“Get out.”
Cassian unlocked the door and opened it.
He stood at the door while Victor picked himself up off the floor, one hand on his jaw and a grimace on his lips, and watched him go down the corridor toward the south stairs without looking back.
When Victor rounded the corner, he closed the door again.
He stood there alone with the scattered books and the overturned library steps and the spot on the carpet where Lucas had been crying when they had arrived, and he finally understood that he did not know what he wanted anymore.
He did not know what he wanted.
He was about to find out.
CHAPTER 24
For the next five days, Alice did not leave her rooms.
She sent down word the morning after the library incident that she had a slight headache and that she begged the indulgence of the house. She sent down word the next morning that the headache was no better.
She sent down word the morning after that she would, with regret, be missing the day’s riding party, and the morning after that that she would, also with regret, be missing the morning service in the small chapel at the edge of the orchard.
By the end of the week, the house had stopped expecting her at meals.
Joanna sent up trays. She sent up notes. Once, she even sent up a small bunch of late tulips from the long border. Alice answered the notes in her disciplined handwriting and ate two bites of the toast on a good morning, but it did not go down.
She was not ill.
She was, in fact, working. She was working in the careful way she had worked at every difficult thing in her life: by herself behind a closed door with no one watching.
She had her maid bring up parcels from the village. She had her maid bring up paints and brushes and small jars from the saddler. She had her maid, who had been with her family for sixteen years and had not once asked a single question she had not been asked to ask, bring up a box from a particular shop on High Street that Mrs. Halliwell, when consulted in the kitchens at half past five on the morning after the library incident, had identified by name.
The box arrived on the afternoon before the wedding.
It was a paint set. It was a flat wooden box of perhaps twelve inches by eight with a brass clasp and a small painted dragonfly on the lid, and inside it was the careful arrangement of pans and brushes and stoppered jars of a proper artist’s paint set. The kind a young gentleman might have been given by his governess when he was twelve.
The kind that, on a particular Tuesday in October sixteen years ago, might have been gathered up by the housekeeper and put on a small heap of canvases in the back grate of the master’s study.
Alice put it on the small table by the window.
She looked at it for a long time. She had not been certain she would have the nerve to give it to Cassian. The week’s small private liturgy had been:I shall decide on the morning of the wedding. I can still take the carriage. The offer he made me in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room is still open. I have until the chapel bell to make up my mind. I do not need to decide anything now.
She had been telling herself that for five days. She had not believed any of it.
In fact, she had decided when Victor Hamilton had made that remark in the library. She had decided when Cassian had said,I do not know. She had perhaps decided much earlier than that, against an orange tree in her father’s orangery on a Friday morning in May. This week, she had been deciding only how to tell him.
She had decided this evening.
She had decided this evening because tomorrow was the wedding, and because she had, at five in the afternoon, looked out the window in her bedroom and seen him walking across the lawn with his coat draped over his arm and his head bent.
The set of his shoulders suggested he was not sleeping any better than she was, and at the sight, she decided that she could not let him go to bed tonight without speaking to him.
She put on the silk nightgown Mrs. Hatcher had laid out across the velvet stool a week ago which she had not looked at since. Over it, she put on a long pale wrapper of her mother’s thathad been packed in her trunk by mistake. Then she clasped the small gray pendant that had not left the small velvet box on her dressing table since the orangery around her neck and settled it at the base of her throat.
She picked up the paint box, wrapped it in a square of brown paper, and walked out of her room.
The house was quiet. The other guests had retired to their rooms after dinner. The maids had finished their work. The small clock at the end of the corridor read five past eleven.
She walked past the door to Joanna’s room, which was dark. She walked past the door to her mother’s room, which was also dark. She walked past the landing where, on the day she had arrived, Cassian had taken her gloved hand and bowed over it and not kissed it.
