Through the small carriage window, she saw the chapel doors standing open. And in them, very straight, very still, stood a man in a dark blue coat, his hand hanging at his side and something gray and bright closed inside it, watching her go.
She pressed her hand flat against the glass.
She did not mean to. She did not decide it. Her hand simply came up and pressed against the cool window, fingers spread, as though she could reach back across the distance she was putting between them.
For one moment, she thought she saw his hand lift, and her heart leapt up so hard it hurt. Then he stilled it. She watched himmaster it, watched the famous control come down over him like a portcullis, watched him keep the promise he had made her in that back room nine days ago.
He was doing for her the single cruelest thing she had ever asked of anyone which was to stand still while the person he loved drove away and make it look, for her sake, like a kindness rather than a wound.
The limes came between them. The avenue turned. Then he was gone.
And Alice, who had spent her whole life making certain that everyone around her was happy before she would permit herself to feel anything at all, dropped her face into her gloved hands in the dim of the moving carriage.
She was alone at last with no one left to be brave for, and finally, finally, she let herself cry.
She cried the whole way to Westbury.
She cried for the man in the doorway, and for the children she would never have, and for the great, loud, happy life she had glimpsed for three weeks and handed back.
Most of all, she cried because she got exactly what she had wanted. Her sister was free, her sacrifice was complete, the deal was discharged, and the debt was paid.
And she had never in her life been so perfectly, so thoroughly, so successfully miserable.
CHAPTER 27
The guests were gone by four.
Joanna had gotten rid of the last of them, and the house had settled into the particular ringing silence of a place where something large had happened and stopped.
Cassian sat in the studio at the top of the house in an armchair that still smelled of Alice and did not move.
He had pulled a sheet over the painting. It was the first thing he had done when he had come up. Before the drink. Before anything.
He had walked into the studio she had made for him with the easel and the canvases and the small flat paint box with the dragonfly on the lid. He had seen the half-finished canvas on the easel, the long pale shape of a woman in candlelight that he had started on the night before and had not finished for obvious reasons. He had taken a dust sheet from the corner and thrownit over the easel so that he would not have to look at her looking at him. Then he had sat down.
Then, after a while, he had poured himself a drink because it seemed the thing a man did, but he had not drunk much of it. It sat in his left hand, warming. In his right hand, where it had been since the chapel, was the pendant.
He had not opened his right hand since he had left the chapel. He was aware that this was not entirely sane, but he found he did not care.
The light stretched gold across the dusty floor and slowly began to dim.
She is well away by now. She will be at Westbury by dark. Her father will rage, and her mother will weep. In a month, it will be a story the ton tells at dinners—the Lockwood girl who jilted the Ice Duke at the altar.
They will say she was brave, or they will say she was mad. Either way, she will be free of me which is what I wanted, which is what I gave her. The one decent thing in this whole sorry business.
All his life, he had wanted to do right. He had not known it would feel exactly like dying.
The knock, when it came, was not a knock so much as an assault. It was a fist, a large one, slamming against the wood, hammering on the door with a cheerful violence.
Whoever stood on the other side had climbed four flights of stairs at the end of a long day and plainly meant to make it the door’s fault.
Cassian did not answer.
The fist hammered again.
“I know you are in there, boy,” called a voice through the wood, a deep, cracked voice with the parade ground still in it after thirty years. “I can hear you not answering. It is a very loud silence. Open the door before I put my shoulder to it and ruin a perfectly good shoulder.”
Cassian set down the warm glass. He crossed the studio, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door.
