and fifty people, and—”
She stopped again. She could feel the heat rising in her face, the particular heat of humiliation admitted aloud, the thing she had been least willing to give the room it required.
“I am not Theresa,” she said. “I am never going to be Theresa. I do not play the pianoforte. I cannot embroider. I bobbed for an apple at a village fair and did not know what cotillion steps went in which order until three weeks ago when I counted them on my bedroom floor in the dark.” Her voice had gone thin at the edges.
“And there is no version of this story in which I am the wife anyone would have chosen for you.”
“Alice.” His voice had dropped. “Look at me.”
She turned. He had shifted, the space between the chairs reduced to almost nothing, and his hand had moved from hers to her face, warm and sure, his thumb brushing the curve of her cheek where the tear had fallen.
“I did not choose you,” he said. “You are right about that. I chose Rachel because the matchmaker recommended her and she came from good stock, and I needed someone to manage the boys. That is the entirety of the thought I gave to the matter.” His thumb moved, and she felt it in the line of her jaw, at the base of her throat. “But then I met you.”
She hadn’t expected the softness in his voice.
“I did not choose you,” he said again. “And I have thought about that fact more than is comfortable in the months since. Whether it was good fortune, providence, or simply the particular variety of chaos that Freddie causes wherever he goes, what I am certain of is this…”
He tilted her chin, and she felt the focus of his gaze the way she felt firelight, a warmth on the skin that was also a weight.
“I have never once, in the months since our wedding, wished I had chosen differently,” he declared.
She could not look away from him. This was the difficulty with Kenneth—he was not performing sincerity.
He was a man who kept everything armored, and when the armor came off, even a piece of it, what came through had the quality of something that had been under considerable pressure for a long time.
“You should find Rachel.” Her voice was small and not entirely steady. “You said—”
“You know that I have men in Wiltshire,” he said. “Three of them, since this morning. I sent the third while you were getting ready for the ball.” He looked at her with that careful, particular attention. “Carver will find her. I am certain of it.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Because I am paying him a great deal of money to be thorough,” he said. “And because your sister is demonstrably resourceful, which is a quality I recognize, and women who are resourceful tend to survive.”
Something moved in her chest, the particular dangerous something that arrived when he was like this, when the distance dissolved, when she could see him clearly.
“You think I am resourceful?”
“I think you are a great many things,” he said, “and that you have a persistent and, frankly, bewildering habit of believing the least generous account of yourself.”
His thumb was still on her cheek, and she was very aware of the warmth of it, of the whole warmth of him, in the small attic room with the candle burning low and the night air drifting in through the window.
“You rearranged my household and made it run better in a fortnight. You handled your father in my drawing room without losing your composure. You managed Tidswell alone tonight, long enough to understand exactly what he was doing, before I arrived.”
The candle guttered. The city haze sat low over the rooftops beyond the window.
Alice looked at his face, at the careful openness of it, and felt the full weight of what this room was.
What it meant that he had brought her here, that she was still sitting in it at nearly one in the morning with his hand warm against her face.
The accumulated wreckage of the evening settled quietly in her chest like a tide going out.
“I also wanted to tell you that… that I have been afraid,” he said. “Of this. Of whatever this is, between us. Of the fact that I am not capable of—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. “I am not a man who finds this easy. The saying of things. You are aware of that.”
“I am.”
“What I am less aware of,” he continued, his voice dropping into the register she felt more than heard, “is whether I’m capable of continuing to behave as though I am indifferent to you.
I find that I am not.” His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone, and the heat of it moved through her in the way she had stopped pretending it did not.
“I am many things, but indifferent to you is not one of them.”
She was aware of the distance between them, which had become less a distance and more an intention. Above all, she was aware of the very urgent nature of what she wanted.
“Kenneth,” she said.
“Yes?”
He was not moving. He was waiting, with the patience of a man who had spent seven years learning to hold still and was finding it considerably more difficult than usual.
Alice lifted her chin and kissed him.
She found him before he found her, which was the second time it had happened, and she understood, as his hand moved from her cheek to the back of her neck and the blanket slid from her lap to the floor, that she was done being careful.
She had been careful for three Seasons and two households and four months of a marriage that had surprised her at every turn. She was, at half past midnight in an attic with the stars visible at the edges of the London sky, entirely done being careful.
And Kenneth kissed her back.