It was not a grave stillness. It was a small one. It was the stillness of a fifty-year-old woman who had spent thirty years in drawing rooms and knew exactly which sentence had been spoken and how to receive it without giving her feelings away. The stillness lasted perhaps two seconds. Then her mother breathed out, folded her hands again, and tilted her head slightly.
“Has he, indeed?”
“He has.”
“And how was the subject broached, Alice?”
“I broached it.”
“You broached it?”
“Mother—”
“Alice, my love, I am not scolding you. I am asking. I am asking because if there is a young woman of twenty-five in England who would have raised the subject of an heir to her betrothed in plain words on the gravel of Hyde Park, it would be you, and I am only confirming that it was you.” She paused and drew the slow, patient breath of a woman of fifty who had seen a great deal. “Did he give a reason?”
“He said there were reasons.”
“That is not a reason.”
“He said he would not speak of them on the gravel of Hyde Park.”
“That is closer.”
Alice set the novel aside. She put her hands in her lap and looked down at them.
“Alice.” Her mother’s voice was very gentle. “On the day your sister was born, you brought her every toy you had.”
Alice did not lift her head. “I know,” she muttered.
“You were five. You had wanted a sister since you were three. The maids had told me. You had asked the maids three times if the next baby would be a girl, and each of the three times the maids had told you that nobody could promise such a thing, and each of the three times you had told the maids that, in that case, you would simply require the baby to be a girl because you had decided. You had decided, Alice. At five.
“And when Daphne was put into your arms—your father has forgotten this, I think, but I have not—you were not at all surprised. You behaved as though a package you had sent for had arrived on the appointed day. And then you went up to the nursery, packed up every toy you had ever owned, and brought them down. You laid them on the rug at the foot of my bed and said very seriously,They are hers now.”
“Mother.”
“I am not done, Alice.”
“I know.”
“You were five then, but you have been doing the same thing ever since.” Her mother’s voice broke on the last word.
Alice kept her eyes down because if she looked up, she would see her mother’s face, and her composure would shatter in two seconds and would never recover.
“Alice, I know what you have done. I know why. I am not Sally. I am not Daphne. I have known you for twenty-five years, and I have known what you would do for your sister since you were five, and I knew when Lord Dowton came to dinner what you would do, given a small opening. I did not think it would be a kiss at the Worthington ball—I will admit you were creative—but it does not surprise me that you have done it.”
“Mother—”
“Alice, look at me, please.”
She looked up.
Her mother was not crying. She was looking at her with a face Alice did not recall ever seeing before. It was a face that wasvery tired and very kind. It was a face that, Alice realized with a twist in her chest, had not in twenty-five years been turned this way on her because she had not in twenty-five years given her mother any cause to turn it this way.
“Alice, are you certain of what you are doing?”
“Mother.”
“You said to me, in this room when you were nineteen, that you wished one day to marry for love. You said it again when you were one-and-twenty. You said it again at three-and-twenty. You have not said it for the past two years, but you have not stopped wishing it, Alice. I have seen your face. I have watched it for twenty-five years. You wish it still.”
