He had known Victor for twenty-eight years. He had bled with him in a boxing ring and gotten drunk with him at Cambridge and stood next to him at the grave of his brother when he was fourteen, and he had hit him in the jaw a fortnight ago and had not until this moment been sorry for it.
He found that he was sorry for it now. In fact, he found that he could not afford, on this morning of all mornings, to keep one more grievance locked in the cold, tidy room of himself where grievances were kept because the room was full.
And he was tired, and a man on his way to the altar should not go there carrying his oldest friend’s name as a grievance.
“Sit where you like,” he said. “But not at the back. You will sit with Joanna, and you will hold her fan, and you will keep her from saying anything to the bride.”
Victor’s throat worked. “That is more than I deserve.”
“It is. Take it before I reconsider.”
Richard made a small sound that he quickly masked with a cough. “Well,” he drawled, “now that we have all wept, it is time to go down.”
Cassian looked once more in the mirror, at his dark blue coat, at the knot his father had taught him, at the face that Richard had said looked like a funeral.
He thought of the carriage waiting behind the chapel which he had ordered and which he could not now unorder and which might or might not be empty. And he understood that in a little under half an hour, he was going to learn which in front of two hundred people, with no warning and no defense, the way he had learned every important thing in his life.
He went down to find out whether Alice would come to him or run.
CHAPTER 26
The chapel was full of flowers and people, and Alice could not, for the life of her, remember a single face in it.
She remembered the doors. She remembered the weight of the doors swinging back, the cool stone breath of the place coming out to meet her, and the sudden turn of every head, like wind blowing over a field of barley, all of it bending in one direction at once.
She remembered her sister’s hand, warm and trembling, tucked into the crook of her arm. She remembered, most of all and against her will, the gray pendant resting at the base of her throat, warm now from her skin, pulsing faintly in time with her heart.
And she remembered Cassian.
He was standing at the altar in dark blue with his hands at his sides and his shoulders set. And he was looking at her the way he had looked at her across Mrs. Hatcher’s back room and across the lake and across her father’s orangery, as though he had decided, against all his careful planning, to want her.
He did not smile.
He had never, in all the time she had known him, smiled at her in any way she could put a name to. But he looked at her, and he did not stop looking at her.
Alice walked toward the only man in England she had ever loved, in order to leave him.
“Oh, Alice,” Daphne breathed beside her. “I have never seen a man look at a woman the way he is looking at you. You are so loved. You are so terribly, terribly loved. I am so happy for you, I think I will cry the whole way down.”
Do not, little one. Please don’t. I cannot do this and listen to you at once.
“Hush,” Alice said gently. “You will spoil the flowers.”
Daphne gave a wet laugh and then fell quiet.
It was the cruelest walk Alice had ever taken, and she had taken some unkind ones.
She had walked into her father’s study a week before her betrothal to be told whom she would marry. She had walked her little sister to the schoolroom on the morning their mother had said in front of both of them that it was a pity Daphne had not been a boy and twice the pity Alice had not.
She had thought that she knew the full range of difficult walks. She had been wrong.
The full range of difficult walks ended here on the warm stone of a chapel with her sister gushing into her ear and her heart breaking very quietly and very completely in time with her slow, careful steps.
She walked toward a man who was looking at her as though she were the answer to a question he had spent thirty years refusing to ask aloud.
She loved him.
She had known it for nine days. She had decided it against an orange tree and confirmed it in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room and surrendered to it in his studio with a paint box in her hands.
