“You have come to call on me. This counts among the list of things you owe me by way of a proper courtship.”
“It does. It is one of the reasons I came.”
“What are the others?”
“There is one other.”
“Only one?”
“Only one, Lady Alice. I am a man of discipline. I came with two purposes. I have already accomplished the first.”
She glanced at him.
They had walked behind a small group of three orange trees. The trees were old and taller than both of them, and they formed a small alcove at the back of the orangery which was not visible from any of the doors or any of the upstairs windows or the gardener’s potting shed or the cook’s larder. Alice had not entirely forgotten about it while considering the walk.
Cassian took something out of the inner pocket of his coat. It was a small box, small enough to fit in his hand. It was wrapped in a dark blue velvet that Alice recognized at once as the velvet famous jewelers on Bond Street used for their best work.
“Your Grace.”
“You said I had not yet given you a gift.”
“I said you had not yet given me a puppy.”
“I would not bring you a puppy, Lady Alice. Certainly not in the orangery. It would frighten the cook. This is something else.”
He opened the box.
For a moment, Alice did not see its contents. She was too aware of the box. She was too aware of the man holding the box, who in two years of knowing her had never struck her as a man who would have come to her parents’ house with a small dark blue velvet box from a Bond Street jeweler.
Then she looked at what was in the box and stopped breathing.
It was a pendant. It was not large or gaudy. It was, in fact, very plain. A small oval-cut stone on a fine silver chain, the kind of thing that a sensible older woman might have selected for her daughter’s nineteenth birthday with the main expense in the stone itself rather than in the setting.
The stone was gray. It was not, she realized after a second look, an ordinary gray. It was a cool slate gray that, in the morning light filtering through the glass, did a thing she had not seen any stone do before.
It looked back at her with Cassian’s eyes.
“Cassian—”
She had said his name without meaning to. She had said his Christian name in a room with three glass doors and an unspecified number of maids at the linen room window. She put her hand briefly on her mouth and then lowered it again.
“Your Grace, it is too much.”
“It is a betrothal gift.”
“It is?—”
“Don’t you like it, Lady Alice?”
“I like it very much, Your Grace.”
“You are pale.”
“I am pale because it is gray.”
“Yes.”
“It is the gray of your eyes, Your Grace.”
