Page 71 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“The W shape. Five stars, low in the north,” he pointed out.

“The queen,” she said. “I know the myth.”

“Tell me which version you know.”

She thought of the library at Peltbury House, the shelf of mythology she had worked through at the age of fourteen while her sister had her pianoforte lesson.

“Cassiopeia boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the sea nymphs,” she started. “Poseidon was offended on their behalf. She was placed in the sky as punishment, fixed to her throne, rotating around the pole so that half the year she hangs upside down.”

“That is the standard version.” His voice came from just above and to her left, unhurried, and she became aware that she was not looking through the telescope at all. “My book gave a different one.”

She waited.

“The book said that the throne was not punishment.” He reached past her again to make some small unnecessary adjustment, and she felt the brush of his coat sleeve against the back of her hand and stilled. “It said she chose it. That she knew what she had done and sat down anyway, because the alternative was to run. Cassiopeia was a great deal of things, but she was not someone who ran from what she had made.”

Alice looked at the star chart on the wall before her, at the figure traced in faded ink, the queen on her throne with the W of her crown tilted toward the horizon.

She turned to look at him. He was closer than she had thought, and the candlelight was doing things to the planes of his face that she had taken care not to look at directly all evening. His eyes, which had been on the star chart, moved to hers with the unhurried attention of a man who had been waiting for her to turn.

“Kenneth,” she began.

“Sit down,” he urged and moved to the chairs.

He lifted the blanket from the arm of one, held it until she sat, and placed it over her lap gently. Then he sat beside her.

The window before them framed a section of sky between two chimney stacks, and the stars were visible at the edges of the city’s haze: Cassiopeia low and to the left, the Plough higher and to the right.

Alice pressed her hands flat beneath the blanket and looked at the sky, feeling the accumulated weight of the evening make itself known in her chest.

“Kenneth?”

“Yes?”

“What did you want to tell me?” she asked. “At the ball.”

The candle flame moved in the draught from the open window.

“I wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I have not brought anyone else here.”

She turned to look at him.

“Not Theresa,” he said. “Not the boys. Not Jonathan, who would make a thorough nuisance of himself with the telescope and never let me hear the end of it.” His gaze was on the window, on the sliver of sky between the chimney stacks, and his hands rested open on his thighs. “No one.”

The room was very quiet. The candle burned lower.

“Why did you bring me?” Her voice came out soft.

He turned his head. His eyes found hers and stayed there, and she felt the gravity of his attention.

“Because I find that I am running out of reasons not to.”

The back of her eyes warmed before she had any say in the matter. She looked away at the star chart, at Cassiopeia on her tilted throne, at the queen who had chosen to sit down. She pressed her lips together and breathed carefully through her nose.

“Alice.”

“I am perfectly well,” she said, which was what she always said, and it had never been less true.

He did not press. He did not offer the brisk retrieval of the moment that she had half-expected, the careful stepping back from what had been said and the restoration of the usual distance between them. He simply sat and waited.