“At the house party, you shall give me one true conversation. About children.”
He went still in the particular way he had gone still on the terrace when she had said his Christian name, as if she had touched a wound.
“Alice—”
“One conversation, Cassian. About why.”
He drew a breath and let it out. He fixed her for a long moment with the dark, steady look she was beginning to recognize as the look he gave her when he was about to agree to a thing that he was not ready to agree to.
“One conversation.”
“You promise me.”
“I promise you, Alice.”
“Then we shall be married next week.”
She offered him her hand. He took it and kissed it.
He kissed it for the precise count required by manners and not a count longer.
Alice stood in the middle of the morning room with her hair coming down at the back and the stone at her throat and her sister listening at the door, and she resolved not to tell him until she had to that the count he had just kissed her hand for would, regardless of any other thing she chose in the next eight days, be the last one she ever counted at all.
CHAPTER 17
Cassian arrived at Threadgill’s at half past two with his coat slung over his arm and a particular intention to hit something.
He had never been a man much given to drink. Drinking did not make him feel the small, forgetful warmth other men reported. It instead gave a worse clarity, an unhelpful sharpness about whatever it was he had been trying to forget.
He had given up on it as a tool some years ago. However, he had retained the other tool. He had retained boxing. He had retained the particular fact that a body that had been thrown at another for forty minutes was a body too tired to do anything but sleep afterward.
Today, he meant to sleep.
He had not slept the previous night. He had not slept the morning he had ridden home from Westbury House with thesmell of the orange trees clinging to his coat and his hands not entirely steady on the reins.
He had ridden home with a careful neutrality, and he had not, for the time being, meant to discuss the matter with his coachman. The coachman had not asked. Cassian had not slept since.
Richard was already in the ring. He had taken off his shirt and wrapped his hands. He had been there for an hour and was now warming up the next opponent who had the misfortune of walking in. He grinned when he spotted Cassian.
“Langton.”
“Sutton.”
“You look as though you intend to murder someone.”
“I do.”
“Good. I have not had proper exercise in three days. Wrap your hands.”
Matthew was not present today. He had sent a note that morning explaining that his eye had been giving him trouble and that he would be at home with a poultice and a Wordsworth and a glass of brandy and that he hoped Cassian would have the sense, in his absence, not to break Richard’s nose which Richard could notafford to be broken before Lady Pevensey’s musical evening on Thursday.
Cassian had folded the note and put it in his pocket. He had no intention of attending Lady Pevensey’s musical evening. In fact, he had no intention of going anywhere that did not involve Alice, an altar, and the eight days that separated him and his wedding.
He took off his coat, his waistcoat, and his shirt. He stood in his breeches and his bare feet in Threadgill’s small back room with the smell of leather and lamp oil and chalk around him and wrapped his hands in the slow, careful way Matthew had taught him when he was fifteen years old and angry about something.
He climbed into the ring.
He hit Richard hard in the second round. Richard hit him back.
