“Hello, Bea. I should have sent word–”
“Where is William?”
“Blackmoor House, presumably.”
Beatrice came the rest of the way down the stairs. She looked at her sister’s face with sharp focus, her eyebrows knitting together. Then she took Cecily by the arm. “Drawing room, come.”
She pulled her in that direction.
The fire was good, and the tea arrived quickly. Beatrice poured while keeping an eye on her and waited, giving her the space to open up.
“He called me a responsibility, you know,” Cecily said after taking a small sip.
Beatrice was very still.
“In those words exactly,” Cecily continued. “When I asked him what I was to him, he said he had accepted responsibility for me when he married me.” She looked at her tea. “We kissed. And it was… beautiful, or so I thought. He called it a mistake. Told me that ‘emotional entanglement’ clouds judgment. That Blackmoor could not afford–” She stopped. “He had a great many things to say about what Blackmoor cannot afford.”
“Oh, William,” Beatrice gasped.
“I knew the terms when I agreed to them,” Cecily said. “I knew… I knew what it was. I was the one who proposed half of them. In fact, I sat in your drawing room and listed my conditions and… and I insisted on them. I knew exactly what I was agreeing to.” She looked at the fire. “But then, something happened. Or I allowed myself to believe something had happened. And apparently, I was the only one it happened to.”
“You were not,” Beatrice said.
“I am. He said–”
“I know what he said. I also know what I have seen with my own eyes since the wedding, and what I have watched across a Pall Mall course, and what Edward said he observed across a dinner table.” Beatrice set down her cup carefully. “William has been taught, through several years of direct evidence, that love is a thing that destroys households. That it begins with everything and ends in damage, and the people who pay most are the ones who had no say in the matter.” She paused. “He is not wrong that he learned that. He is only wrong that it applies to him.”
“Beatrice.” Cecily looked at her. “I am not going to beg for it.”
“I’m not suggesting you should.”
“He kissed me in a garden and came home, then decided it was a mistake before the morning properly started. That is not a man who has arrived at love and is afraid of it. That is a man who has decided, in advance, that it is not available to him and is enforcing that decision regardless of what actually happened.” Her voice wavered on the last word, which she resented. “I can endure the gossip. I endured it in Brighton, and I endured three months of London society watching me to see what I would do, and I managed all of it. But I cannot…”
Beatrice waited. When Cecily didn’t continue, she said, “Oh, darling,”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not fine.”
“I’m going to be fine.”
“Cecily.” Beatrice reached across, took the teacup from her hands, because Cecily had been tilting it at an increasingly alarming angle, and set it on the table. She held her hands instead. “Look at me.”
Cecily looked at her.
“What do you need?”
“I don’t need anything. I just need–” She stopped. Breathed. “I could endure the rest of it. I had thought it through before today, and I had made my peace with most of it. The gossip. The circumstances. The fact that half of London knows exactly what kind of arrangement it was.” She looked at Beatrice steadily. “I can endure being talked about. I was talked about before, and I have survived it.”
Her jaw tightened.
“But I cannot endure being tolerated. I cannot sit in that house and be managed and maintained and called a responsibility by a man who kissed me in a garden and then–” She swallowed hard. “I have spent my entire adult life refusing to be with someone who didn’t choose me. I am not going to start making exceptions simply because the man in question is…”
“Is what?” Beatrice prompted gently.
Cecily looked at the fire for a long time. “Exactly what I would have chosen,” she finished. “If I had been allowed to choose.”
The room was very quiet.
