He saw a morning. He saw the studio with the sheets off the windows and the light pouring in. He saw a dark-haired child, three perhaps, painting on the walls because no one had told them not to. He saw a smaller girl, dark-haired and green-eyed like her mother, shrieking with laughter as they were chased across the gallery by a tall man in his shirtsleeves who moved with a boxer’s ease and laughed out loud as he had not let himself laugh in sixteen years.
And he saw Alice.
He saw Alice in the middle of it all, standing in the golden light, round again with another child, her hand resting on her belly, watching the chase and laughing her great, loud, uncareful laugh. It was the one she had told him she had taught herself on purpose so that her sister would learn it was allowed.
The picture did not frighten him. It made him want to weep with how badly he wanted it.
“That is what I thought,” Matthew said softly.
Cassian opened his right hand at last. The pendant lay in his palm, gray and bright, the warm shape of it pressed into his skin where he had held it for six hours.
“What if it is too late?” he rasped.
“It is never too late for true love, you ridiculous boy. It is the only thing in the world there is always time for.” Matthew reached for his cane and, with a great show of difficulty, levered himself out of the chair. “Provided you do not stand here feeling sorry for yourself. Go and show her properly, with both hands and no dignity left, that you know exactly what you almost threw away. Grand gestures, Cassian. I never married, so I would not know, but I am told women are fond of them.”
“I would do a great deal more than a grand gesture,” Cassian said.
Matthew straightened, planted his cane, and looked at him with his good eye. “Then what in the name of God are you still doing up here, talking to an old man, when there is a girl at Westbury crying her eyes out and a great deal of work to be done before morning?”
Cassian was already moving toward the door.
CHAPTER 28
By the second morning, Alice had cried so much that she had begun to feel faintly ridiculous about it, which did not, as it happened, stop her crying.
She sat at the window in the breakfast room at Westbury in yesterday’s shawl, with her tea going cold and her toast untouched, and watched the rain that had fallen overnight drip from the edge of the orangery roof.
She was distantly aware that her family had arranged themselves around her grief like furniture around a fire.
Her mother sat very close, patting her hand at intervals and saying, every quarter of an hour or so, that there were other dukes, which did not help at all.
Daphne sat on her other side with red-rimmed eyes, having decided, with the fierce loyalty that Alice loved her for, to be as miserable as her sister whether or not she understood why.
And in the corner, with the stiff awkwardness of two men who had no idea what to do with a weeping woman and would rather charge a cannon, sat her father and the Marquess of Dowton.
Isaac, who had come to call on Daphne and found a house in mourning, had stayed anyway which Alice thought rather decent of him. Currently, he was attempting to interest her father in a point of natural philosophy concerning the migration of a particular moth. Her father, who did not care for moths, was nodding at all the wrong moments.
It was her father who undid her in the end, not the moths.
A footman had come in at eight with the morning papers on a salver, the scandal sheets among them. Alice had seen the top one and gone white because she knew, the way one knows the weather, exactly whose name would be in it and exactly what would be said.
Before she could so much as reach for it, her father had stood up, crossed the room in three strides, taken the entire stack off the salver, and thrown it straight onto the fire.
The room had fallen silent. Her father, who had never in his life done a single thing without deciding first whether it was correct, had stood with his back to them and watched the scandal sheets curl and catch and burn.
“There,” he had said gruffly to the fire. “Damned things. Bad for digestion.” He had not turned around. “Eat your toast, Alice.”
And Alice, who had spent twenty-five years failing to make this man love her in any way she could see, put her face down on her folded arms on the breakfast table and wept harder than she had wept since the chapel.
She would have laughed if she had not been so wretched because she understood now, far too late and far too well, that her whole family loved her in their cramped and clumsy and inarticulate way and had loved her all along. She had spent her life so busy ensuring their happiness that she had never let them try, however badly, to ensure hers.
“There is a caller, My Lady,” the footman announced from the door.
Alice lifted her head. For one wild, ruinous instant, her whole body went still, and her heart leapt up into her throat. She hated it for leaping, and she hated herself for its leaping.
“Who is it?” she asked in a barely steady voice.
“Lady Joanna Arnolds, My Lady.”
