Chapter 17 #2
“But let us be fair,” the Observer continued.
“The children of feuding houses are not always prisoners of their inheritance. Sometimes, against all expectation, they look across the ballroom and see not an enemy but a question. Sometimes they discover that the person they were raised to despise is the only person in the room who speaks a language they recognise. This is not a romance. It is a complication. And complications, in our tidy world, are not often welcomed.”
Alistair’s hand went to his mouth. He pressed his knuckles against his lips and held them there.
She had written that. About him. About them.
The anger was still there, but it had shifted its shape.
It was no longer the clean, hot fury of a man who had been mocked.
It was something murkier, tangled up with the memory of her laugh on the Parade and the way her eyes had met his during the waltz and the impossible, infuriating fact that even now, even knowing what he knew, he wanted to find her and demand that she explain herself.
Not to apologise. Sophia Ainsworth did not seem like a woman who apologised.
But to account for herself, to acknowledge that what had passed between them was real and not merely material for her next issue.
He thought of the kiss. The memory surfaced without permission, the dim corridor at the Hargraves’ reception, the way she had not pulled away, the brief, electric certainty that she had wanted it as much as he did.
Had that been research too? Had she filed the sensation away for future reference, a footnote in her ongoing study of society’s hypocrisies?
He did not believe that. He could not make himself believe it, no matter how much the cynical part of his mind insisted that he should.
The woman who had kissed him was not performing.
He had spent his adult life surrounded by performers, and he knew the difference between a gesture meant for an audience and one meant only for the person receiving it.
Whatever else Sophia Ainsworth was, whatever else she had written, that moment had been true.
Which made the rest of it worse.
He folded the pamphlet carefully, creasing the spine with his thumbnail, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his waistcoat.
The paper pressed against his chest, a small rectangle of heat that seemed to radiate through the layers of linen and wool.
He would keep it. He would read it again when his temper had cooled, and then again after that, until he understood exactly what she had meant and exactly what she had not.
But first, he would have to see her.
The charitable committee meeting. He had received the notice a week ago and had dismissed it as the sort of event he attended only when his mother insisted.
Now it seemed like providence. The committee was organising a subscription ball for the relief of widowed seamstresses, a cause sufficiently dull to attract every respectable young lady in Brighton, including, he was certain, Miss Sophia Ainsworth.
She would be there, seated among the other debutantes, her dark curls pinned beneath a bonnet that would look demure until you noticed the quality of the eyes beneath it.
He would watch her. He would listen to her speak, and he would hear, now, the echo of the Observer’s prose in every sentence. He would look for the gaps between what she showed and what she hid, and he would not let himself be charmed by the performance.
And then, when the moment was right, he would let her know that he knew.
Not directly. A direct accusation would be crude, and Alistair Cavendish had not spent a decade cultivating the art of subtle cruelty only to abandon it now.
He would find a way to quote the Observer’s own words back at her, to watch her face as she realised that her secret was no longer safe.
He would make her understand that the intimacy she had treated so casually had consequences.
The thought brought a thin smile to his lips.
It was not a kind smile. He recognised it as the expression he had worn for years, the one that had earned him his reputation, the one that said I am amused by you, and not in a way you will enjoy.
He had let that smile fade in recent weeks.
He had almost forgotten how comfortably it fit.
He walked to the sideboard and poured himself a measure of brandy. The decanter was heavy, the crystal cold against his palm. He drank standing, facing the window, and let the liquor burn its way down his throat.
The study was quiet. The fire had settled into a steady glow.
Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed, and his mother’s voice carried faintly up the stairs, instructions to a servant, the precise, unhurried cadence of a woman who expected to be obeyed.
Alistair listened without hearing the words.
His mind was still in the pamphlet, still turning over the sentences that had wounded him and the ones that had, impossibly, sounded like an overture.
Sometimes they discover that the person they were raised to despise is the only person in the room who speaks a language they recognise.
She had written that. She had meant it. And she had published it for all of Brighton to read, hiding behind a pseudonym that was becoming, with each passing week, more famous than the woman who wore it.
He finished the brandy and set the glass down with more force than was necessary. The sound rang in the quiet room like a decision made.
Tomorrow, then. The committee meeting at the Assembly Rooms. He would arrive late enough to be noticed and early enough to secure a position from which he could observe without appearing to observe.
He would be charming, because charm was a weapon he had never forgotten how to wield.
And he would wait for the moment when Sophia Ainsworth’s composure cracked, just slightly, and showed him what lay beneath.
He was almost looking forward to it.
Almost.
The brandy had left a warmth in his chest that did not quite reach the cold knot of something else, something that felt, against all reason, like grief.
He had liked her. He had liked the woman he thought she was, the sharp-witted debutante who refused to simper, who met his barbs with her own and did not flinch.
He had allowed himself to imagine that she might be the answer to a question he had been asking for years without knowing it.
And now he did not know what she was. The Observer. The critic. The woman who had kissed him and the woman who had written about that kiss as though it were a specimen to be pinned and labelled. They were the same person, and he could not reconcile the two halves into a whole he understood.
He would have to find out. He would have to watch her, and listen, and piece together the truth from whatever fragments she let slip.
It was not the conversation he had imagined having with the author of the Observer essays.
It was not the meeting of minds he had hoped for when he told Arthur Finch he wanted to find the writer and speak with her honestly.
But it was what he had. And Alistair Cavendish had learned, a long time ago, to work with what he had.
He touched the pamphlet through his waistcoat, feeling the edges of the folded paper press against his ribs.
Then he straightened his cuffs, smoothed his expression into the languid indifference that had served him for a decade, and walked out of the study to find his mother and tell her that he would, after all, be attending the charitable committee meeting.
She would be surprised. He would not explain. And somewhere across town, in a sitting room facing the Channel, Sophia Ainsworth was probably putting the finishing touches on her next essay, unaware that the man she had written about was no longer merely intrigued.
He was hunting.