No, no. Have you tasted Midsummer Night? I am convinced it is the best.
Lucie heard nearly all of it from behind the kitchen doorway—they were never quiet—and sometimes allowed herself a small, private smile because if nothing else, at least they loved the honey light.
And then, at the end of that long week, Lady Rivenna appeared at the top of the staircase and called down to the kitchen.
“Lucie? A word, if you please.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
The study waswarm with late afternoon light. Lady Rivenna sat behind the desk with a ledger closed in front of her and a cup of tea at her elbow.
I will not cry, Lucie told herself as she stood on the threshold.I will not cry.Because this was surely it. A week of reprieve, and now the dismissal. She had known it must come; she had merely not known when.
Balthazar trotted ahead of her through the doorway as though he owned the room, tail up, and Lucie followed. Lady Rivenna looked up, and her gaze went first, and pointedly, to the cat.
“Cat,” she said.
Balthazar regarded her for a long, insolent moment, then flicked his tail and crossed to the armchair in the corner, sprang up onto the cushion, and settled himself with his back deliberately toward her.
Lucie took the chair across the desk, sat with her hands folded in her lap, and waited for it to begin.
“I have had quite enough of this brooding,” Lady Rivenna announced. “We are going to talk about the thing. All of it. Now.”
Lucie blinked. Her throat went dry. “I—I thought I had a choice. You said, the other morning, that I had a choice, whether to speak of itor?—”
“You do. And so do I, and I am choosing to speak. You may sit there and listen, if that is more to your taste.”
There did not seem to be any answer to this, so Lucie gave none.
“Very well. My grandson. And the girl who works in the kitchen of my confectionery.”
Lucie’s face went hot.
“You are expecting, I imagine, that I ought to be scandalized. Horrified. Perhaps overcome and in want of a fainting couch. To clutch my pearls and call for the smelling salts and inform you thata Rowanwood cannot possibly,and so on, and so forth.”
Lucie said nothing, because that was, in fact, precisely what she had spent the week waiting for.
And yet, now that Lady Rivenna had said it aloud in that dry, unimpressed voice, the picture would not quite assemble itself. She tried to imagine Lady Rivenna requiring smelling salts and found that she could not. She rather doubted Lady Rivenna had needed smelling salts a day in her life. She was not a woman who wasshockedby things; she was a woman who arranged for things to shock other people, and then watched while drinking her tea.
Which meant, Lucie thought slowly, that perhaps the revelation in the garden had not shocked her at all.
“What you are perhaps not expecting,” Lady Rivenna went on, “is that I have known for years.”
“You—” Lucie heard the words, but they did not reach a part of her mind that could process them. “What?”
“You and Kazrian have felt this way about one another for years, and I have been aware of it for almost as long.”
Lucie wondered distantly if she might be the one who required the smelling salts, because the room seemed to tip very slightly, a sensation like a carpet being yanked from under her feet, and she had to put her hand on the arm of the chair.
“Years,” she repeated.
“Mm.”
“But—” Her mind was scrambling now, casting about among a hundred small remembered moments and finding, to her horror, that every one of them looked entirely different in this new light. “But then you—all thistime, you—” She could not seem to finish a single sentence. “You cannot possiblyapproveof this. You cannot. I am merely?—”
“You are about to say something that I suspect I shall not care for.”
“I amhuman.” The word came out cracked. “I work in the kitchen. I have no magic, and I—I am nothing?—”
