Her nose was burning, and her eyes, but her face was dry. “I shan’t forget.”
She did not think her father registered the import of her words. His face did not change as she rose. But Malcolm’s did. He gave her one glance—a flash of blue, almost stricken—and gripped her fingers tight as they made their way to the door. Her ring pressed hard against her bone.
She thought of the name she had been born to. And then—with a hot surge of pride and pleasure—a different name. The one she had chosen to take.
* * *
She took him out to the mews, where her father had told their crew to go. In the stable’s dim interior, the familiar scent of hay and horses filled her nose. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she picked out Gerry and Eugénie seated on a bench. The Enys boys were arguing noisily, and one of her father’s grooms leaned against a wall.
And Alice stood very close beside—
Ruby blinked. Squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them again.
She said: “Cassandra?”
Her sister looked up. She was dressed neatly and fashionably in a silver-embroidered, high-collared riding habit. A tiny hat was perched atop her buttery hair, and her gloved hands were twisted together.
She looked like the daughter of an earl and the wife of a viscount, and still, somehow, she looked like Ruby’s baby sister.
“I went for her,” Alice said softly. “I told her everything. I hope you don’t mind, Ruby. I feared... your father...” She stumbled over the words. Tried again. “I suppose I thought we might need some help. And I thought—it was what Tam would do. If she were here.”
Ruby felt a painful rush of tenderness for Alice, who might well have been turned away at Cassandra’s door. Alice’s father’s reputation had blackened their family name so thoroughly that Alice could never be certain of her reception.
And yet she’d gone for help anyway.
Beside Alice, Cassandra took a step forward and searched Ruby’s face. “I came,” she said. “Lady Alice told me you might need me, and so I came.”
“Cass—” Ruby started to say, but her voice wobbled. She closed her mouth.
Her sister was linking and unlinking her fingers, a familiar little gesture that called up a lifetime of memories: Cassandra seated before the pianoforte; Cass at her court presentation, sick with nerves; Cassandra with the fledgling bird their father hadn’t let her keep.
She hadn’t protested when her father made her put the bird back outside. Ruby had, vigorously and vociferously, and when they’d been forced to set it back beneath the hedge anyway, Cass hadn’t cried either. Only blinked very hard and gripped her own hands for comfort, exactly as she was doing now.
“I want to help,” Cassandra said. “It’s—difficult. For me. To go against Papa. But I would do it if you needed me to. The truth is, Ruby, I’ve been trying very hard these last years to be more like you.”
She stood very straight, Cass did. Her shoulders made a perfect line, and her chin nearly topped Ruby’s head.
Ruby had to look up to meet her sister’s eyes, and somehow, she couldn’t remember when that had happened. “Me?”
“You,” Cassandra said. “You were always yourself. No one could dim your light, Ruby. Not even Papa.”
Ruby had the kaleidoscope feeling again—the sense of reality swirling and settling around her in new, fantastic shapes. She had left her father behind. She had forged a new path.
Shehad done that.
It wasn’t over. She still had Tamsin and the princess to find, a hundred impossible hurdles to cross. But she didn’t have to cross them alone. She had Malcolm and Alice, theDelphiniumand all its crew. She had Cassandra, and her sister wanted to help.
“Please,” she said unevenly. “Yes. We need you, Cassie. We could use your aid.”
“Anything,” Cassandra said. “Tell me what I can do.”
Malcolm had his arm around Ruby’s shoulders, and he pressed his chin against her hair. “Your father says Verdura has fled England. I think our next best bet is to get to Penney. Find out if he knows where Verdura has gone.” A muscle in his jaw flexed as he looked at his assembled crew—as he thought, Ruby suspected, of the absent Lamentation and the words Lamentation had hurled at him on the deck of theDelphinium.
But he steeled himself and turned his gaze back to Cassandra. “Rear Admiral Lord John Penney, I mean. Can you get me to his house?”
Cassandra regarded him steadily. “Of course,” she said. She raised her chin—looked, suddenly, like the viscountess she was. “Leave everything to me.”
Ruby looked up at Malcolm. He was holding her very tightly, his face grave and intent. But a shadow of his dimples emerged around his mouth as he met her eyes—an expression he meant to be reassuring, she knew, and that looked only halfway forced.
