“Mother—”
“And today, he has told you that he will not give you children. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you propose to do, my love?”
“There are worse fates,” Alice heard herself say, “than marrying a duke.”
It was exactly what her mother had once said to a young cousin at a wedding breakfast. It was, in fact, what her mother had been saying her whole life.
It was a sentence Alice had often despised her mother for using. She used it now deliberately because she could not think of any other thing to say and because if she did not use it, she was going to cry, and crying was not a thing the Lockwoods did.
Her mother studied her. She did not contradict her. She did not press her. She did not, in any of the dozen ways Alice had imagined the conversation going, attempt to argue her out of what Alice had just said.
Eventually, she spoke. “Alice, if you could go back to the night before Daphne was born, would you choose differently?”
“I—”
“Would you not bring her your toys, Alice? Would you, having known what you would later choose to do for her, have chosen otherwise?”
“Mother—”
“Would you, Alice?”
Alice did not answer.
She did not answer because she did not know how to. She did not know how to because she had never, in twenty-five years of being Daphne’s older sister, considered the question. She had never been required to. She had been five at the time. She had decided then. That decision had been the foundation of her whole life since then.
Her mother nodded once. “That is what I thought.”
She stood up. She did not come over and embrace her which was kind of her because Alice would not have survived being embraced. Instead, she crossed to the small writing table by the window, picked up the brush Alice had left there earlier, and ran her thumb across the bristles idly, the way a woman does when she is composing a thought she is not yet ready to voice.
“Alice.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“I am going to say one thing. It is the only thing I shall say. I will not raise the matter again after tonight. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Your father gave me two beautiful girls, so I would not go back. I would not change my choice for anything because the cost of changing it is the two of you, and the two of you are the greatest work of my life.” She set the brush down very carefully. “But that is the only reason. I want you to know that. That is the onlyreason. There is no other reason in the world that a woman of any sense should marry a man who will not give her what she has known she wanted since she was a child.”
She kissed Alice on the top of her head and then left. The door closed very softly behind her.
Alice did not get up from the window seat. She did not move at all. She sat with the novel beside her and her hands in her lap and the particular silence of her bedroom around her, and she counted after a while the iron rosettes she could see on the back of the brass fender in the fireplace. There were nine of them.
She thought, with an absurdity she did not have the strength to laugh at, that it was the same as the railing on the balcony at Almack’s. Then she thought, less absurdly, that nine was a great many rosettes for one young woman to count when she was trying not to make a decision and that she would have to make one in the morning whether she had counted them all or not.
She did not sleep that night.
CHAPTER 14
The chess pieces were on a low table by the morning room window, in their usual arrangement, with Daphne’s white side in slight disarray from the previous evening’s defeat. By eleven o’clock, Alice was eight moves into the game and losing on purpose.
She was losing badly.
She had moved her queen three moves ago into the precise square from which Daphne’s bishop could take it. Daphne had not, however, taken it. Instead, she had moved her knight at the far edge of the board absently, slowly, the way one moved when one’s mind was not on the chessboard at all. Alice had been obliged, on her next move, to leave the queen there with even more conspicuous availability, and Daphne had not taken her then either.
