Chapter Twenty-Four
The observatory door stood ajar when Cedric reached it in the grey hour before the dawn, and he pushed it open and stopped on the threshold with his heart going to pieces in his chest.
She was on the floor by the window. Curled on her side on the bare stone like a child seeking comfort that was not there, still in the gown she had worn to the ball, though it was crushed now and grey with the dirt of the floor.
Her face, even in sleep, was swollen and streaked with the salt of long weeping, and her hair had come down out of its pins to lie across her cheek.
She had cried herself to sleep here. On this cold floor.
Alone in the dark, while he was shut in his study with William Hartwick and could not reach her, could not get one word to her, could do nothing in the world but stand and be ruined.
The sight of her there undid, in a moment, the four years of careful armouring that had kept him upright. He crossed the room and knelt down beside her, and reached out, very gently, not to startle her, and touched her shoulder.
Her eyes opened. For one unguarded moment, she only looked at him, soft and confused with sleep, and then memory came back into her face like a tide coming in, and she sat up sharply and pulled away from his hand as though it had burned her, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms hard about herself.
“I had to see you,” he said. His voice came out rough, scraped raw with the sleepless night. “Before breakfast. Before any of it. I had to speak to you, Clara.”
“There is nothing to speak of, Your Grace.” She would not look at him.
Her voice was flat, quiet, and without life, which was worse than any weeping.
“I heard what happened. The whole ballroom heard. Lady Honoria’s reputation is in ruins, and you were the cause of it, before a dozen witnesses, and there is only one thing in the world a gentleman can do about that. You know it as well as I.”
“I will not marry her.” He said it low and hard.
“Do you hear me? I will not. I am going down to that breakfast, and I am going to refuse, before my mother and before Hartwick, and I do not care one straw what the county says of me. I have weathered its opinion for four years, and I will weather this—”
“You cannot refuse.”
At last, she looked at him, and the despair in her face was so complete that it stopped the breath in him.
“You cannot. If you refuse, you ruin that girl utterly. She will never recover it, never marry, never hold up her head again. And you make yourself a man who dishonours women and abandons them, and that name will follow you the rest of your life. I will not be the cause of that. I will not let what is between us cost two more people everything they have. I would rather…” Her voice cracked, and she mastered it, and went flat again. “I would rather bear it.”
“And what of us?” The words came out of him low and raw. “Am I to stand up in a church and swear my life to a woman I do not love, with you three rows back among the servants, and call that honour? There is no honour in it, Clara. It is only a different cruelty, wearing honour’s coat.”
“Then it is the cruelty we have been given.” She would not soften, though he could see what it cost her.
“Do you imagine I have not turned it over and over the whole of this night, hunting for a way out? There is no door, Your Grace. I looked for one until I had no looking left in me. If you refuse her, you ruin her, and yourself with her. If you marry her, you do your duty, and the world goes on, and in time, perhaps, you will even be glad you did the right thing.”
“I will not be glad of it. Not for one single hour of the rest of my life.”
“You must be.” It broke from her, and for an instant the flatness cracked clean through, and all the grief showed under it, and then she forced it shut again.
“Because I cannot do this if you are not. Do you understand me? I cannot live the years I have to live in this house and watch you grieving it on top of everything else. Let me believe you will be well. Please. It is the only thing left in the whole world that I can carry out of this room, and I am asking you for it.”
“Clara—” He reached for her.
She got to her feet, quickly, and stepped back out of his reach, putting the cold space of the floor between them again, deliberately, and the deliberateness of it hurt more than anything she had said.
“I have to go back,” she said. “Before Her Grace finds my room empty and asks where I have been all night. That is a question neither of us can afford.” She was already moving toward the door. “Do not follow me. Please. For both our sakes, do not.”
And she went, not running, but quickly, with her head down and her arms still wrapped about herself as if she were holding the pieces of something together, out of the door and down the hill.
Cedric went to the window and watched her small green figure cross the grey grounds in the first light, growing smaller and smaller, until she slipped in through a servants’ door and was gone, and he was alone in the cold room with the wreck of everything and not one notion of how to mend it.
***
The cold water did nothing for her eyes.
Clara bathed them again and again at the basin in her little room, but they remained swollen and red, past any disguising.
She changed out of the ruined ball gown into a plain grey day dress fit for a companion’s duties, dragged a comb through her hair, and pinned it up with hands that would not stop their betraying tremor.
Then she looked at the wretched stranger in the glass and thought, with a calm that frightened her, that she would simply have to find a way to live inside this for the rest of her life.
A sharp knock made her start.
Mrs Hutchins stood in the corridor, her square face set graver than Clara had ever seen it. “Her Grace wishes you to attend breakfast, Miss Ellsworth. In the family dining room.” A small pause, weighted. “Directly. I should not keep her waiting this morning, were I you.”
The walk through the corridors seemed to take both no time at all and the better part of a year, her pulse beating thick and sick in her throat with every step.
When she came at last to the dining-room door and went in, she took in the whole scene in a single glance and understood that she had been summoned to witness something.
Cedric sat at the head of the table, and he looked terrible: grey, haggard, hollow-eyed, a man who had not slept and had ceased pretending he had.
Philippa sat at his left hand, her face wearing an expression Clara could not quite read.
Satisfaction, certainly; the satisfaction of a woman who had at long last got the thing she wanted.
But beneath it flickered something almost like unease, as though the prize had come to her hand by a road she did not care to examine.
The Earl of Hartwick sat at Cedric’s right, and there was no mistaking what was in his face. Triumph sat upon him, settled and cold. And Lady Honoria sat beside her father, white to the lips, her trembling hands folded hard in her lap, staring down at a plate she had not touched.
Clara took the seat at the very foot of the table, as far from all of them as the room allowed, and folded her own hands, and waited.
The Earl let the silence sit a moment, savouring it, and then cleared his throat with deliberate, attention-claiming relish.
“Well, Duke.” He smiled. “I trust a few hours’ reflection have done something to reconcile you to the realities of your position.
I do not think we need rehearse again what honour requires; it is plain to everyone at this table.
I would suggest only that you make the proper announcement now, and let us put this unfortunate business decently behind us.
There can be no sense in prolonging what everyone in this house, and half the county besides, already believes to be settled.
” He spread his hands, all reason. “Shall we say a spring wedding?”
Clara watched Cedric’s hands close upon the edge of the table until the knuckles stood out white, watched the rigid set of his shoulders, watched him draw the breath of a man bracing himself to leap from a great height; and she shut her eyes, because she could not bear to watch him say the words that would ruin him to spare her, and could not bear, either, to stop him.
“There is something I must say first.”
The voice was not Cedric’s. It was light, and it shook, and it cut through the room like a struck glass, and Clara’s eyes flew open to find Lady Honoria on her feet, her chair pushed back so sharply that its legs had shrieked against the polished floor, every face at the table turned to her in astonishment.
She stood swaying a little, white as the cloth, her hands pressed flat upon the table to hold herself steady; but she did not sit down, and she did not look away.
“Before anyone makes any announcement at all,” she said, “there is something that all of you are going to hear.”