Chapter 26 #2
The question landed in her chest and stayed there.
What did she want? She had spent the Season wanting not to be sold.
Wanting not to be trapped. Wanting to write her way out of every cage they tried to build around her.
But want had shifted. Somewhere between the seaside promenade and the Cavendish gallery, between her mother’s list of eligible gentlemen and Alistair’s voice in the darkness of the ballroom, want had become something she did not have language for.
“I want to write,” she said. “I want to be read. I want to marry a man who does not require me to become less than I am.” She paused. “I want to stop being afraid that the roof will collapse before I can save it.”
Her father nodded. He turned to Alistair. “Draw up the papers. I will review them. If the terms are what you say they are, I will sign.”
Lady Eleanor rose. She crossed the room and stopped in front of Alistair. For a moment, Sophia thought her mother might say something cutting. Something about the feud, about Lady Beatrice, about the thirty years of silence between their families. But Lady Eleanor only extended her hand.
“Thank you,” she said.
Alistair took her hand. “You are welcome.”
And that was all. Two words. But Sophia saw her mother’s shoulders drop, saw the tension that had lived in her spine since Derbyshire begin to unspool, and she understood that something in this room had been mended that had nothing to do with roofs or drainage or loans.
An hour later, the drawing-room had emptied. Mr. Ainsworth had retreated to his study to write letters. Lady Eleanor had gone upstairs to lie down, pleading a headache that Sophia suspected was mostly relief. The porcelain shepherdess remained on the mantel, unchanged, indifferent.
Sophia and Alistair stood near the window. The light had shifted. The pewter sky had broken apart, and thin streams of late-afternoon sun were cutting across the Channel, turning the water from grey to something closer to silver.
“You did not have to do that,” Sophia said.
“I know.”
“You did it anyway.”
“I did.”
She turned to face him. The window was at her back. She could feel the cold seeping through the glass, a faint chill against her shoulder blades. “Why?”
Alistair did not answer immediately. He was looking at her the way he had looked at her on the promenade, the way he had looked at her across the ballroom, the way he had looked at her in the gallery with the Turner painting burning on the wall between them.
It was the look of a man who had stopped pretending he was not paying attention.
“Because I have spent ten years cultivating a reputation for not caring about anything,” he said. “And I have discovered, somewhat inconveniently, that I care about you.”
“Somewhat inconveniently.”
“Profoundly inconveniently. Catastrophically inconveniently. My mother is furious. My valet is bewildered. Arthur Finch has been insufferably knowing for weeks.”
Sophia laughed. The sound surprised her. It was the same laugh he had drawn out of her on the promenade, the laugh that had felt like something unclenching in her chest. “Mr. Finch has been insufferably knowing since the day I met him.”
“He has. It is his primary talent.” Alistair’s mouth curved. “That and whist.”
The laughter faded. The silence that replaced it was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people standing on the edge of something and deciding whether to step forward.
“You asked me something once,” Sophia said. “On the promenade. You asked what I saw when I looked at you.”
“I remember.”
“I did not answer.”
“You did not.”
She took a breath. The air tasted of dust and salt and the faint lavender sachet her mother kept in the drawer of the side table.
“I see a man who has been performing for so long he has forgotten where the performance ends. I see a man who is kinder than he wants anyone to know. I see a man who reads essays four times because he is hungry for something true.” She paused.
“I see a man I did not expect to trust. And I trust him.”
Alistair’s expression did not change. But something in his eyes did. It was the same thing she had seen in her father’s face when the weight lifted. It was relief, and it was fear, and it was the particular vulnerability of being seen.
“Sophia.”
“Yes.”
“I am going to ask you something. You may refuse. You may tell me it is too soon, or too much, or too complicated. But I am going to ask.”
She waited.
“How much would you defy your family for your own convictions? If it came to that. If the loan were not enough. If your mother asked you to marry Denbigh after all. If the choice were between your family’s security and your own freedom. What would you choose?”
The question was not an accusation. It was not a test. It was the question of a man who had spent his life obeying a feud he did not believe in, and who wanted to know whether the woman he loved was capable of doing what he had only just learned to do.
Sophia looked at the porcelain shepherdess.
At her grandmother’s ivory fan, still lying on the side table where she had left it after the Hargraves’ reception.
At the chipped paint on the windowsill, the water stain on the ceiling, the evidence of a family holding itself together with will and denial.
“I would choose my family,” she said. “If it came to that. If there were no other way. I would hate it. I would grieve it. But I would choose them.” She met his eyes.
“I have spent this entire Season railing against the cage of duty. But the cage is not made of other people’s expectations.
It is made of love. I love them. I cannot pretend I do not. ”
Alistair nodded. “I know.”
“Does that disappoint you?”
“No.” He stepped closer. The space between them narrowed to something that was not quite improper and not quite safe.
“It does not disappoint me. It terrifies me. Because it means you understand exactly what I have been wrestling with for twenty-eight years. The love and the duty and the impossibility of choosing between them.”
“And what have you chosen?”
“You.”
The word hung in the air. It was not a declaration.
It was a fact. It was the same fact that had been building between them since the moment he had taken the blame for a debutante’s spilled lemonade, since the moment she had laughed on the promenade, since the moment they had stood in front of a Turner painting and agreed that the only revenge worth having was the work that outlasted the opinion.
“You have chosen me,” Sophia repeated.