“Provided for,” Lady Moreland cut in.
“Miserable!” Cecily cried.
Lady Moreland pressed her lips together. “You are being dramatic.”
“I am being realistic.” Cecily met her mother’s gaze squarely. “And in any case, it doesn’t matter, because he is not going to come. He is a rake, and rakes do not make offers to bear the consequences of their own recklessness. They simply move on to the next party and leave the women in the story to manage alone. He will not come, and even if he did, I would not accept him, and that is the end of it.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
“Then what do you intend to do?” Lady Moreland asked, very carefully.
Cecily had been thinking about this since dawn. She had lain in the grey morning light and thought about it with the peculiar clarity that came after crying for a very long time—when everything extraneous had been wept away and what remained was just the bare shape of things, undecorated and true.
“If Society has decided I am ruined,” she said calmly, “then I will leave it.”
Beatrice gaped at her. Lady Moreland went very still.
“I will join a convent,” Cecily continued, in the same steady voice. “There are communities that do real work—schools, hospitals, women who need help. I can be useful. I can give mylife to something that matters.” She paused. “It is not the life I wanted, but it is a whole life. And I will not—Iwill notmarry a stranger out of obligation and call it a solution.”
The silence that followed was the particular kind that meant two people were looking at each other and having an entire conversation without words.
It was Beatrice who broke it first.
“Cecily.” Her voice was gentle, careful, the voice she used when she was genuinely worried rather than merely practical. “You are not suited to a convent.”
“I can learn to be suited to it.”
“You argue with everyone about everything. You read French novels. You have strong opinions about the proper way to prepare tea. You would last only three weeks.”
“Then I would learn patience,” Cecily said, “which would apparently be good for me.”
“Cecily–”
“I mean it.” She looked at her sister and then at her mother, her voice steady and clear and absolutely certain. “I am not going to be tolerated by a man who married me because he had no other choice. I am not going to spend my life being someone’s inconvenient obligation. I would rather devote myself to Godthan to a marriage built on nothing.” She breathed deeply. “I know you both think I’m being foolish. I know you both think I should be practical and accept what’s available and be grateful. But I cannot do it. I have never been able to do it, and I am not going to start now simply because I am frightened.”
Lady Moreland looked at her for a long moment, her expression conflicted. Just as she opened her mouth, the drawing room door opened, and the butler appeared.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” he said, addressing Beatrice. “There is a gentleman at the door.” A brief pause. “He did not give his card, but he gave his name. The Duke of Blackmoor. He is asking for Lady Cecily.”
No one spoke.
Cecily’s heart did something without her permission. Her mother turned to look at her with an expression that said, very clearly,You were saying?
Cecily said nothing. She was aware, suddenly and inconveniently, of the state of her face after a day and a half of crying, of the state of her hair, of the fact that she was wearing a morning dress she had put on without particular care and that everything about her appearance communicatedI have been indoors weepingwith considerable accuracy.
And then the door opened fully, andhestepped into the room.
He was tall, taller than he had looked on the shore, where she’d been too focused and too frightened to take proper stock of him. He filled the doorway with the kind of presence that she wouldn’t call loud. Dark hair, this time dry and slightly disheveled in a way that managed to look deliberate. The same jaw. The same green eyes, which found her immediately and lingered.
He looked, infuriatingly, entirely well.
CHAPTER 4
“Your Grace.” Lady Moreland’s voice was warmth and steel in equal measure. “What an unexpected—that is to say, we are very glad–”
“Mama.” The girl—Cecily—said it quietly, without looking away from him. Just the one word, and her mother sat back down.
He had expected resistance. He had prepared for it on the ride over, running through the likely shape of the conversation with the practical efficiency of a man who preferred to anticipate obstacles rather than be surprised by them.
