“You will be ruined; I will not pretend otherwise. You will be ruined and shunned by the ton, and your sister will be hurt by the scandal, and you will not in another twenty-five years be received in the houses you have been received in until now. But you will be free. You will be free to marry whomever you choose when the scandal has died and to have as many children as you choose and to live whatever life you choose. I cannot give you a family. I cannot. But I can give you the freedom to find one without me.”
“Cassian…”
“That is my offer.”
She put her hand to her mouth because she could not decide what to say if she did not, and she did not want to find out in front of him.
He gently took her wrist and lowered her hand. “Alice.”
“Yes.”
“You have one week. Seven days. Come to the house party. Come tomorrow morning as we agreed. Let me show you what it could be like. Spend the week at Langton. See the rooms, see Joanna, see the orchards. Matthew will be there as well and Richard. See what your life could be like in it, and then, on the morning of our wedding, decide. I will not press you. I will not court you. I willnot, in any of the seven days, speak to you about silk nightgowns. I will give you the week to decide. And whatever you decide, I will accept.”
“You—”
“You will not be trapped in this.”
“Cassian.”
“Let me show you.”
He stepped back two feet, picked up his hat from the chair, looked at the door, and then looked back at her one more time.
“Mrs. Hatcher,” he said, raising his voice slightly. “Lady Alice shall take the silk nightgown. And anything else of the kind you have in store. You may send the bill to Langton House.”
“Your Grace,” said Mrs. Hatcher.
“Have a good day, Lady Alice.”
“Have a good day, Your Grace.”
He left the room.
Alice heard the bell at the front of the shop ring and the particular tread of his boots on the floorboards and then the bell again as the door closed behind him.
She stood there for a long minute, looking at herself in the long mirror.
This time, she did not look like a woman a man might want to mark as his. She looked like a woman who had just been given a choice.
CHAPTER 20
Langton sat at the foot of a long, low valley three hours’ drive from London in a stretch of orchards her father had once described to her, in a rare moment of being impressed by anything, as the prettiest in Buckinghamshire.
Alice had not seen it before this morning.
In her two years of knowing Joanna, she had seen a great many sketches of Langton in Joanna’s small leather portfolio. She had seen, in her parents’ library, the entry for Langton in the small leather-boundSeats of the English Aristocracyher father consulted on matters of social rank. And she had heard Joanna describe Langton in the offhand way that was Joanna’s habit with everything she had been born to and was not impressed by. But none of that had prepared her for seeing it with her own eyes.
The carriage crested the small hill above the valley at half past eleven.
She had been looking at her gloves. She had been looking at them for the better part of two hours because she had decided, somewhere between London and Aylesbury, that she would not look out the carriage window on the way down. She would arrive at Langton with the same composure she had brought to Almack’s a week ago, and she would do this by not allowing herself to be impressed by anything she could see through a window.
The wheels under her had been small and steady on the gravel for the last quarter of an hour. The scent of the box-hedges in someone’s lane had drifted in through the cracked side-glass. She had held to the decision through all of it. She broke it now.
She broke it because her sister, who was seated beside her, had let out a breathyOh, and her mother, who was seated across from her, had gasped, “Goodness, Alice.”
She looked up to see why.
Langton sat below them in the morning light. It was a long pale yellow house, broad and low, with two wings folded back from a central pediment, set in a stretch of grass that ran down to a bright lake.
