“I understand that.” Cecily kept her voice even. “Truly, I do. But you also felt something, Bea, even at the beginning. Even when it was complicated, and nothing was certain, there was something there. You’ve told me as much.” She paused. “With Mr. Alderton, there was simply nothing. And I cannot build a life on nothing and call it a foundation. I would rather have no house at all than one with nothing holding it up.”
Beatrice looked at her for a long moment. The baby breathed. The lamp burned.
“A cold arrangement,” she said finally, “is still better than scandal. Or loneliness.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I believe it more at twenty-five than I did at eighteen.” But she said it quietly, without real conviction.
Cecily could hear the slight retreat in it—Beatrice pulling back from an argument she knew she hadn’t quite won and wasn’t entirely sure she believed herself.
The silence that followed was not uncomfortable, exactly. It was the silence of two people who loved each other and had reached the edge of what could be resolved before sunrise.
Cecily unfolded her limbs and rose from her seat. “I need some air,” she declared. “I think I’ll walk down to the shore.”
Beatrice looked up. “Now?”
“It’s nearly dawn. The light will be lovely.”
“Cecily, you cannot walk to the shore alone.”
“I’ve walked to the shore alone before.”
“In London, in a park, with a maid twenty feet behind you. Not in Brighton at five in the morning.” Beatrice’s voice had taken on the tone of someone who was already tired and could feel an argument assembling itself against her will. “Wait until he’s settled, and I’ll come with you. Twenty minutes.”
“You should sleep.”
“And you should have a chaperone.”
“Bea.” Cecily softened it, reached out, and touched her sister’s arm briefly. “There will be no one on the shore at this hour. Absolutely no one. I’ll walk to the water and back, get some air, and be home before you’ve finished your tea.” She grabbed her shawl from the back of the chair. “I am twenty-three years old, I think I can manage a beach.”
Beatrice looked at her with the expression of a woman who knew she was losing and resented it. “If anything happens–”
“Nothing will happen.”
“If it does–”
“It won’t.” Cecily bent and kissed her sister’s cheek, the baby warm and solid between them. “Go back to bed. I’ll be an hour at most.”
She didn’t wait for the next objection.
Brighton at dawn was an entirely different city.
Cecily had been staying with Edward and Beatrice for only a few days—long enough to borrow their habits, but not long enough to belong to them—and already she could feel the difference between this quiet hour and the bright performance the town would demand by noon. The version that existed by daylight—all promenades and parasols and calculated social performance—had not yet assembled itself.
She walked with her shawl pulled close and her half-boots already damp at the toes from the wet sand, and she felt, for the first time in several days, that she could breathe properly.
That was what the sea did to her. It made everything—the conversations, the expectations, the careful architecture of what she should want and when she should want it—feel slightly less urgent. The water didn’t care that she was twenty-three and unmarried. The tide had no opinions about Mr. Alderton.
She walked further than she’d intended, which was its own small rebellion, before she spotted a huge figure. At first, she thought the dark shape ahead was nothing more than a discarded coat or a fisherman’s bundle left too near the tide. Brighton’s shore collected such things overnight.
It was the color of his coat that she noticed first.
Dark against the pale sand. Wrong, somehow, in the way that things were wrong before one had understood why.
She slowed down. Looked again. The figure was lying on the waterline, half on his side, the waves reaching him and retreating and reaching again with complete disregard, his coat dark with water, one arm stretched at an angle that no sleeping man would choose.
She stood still for one full second. Then she walked toward him quickly, her boots catching in the wet sand.
