CHAPTER 3
“Drink,” Beatrice urged gently. “You will only make yourself ill.”
She sat with her on the settee, pressing the teacup into her hands for the third time.
Cecily stared at the untouched tea. “It does not matter.”
“Of course, it matters. You will faint at this rate.”
Cecily had cried herself hollow by morning.
It had started on the walk back from the shore—a few dignified tears, she had told herself, entirely reasonable given the circumstances, which she would allow and then be done with. By the time she reached Beatrice’s townhouse, she was crying properly. By luncheon, she had stopped and started twice. By evening, she had given up pretending she was going to stop.
She woke up the next morning with her eyes swollen and the particular hollow tiredness of someone who had slept badly and dreamed worse, and lay in the grey dawn light conducting a thorough inventory of everything she had lost.
“No,” she said, her voice breaking despite her effort to keep it steady. “It does not. Because no one will look at me the same way again. No respectable man would want me now.”
Beatrice considered lying. Cecily could see the consideration, brief and well-intentioned, cross her face before she abandoned it.
She pressed her lips together briefly. “The morning papers have it.”
Cecily sat up against the pillows and closed her eyes. “Of course they have it.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which was something, though not much. “Mrs. Fowler was one of them. On the beach. I recognized her. She has been in Brighton a fortnight with nothing to say, and now I’ve given her something to say, and she will say it to absolutelyeveryone.”
“It may not spread as far as–”
“It will,” Cecily said without heat. Simply a fact she had already made her peace with. “You know it will. By Thursday, it will be in London. By the weekend, it will be at every breakfast table in the county.” She looked down at her hands, at the counterpane bunched between her fingers. “And then it’s over. All of it. Everything I’ve been waiting for.”
Beatrice was quiet for a moment. “You don’t know that.”
“I know how it works, Bea. We both do.” Cecily looked up at her. “A woman whose name is attached to a scene like that—who is found at dawn on a beach with a man, alone, his shirt half open and her kneeling beside him… There is no version of that story that Society tells kindly. It doesn’t matter what actually happened. It never matters what actually happened.”
Beatrice reached out and took her hand. Cecily let her.
“I was trying to help him.” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, which she resented. “He was lying in the tide, Bea. Unconscious. What was I supposed to do, step over him and keep walking?”
“No,” Beatrice replied gently. “Of course not.”
“Then what–” Cecily stopped. Breathed. “It doesn’t matter. The right thing and the sensible thing were not the same, and I chose the right thing. Now, I am going to pay for it for the rest of my life. And the part that I cannot—the part that keeps–” She pressed her fingers briefly to her mouth. “I’ve been so careful. You know how careful I’ve been. Every suitor, every Season, I’ve waited because I didn’t want to settle, because I wanted something real, and now I don’t even get the chance. That choice has been taken from me entirely, and I didn’t even—I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I know,” Beatrice said softly.
“It doesn’t help, knowing that.”
“No,” Beatrice agreed. “It doesn’t. But it isn’t too bad—they haven’t used your full name. Not yet. But it’s descriptive enough that anyone who was in Brighton yesterday will–”
“Know immediately.” Cecily squeezed her eyes shut. “What does it say?”
Beatrice hesitated.
“Bea. Tell me.”
“A compromising scene,” Beatrice revealed carefully, “between an unnamed lady and a certain well-known gentleman, discovered on the eastern shore at dawn, in circumstances of unmistakable intimacy.”
Cecily’s stomach dropped.
“In what sensediscovered?” she asked.
Beatrice hesitated. “They describe you kneeling beside him. His coat open. The tide not yet withdrawn.” She swallowed. “They make much of the isolation with the gentleman.”
