“China sets. Dance cards. Gentlemen. I can manage them all.”
She was surely just putting on a brave front, but it would only hurt Henrietta’s pride to press her further.
“Perhaps I should stay…” Celia was dithering now, weak and foolish. “I am worried that Peter had to quit his job for me. I am worried that it won’t be a good place for Marianne. I am worried…”
About you, she wanted to say.
Henrietta lowered her sewing and looked straight at Celia.
Celia shivered. She tried to focus on her cousin’s curls, the set of her jaw, but couldn’t stop seeing Clarence as he was that night.He was walking away, knocking against the wet dark leaves in his rush to leave her behind.
“Celia. Celie, look at me.”
Celia shook her head, trying to clear it.
Henrietta reached for Celia’s hand. “Let me put my skills to the test.” She smiled, silk and steel. “I will tell you what to do. Decisively. Stop thinking of the might-have-beens. Stop wishing the other night never happened. It did, and it changes everything.”
“I know.” Below all her pain, Celia was a realist too.
Henrietta squeezed her fingers, her smile tight. “Hughes is giving you the chance to make your own life—as much chance as any of us ever get. Take it, Celia. Go.”
*
On Thursday evening,Aunt Thompson filled the house with distant relatives and well-wishers, with Peter Hughes in the middle of everything, a brilliant smile flashing across his face. He wore a dusky green coat, perfectly fitted around his square shoulders and slim waist, his waistcoat embroidered with tone-on-tone cream swirls, his hair smoothed into fashionable curls instead of tumbling into his eyes at inopportune moments. He was handsome and charming and elegant, and Celia assumed that people meant it when they congratulated her.
Celia didn’t want a party, she didn’t want an engagement, and she most certainly did not want to leave her family. But she was here, and she was smiling. That afternoon she had sewn long sleeves into one of her evening gowns to cover the bruises on her arms, her ankle throbbed, and she hoped that the candlelight obscured the little white lines around her mouth and eyes. She kept smiling.
She just wanted to go to bed, she and her cousins pulling the covers over their heads and giggling in the dark like when they were girls. She would tell stories of the Sidhe, and Rose would tell stories from the Decameron, and Marianne’s eyes would pop wide at the scary parts. Henrietta would—
Peter’s laugh startled Celia out of her reverie. A portly gentleman congratulated them, Mr. Thompson’s second cousin or some such.
“Happiest among men,” Mr. Hughes said.
Celia stared into her wineglass. He was lying. Mr. Hughes wasn’t marrying her because he was happy; he was trapped. Caught. Tricked.
“And she’s a beautiful lady.” The second cousin winked broadly.
Celia turned away before she heard Peter’s reply. She did not want men looking at her and thinking about how she looked. None of them, not ever. She meandered through the crowd, following the low cadence of the voice that was new to her tonight.
“May I present Mr. Paul Leavenworth,” Peter had said, “formerly Lieutenant-Colonel, and who graciously has agreed to be my secretary.”
Aunt Thompson pitied Mr. Hughes for not having any family to host an event, so had encouraged him to bring guests to her party. She was probably hoping that he would produce some obscure relatives, whose antecedents she could trace through the generations until she found half a dozen friends in common, but Peter brought only the dark-skinned gentleman that Celia had seen at the Macallisters.
Aunt Thompson was still trying to sort what to make of him.
Celia sidled closer, watching Mr. Leavenworth charm her family. A Lieutenant-Colonel was a high rank, the same as Peter had achieved in the war, and she wondered why he had agreedto become a secretary. It was a gentleman’s job, but usually for a young man at the start of his career. Studying him, she decided that she was looking forward to working with him. She liked how his smile came on slowly but made people want to smile along.
Peter drew up beside them, and Celia was startled by how different he looked, standing by his friend. He seemed sturdy, settled into himself, as though he absorbed some of Leavenworth’s calm.
“So you are accompanying my niece to, ahem, County Durham?” Mr. Thompson cleared his throat.
“Where is this house, precisely?” Aunt Thompson chirped.
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Leavenworth answered. “Far out in the Pennines, ma’am. I am afraid we will have a long carriage ride, especially after this wet spring. Two weeks—”
“If we are lucky,” Leavenworth and Peter said simultaneously. They cast each other a glance, the smile implicit.
Celia was sorry she was putting good men to such trouble, two weeks’ travel in the rain, and she slipped away, guilty.
