Chapter 1 #3
"Performing card tricks for women who will not recall your name come morning, only the warmth of your attention. You could be running an estate. Commanding a room that decides something. Instead you spend a mind I have watched outpace every man in Parliament on this."
The mask slipped. He felt the footing go beneath him, just for a moment—the way a step goes in the dark when you were certain the ground was there.
"And what would you have me do?" he said, quiet enough that only the garden could hear it.
"They want the golden boy, Sarah. Not the wise one.
The wise one bores them, and bored men grow dangerous.
I am tired of it—God knows I am. But if I were to set it down tonight, if I simply changed—how do you imagine I survive the morning?
" He looked at her. "This is the ground I stand upon.
Take it from under me and tell me what is left to hold me up. "
For an instant she only looked at him.
Her expression shifted—because this, the truth, was the thing she had spent years reaching for through the charm and the performance and the deflection, and he had handed it over without intending to, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it, and neither of them moved.
"There," she said softly. "That is the man I keep waiting for.
The one who knows precisely what he is doing, and does it regardless.
" She stepped nearer. "There is a mind behind all this glitter that has been allowed to sit idle, because the world never once required you to use it.
Charm answered every door. So you stopped knocking with anything else. "
"And what if there is nothing behind it?"
The words escaped before the mask could catch them. He heard them land and could not take them back.
"What if the glitter is the whole of me, and the room has had the right of it all along?"
Her jaw tightened — not with pity. With anger.
"You do it again," she said. "Even now. The ground turns uncertain beneath you and you reach for the worst of yourself, because despair is an easier thing to perform than effort.
" She shook her head, and her voice had the quality of someone who has had this argument before and is tired of winning it and getting nothing for the victory.
"One diversion to the next, one amusement, one admirer, one glass—you call it living, and it is destroying you by degrees, and you would sooner I pitied the emptiness than asked you to fill it. "
It struck too near. He felt the heat of it rise in his chest, and his oldest instinct answered without his permission — the charm, the deflection, the door swinging shut before anything else could get through.
He let his gaze settle on her mouth. Then her eyes. And he let the smile arrive slow.
"As it happens," he murmured, "I had thought to revisit an old diversion tonight."
The color rose in her cheeks at once — involuntary, immediate, and he watched her hate that it had. She drew a breath as though steadying something that had slipped its footing.
"You are unbelievable," she said, and her voice was not entirely level. "You feel one true thing, for the space of a heartbeat, and the instant it costs you, you turn it into that."
She shook her head, and when she spoke again the anger had thinned into something worse — a weariness, a grief for a thing not yet lost but already diminishing.
"I care for you, Damon. The real you. The one who slipped out just now and frightened himself back into hiding.
" She looked at him steadily, without performance, without the armor that the rest of the room required.
"But every time I see you, he is a little smaller.
A little harder to find. One day I shall come looking for him and find nothing left but the glitter — and you will smile at me, and never even know that he is gone. "
She held his gaze a moment longer.
Then she turned and walked back inside — through the terrace doors, into the warmth and the noise and the light, without looking back.
Damon remained at the balustrade.
He did not move for a long time.
The garden below was dark and still, the hedges manicured and silent, the marble statues frozen mid-gesture among the dormant roses.
Somewhere in the distance, London murmured its indifferent murmur.
The music inside swelled and the laughter rose and the great warm machine of the evening spun on, entirely without him.
He thought of what she had said.
He thought of the card table — of Crane folding on instinct, of Marsh misreading him completely, of the four hands played like a conversation in a language only he had been fluent in — and he thought of how easily it had come, and how little it had cost him, and how nothing about it had felt like enough.
He thought of his father, who had never stood on a balcony doubting himself, or if he had, had never let it show.
The old Duke had been certain as gravity, relentless as weather.
Damon had spent half his life trying to become him and the other half pretending he already had, and now the man was gone, and the pretending had become the whole of him, and somewhere beneath it the person Sarah kept asking after was growing quieter every season.
He set his glass on the balustrade.
He did not pick it up again.
He drew a long breath of cold air and held it, and let himself feel, for one unguarded moment, the weight of everything the evening had cost him.
The table, which had been easy. Thomas, which had been less easy.
And Sarah—who had been the hardest thing in the room and had not known it and would never know it.
He was still holding the breath when the door opened behind him.
He turned, half-hoping — absurdly, against all sense — that she had come back.
It was a footman. Young, uneasy, carrying news he would have preferred to deliver to someone else.
"Your Grace. Forgive me. Lady Sarah has not been seen for some time. Her cousin grows concerned. And her carriage—" he hesitated. "Her carriage stands at the door still."
Something small and cold moved in Damon's chest.