She put her hand briefly on his sleeve. She did not look at his face. She did not require him, in the small kind way she had, to say anything to her. Then she squeezed his sleeve once, dropped her hand, and moved away, disappearing among the dancers and the matrons and the chaperones.
Cassian found himself alone at the window with a glass he was not drinking and a sentence sitting in his chest he was not going to be able to dislodge.
“… you are both lying to yourselves about why.”
He picked the glass up again. He set it down again.
He looked at Alice. She was standing with her mother at the far end of the room, smiling at something Lady Sefton had said. She still had not looked at him.
He understood, calmly and at once, the way a man understood an unwelcome piece of correspondence on its third reading, that he had got himself into a thing he had not until this moment understood the shape of.
He had thought he was rescuing her. He had thought he was protecting his sister’s reputation, Alice’s reputation, his own peace of mind, and the orderly set of arrangements that he had been making painstakingly for ten years.
In short, he had thought that this was a business.
It was not a business.
He looked at his sister, who was now laughing at something with a friend across the room, and then at Alice, who was now laughing at something with her mother, and he understood for the first time that Joanna was not afraid for Alice.
She was afraid for him.
CHAPTER 12
Alice had been at Hyde Park for forty-five minutes by the time Cassian appeared.
She had not slept. She had not pretended to sleep. She had lain in her bed for the better part of three hours, watching the strip of light move across her ceiling, and counted three or four times the number of things that had occurred at Almack’s the previous evening that she did not, on reflection, mean to think about.
The count was eleven. It was the same number of slots on her dance card. She had found this very funny at three in the morning and had stopped finding it funny by four.
She had dressed at six, gone downstairs at half past, and informed her father at breakfast that she meant to promenade at Hyde Park with her sister and Sally. Her father had grunted at his paper and said, “Mind the chaperone.” And she had said, “Of course, Father.” She had not, throughout it, met his eyes.
Daphne, by contrast, had been chattering since dawn. After all, she had not opened the curtain at the back of Almack’s terrace. She had spoken Alice’s name; Alice had answered; Daphne had cheerfully accepted that her sister had been admiring the moon and had gone away. On the ride home, she had decided, in the dreamy, oblivious way that she decided most things, that Alice and the Duke must have been very much in love this whole time, and she had spent the night before breakfast and the morning after it telling Alice so.
Alice had been told eleven times that the Duke was very handsome. She had been told six times that penning his name in all the slots was the most romantic thing Daphne had ever heard of in her life. She had been told twice that Daphne would not have believed it and was so glad to be wrong.
Alice had not corrected her. Perhaps she had not found the strength.
“There,” Sally pointed out quietly on Alice’s other side. “That is Lord Dowton.”
Alice looked up.
Isaac was on the path some twenty paces ahead of them, alone but for a stick, and he was looking with the particular attention of a man cataloging a thing into the deepest folder of his memory at a small green creature on a leaf.
He had not yet seen them. He was so focused on the creature that Sally, who was old and very kind and had taken note of agreat many things in her time, did Alice a favor by clearing her throat loudly enough that he would hear her without having to be addressed.
He looked up, his face turning pink. He bowed at the waist very carefully, the way one bowed when one had been rehearsing the bow in one’s head for several minutes. “Lady Alice. Lady Daphne. Good morning.”
“My Lord,” Alice greeted.
Daphne said nothing. She was looking down the path.
“It is a very fine morning,” Isaac said.
“It is, My Lord,” Alice agreed.
“I have just been looking at a particular species of leafhopper. I think it may be a new one. I have been keeping a notebook.”
“Have you, My Lord?”
