The orchards sprawled behind the house in long, neat rows. The lake had a small white folly at its near end, a bridge over its narrowest point, and a path that ran around its edge and disappeared in the trees.
There were perhaps thirty people on the lawn, in pale dresses and dark coats and the particular movements of a house party that had just started. Alice could see, even from this distance, that someone had set up an archery target in the meadow at the far side of the lake. She had never in her life held a bow.
She told her pulse to settle. It did not, in fact, oblige.
“Alice,” Daphne said softly.
“Yes?”
“It is very beautiful.”
“It is.”
“He has done well for himself, has he not?”
“He has done very well for himself, Daphne.”
“You are going to be very rich, Alice.”
“I suppose I am.”
Alice did not say what she was actually thinking which was that she had not, in any of the imagining she had done about this marriage in the last week, accounted for the existence of Langton. Her imaginings had had Cassian in them. They had had Joanna. They had had a civil ceremony, a large emptydrawing room, and the careful management of a life she had not chosen.
They had not had this. They had not had a long pale yellow house in a green valley with an orchard and a lake and a folly. They had not, above all, had a house that looked very much like the house in which a woman who had wanted a family for sixteen years might have one.
The carriage rolled to a stop at the front steps a quarter of an hour later.
Joanna was on the gravel before the footman had unfolded the steps. “Alice.”
“Joanna.”
“Come with me, now. I have a great deal to show you. Mrs. Pendleton, I will be perhaps an hour; see the trunks taken up. They will be in your rooms when you return. Alice, give me your hand. Daphne, you as well. Lady Westbury?—”
“Joanna,” Lady Westbury cut in gently. “Perhaps the girls?—”
“They will be back for nuncheon, My Lady. I promise it. Come, Alice.”
Alice was pulled, along with Daphne, around the side of the house and down a small gravel path to the lake. The path ran between two long borders of late tulips.
Up close, the lake was perhaps four hundred yards across at its widest and quite shallow at the near end where there was a small wooden landing for a boat. There was no boat at the landing. However, in the meadow at the far end, there were a great many figures, a great many bows, and as Alice now saw, no target at all.
“Joanna.”
“Yes?”
“Where is the target?”
“There is no target.”
“There is?—”
“There is no target. Cassian shall explain. Cassian!”
He was standing at the center of the meadow in shirtsleeves with his coat slung over his arm, the Viscount Greencliff at his elbow, and Richard Sutton at the other. He had the particular look of someone who had spent the last quarter of an hour organizing a piece of foolishness and was now ready to set it loose.
He looked up and saw Alice. He held her gaze with the particular intensity he had shown ever since the orangery and then crossed the meadow toward her.
“Lady Alice. Lady Daphne. Lady Westb—Ah, Joanna has lost your mother.”
