Richard’s expression changed. The humor vanished from it, and what came in its place was the careful attention he wore when he was being asked by a friend to take a thing seriously.
On three separate occasions in the last ten years, he had sat in this ring while Cassian had told him, in the careful, unanswerable way Cassian told him things, that he did not intend to have an heir. And on those three occasions, he had said nothing. He had said nothing because he had decided some time ago that Cassian’s reasons were not to be argued against.
This afternoon, he looked as though he might be reconsidering. “This again.”
“Yes, this again. We have not finished the conversation.”
“We have finished the conversation, Cassian. We have finished it many times. You said the line you always say. The line about your father. I shall say it back to you if you have forgotten it.No child deserves to give up everything just to be someone’s son.”
“Yes.”
“You will hold to it.”
“I will hold to it.”
“Even with her?”
Cassian did not answer. In fact, he did not immediately understand the question.
The question seemed to have an obvious answer. It was the same question he had been answering for sixteen years since the moment he had stood at the door to his father’s study at fourteen and seen the small heap of black-edged canvases in the grate and the blackening smoke of the things he had loved going up the chimney. He had stood there, with the smell of smoke filling his nostrils, and had decided that he would never give a child of his anything to lose.
He had not, in sixteen years, revised that decision.
He had not, in sixteen years, been asked to revise it by anyone who had any standing to ask.
“Richard.”
“Yes.”
“It does not matter who she is. It does not change my decision.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You are certain?”
“I am certain. Which is why I will not sire children, Richard. Even if my father had not burned everything I cared for, society would have. I have watched it happen. I will not, in my own house, do it to a child of my own.”
Richard looked at him for a long second.
Then Richard, who had not in all the years of their friendship lost a single argument by losing his temper, said, “Cassian, you are better than your father. That has been true for a long time. I have been telling you it is true for a long time. You have not been listening. I will not say it again this afternoon. I will only say that the woman you are marrying next week will not let you avoid the conversation.”
Cassian opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. He climbed out of the ring instead.
He pulled his shirt down over his head and sat on the bench at the side of the small back room. He unwrapped his hands slowly, the way Matthew had taught him when he was fifteen, and looked at the bloodied spot between his knuckles where the skin had split the third time he had hit Richard.
“I almost liked her better when she was my rival,” he said again to the wall.
He had said it twice. He did not believe it either time.
It was perhaps the first thing in sixteen years that he had not been able to lie himself into believing on the third try.
CHAPTER 18
Alice had not, in her life, paid very much attention to lace.
To her, lace had always seemed one of the smaller indignities of being a young lady of the ton, a thing that was periodically attached to her at the wrist and the collar and the hem by people who knew what they were doing in such a way that she only ever had to stand still and look agreeable while it was attached.
