“Very well,” she said, “let us give them a ball.”
He exhaled, relief and fatigue and love knotted into one unwieldy sound. He offered his arm. She laid her fingers upon it and felt the familiar steadiness beneath the bruises. For a moment, she allowed herself the treachery of imagining that steadiness was hers for a lifetime. They stepped from the quiet into the blaze.
Conversation hiccupped and surged. Faces turned, some avid, some admiring, some merely hungry for whatever this new chapter would bring. The orchestra found a melody. Tristan led her to the top of the room where the first couples formed. For a breath, there was a hush, the collective intake of a hundred lungs.
Christine looked out over the sea of satin and starch and felt the balance tilt beneath her feet as if the polished floor were a ship. She saw Lady Atherby’s small, pinched triumph restored. Lord Bittern’s amused malice, the sympathetic gaze of Lady Thynne.
Blanche was on the edge of the floor with her hands clenched in a prayer that had no god. She saw Jane standing just within the doorway, chin up, a footman hovering like a guardian spirit who knew where all the knives were kept. She saw Tristan’s profile, severe, beloved. The world steadied long enough for thought.
She was not a coward. She had learned that on lanes and in rooms and in kitchens where the air had been a wall. Fear obeyed her when she gave it orders. But this was not fear. It was something worse and more honest. The knowledge that she was about to consent to a life where the best part of her would be forever in abeyance, waiting for a man to come home from a war he liked too well to end. She withdrew her hand from Tristan’s sleeve.
A flicker of confusion crossed his face, then concern. “Christine?”
She stepped away from him, into the open reach of the room where sound could carry. Her voice, when she found it, surprised her with its clarity.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said.
Silence fell with the greedy swiftness of a hungry magpie.
She did not look at Tristan. If she looked at him, she would fold back into the shape of what he wanted. She looked beyond him, at the great doors, at the reflection of her own pale face in a mirror above the mantel.
“You have honored me tonight more than I deserve,” she said, and knew at once that the phrasing was wrong, humble where she needed steel. She straightened.
“No. That is not true. You have come because you love a ball. You have come because scandal is a kind of sugar. But some of you have also come because you wish us happy.”
A rustle. A cough. The uneasy shifting of those who did wish it and those who did not.
“I cannot accept your congratulations,” she said, and the room went very still, “there will be no marriage.”
The words made a sound in the air like glass cracking. Someone gasped; someone laughed in disbelief; somewhere a woman said,
“Good God,” as if God had been waiting to be summoned to this exact corner of the county. Christine kept her chin level.
“I invite you,” she added, with a courtesy that cut, “to enjoy what remains of the evening at another house. Duskwood’s hospitality is withdrawn.”
There. It was done.
For a moment, no one moved, as if a stage cue had been missed. Then the room erupted, not into violence, but into that worst kind of noise, the rapid, intimate talk of people recalculating. The orchestra faltered into silence. Chairs scraped, fans snapped, and invitations to supper elsewhere were invented in handfuls. Tristan had not spoken. She dared, at last, to look at him.
He stood as if someone had removed the floorboards beneath his feet and left him hovering by will alone. His mouth parted and closed; no sound arrived. His eyes, those disciplined, stubborn eyes, looked as if they had been struck by something that hurt more because it had not been thrown by an enemy.
“Christine,” he said finally, raw as splintered wood.
It was not a plea, not yet, just the beginning of one.
She turned before she could soften, and ran. Lace, candlelight, air. The corridor welcomed her with its blessed cool. She did not stop to think that she had no plan beyond flight; she only knewthat if she stayed one minute more, she would be convinced, coaxed, cornered into a compromise that would look like bravery from the balcony and feel like drowning in a bed.
Down the side stairs, past the stillroom with its clean glass and mint, through the green-baize door into the kitchen’s glow. Mrs. Fogarty made a startled sound as Christine sped past, skirts caught up like a girl’s. Out through the scullery, across the flagged yard smelling faintly of yeast and woodsmoke, into the night.
The grounds had shrugged off their darkness with relief, as if tiresome guests were a weather that would pass. Lanterns along the terrace dissolved into a breath of gold and then nothing. Beyond them, shapes reassembled themselves into hedges and statues and the suggestion of trees. The moon had not yet risen high; the lake lay like a sheet of slate.
Her lungs burned, but her heart ran harder. She did not weep until the gravel curved toward the yew walk, and she knew exactly where her feet were carrying her.
He stepped out from the shadow of the hedge as if the night itself had breathed him into being.
“Christine,” Charles said.
She stopped so abruptly that the pebbles slid and muttered under her shoes. The tears she had been outrunning caught her at once, hot and angry.
