Of course.Of course, it was Joanna. Not him. It would never be him. She had made sure it would never be him; that had been the entire point.
She pressed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes for a moment and then got up because Joanna was the one person in the world she most wanted and least deserved to see.
She stepped out into the hall to find Joanna in her traveling cloak with the rain still on it.
Joanna took one look at Alice’s swollen face and did not say a single one of the words Alice had been bracing for. She simply opened her arms. Alice walked into them and let herself be held.
“You absolute idiot,” Joanna murmured into her hair. “You wonderful, self-sacrificing, infuriating idiot. Come for a ride; the rain is stopping. You have not had air in two days, and you smell slightly of grief and old tea, so I am taking you out before you turn entirely into a Brontë heroine.”
“I cannot, Joanna. I look a fright. I cannot see anyone.”
“You will see me, the inside of a carriage, and a great deal of dull wet countryside. Mama Lockwood.” Joanna turned her considerable charm on Lady Westbury, who had appeared in the doorway. “May I steal her for an hour? I will return her improved or at least aired.”
“Oh,” said Lady Westbury, who had been frightened for two days and was glad to see someone with a plan. “Oh, yes. Yes, please do. Take her, dear. Air… Air is the thing.”
So, ten minutes later, Alice found herself bundled into Joanna’s carriage in her crumpled gown, her face hastily sponged and her bonnet askew, rolling out through the gates and into a clearing gray morning.
Joanna kept up a determined, cheerful patter about nothing and everything—the weather, a hat she had seen, a scandal involving someone Alice had never met.
Alice leaned her aching head against the squabs and let the patter wash over her and thought that perhaps in a year or ten, this might become bearable, this dull rinsed-out feeling, if only Joanna would keep talking and never once say her brother’s name.
Joanna, to her credit, never once said her brother’s name. She talked instead about the wedding gowns she had ordered and would now, presumably, cancel, and did not let the wordweddinghang in the air long enough to wound.
She talked about a horse she meant to buy and a book she had begun reading and a dreadful soprano they had both endured at a musicale in the spring, and she reached across at intervals and squeezed Alice’s cold hand, and she did not ask a single question.
Alice understood dimly, through the fog of her grief, that this careful, determined patter was love too.
Joanna had decided the kindest help she could offer her was to fill the silence with harmless nothings so that there was no room left in it for the grief itself.
Alice loved her for it but could not say so, so she only turned her hand under Joanna’s and held on.
“You are very quiet,” Joanna noted gently at one point. “You need not talk. I shall talk enough for both of us; I always have. Mama used to say I was born talking and have not since drawn breath. Only, Alice…” She paused. “You did a brave thing. I want you to know that. Whatever anyone says in the days to come—and they will say a great deal—you did a brave thing, a true thing. I am proud to call you my friend, and I shall call you my friend until we are both very old, whatever else does or does not come to pass. Do you hear me?”
Alice’s eyes filled. “I hear you,” she croaked.
“Good.” Joanna briskly turned back to the window. “Now, I saw the most absurd bonnet on Bond Street. It had an entire pheasant on it. Awholepheasant, Alice, as though the woman had caught one on the way to the milliner’s…”
It was some time before Alice realized that the scenery outside the window had stopped being unfamiliar.
She sat up. She knew that line of limes, the same that ran down from the chapel. She knew that long gravel sweep. She knew, with a lurch that went straight through her like cold water, the gray stone front of the house rising at the end of the avenue because she had stood in its attic two nights ago with a paint box in her hands and given away her whole heart and called it a parting gift.
“Joanna.” Her voice came out strange. “Joanna, where have you brought me?”
“Home,” Joanna said.
Before Alice could so much as reach for the door, the carriage had swept up to the steps and stopped. Joanna leaned across, opened the door, planted one firm hand on the small of Alice’s back, and shoved her onto the gravel.
“I am so sorry. I am the worst friend in England. I will make it up to you for the rest of my life. Go inside, Alice.”
“Joanna, you cannot—I will not?—”
But the door had banged shut, and the whip had cracked. And Joanna, the worst friend in England, was already wheeling the carriage in a wide spray of gravel and bowling back off down the avenue of limes at a speed that suggested she had no intention whatsoever of being caught.
Alice was left standing alone on the front steps of Langton Manor in yesterday’s gown with her bonnet askew and her lips parted and nowhere on earth to go but in.
She looked down to steady herself… and stopped.
There were small arrows painted on the steps. Dozens, in bright careless color—the blue of cornflowers and the yellow of gorse—all pointing toward the great open doors.
