The ball clattered across the table.
The silence was long.
The two of them stood at either end of the table as though this was a duel, and not a game.
“Interesting philosophical question, Cassidy. I should think it would be an uncomfortable realization, indeed.” Giles didn’t look at him.
Giles leaned forward and eyed the table for his shot. He drew the cue back, measuring, measuring again. “Out of curiosity, what do your sort do if another bloke intervenes in an engagement? Is it duels with pistols? Or do you simply snap them in half over your knee like a bundle of twigs?”
“We tie them up, coat them in honey, and leave them in the forest for the bears and ants to have their way with. They’re not worth wasting good bullets on.”
Giles missed his shot badly.
He stood upright again.
The assessing stare returned. Giles was wary now. His face hard. He had centuries of breeding behind him. Innate confidence bequeathed by money and the power of his family name. And he could lay claim to his own strength of character.
“But I don’t think there’s any honor in holding a woman to a promise if there was a certainty she could have the life of which she’s long dreamed,” Hugh continued. “And if there’s a certainty she’d be cared for, protected and cherished by someone she cares for, only a brute wouldn’t step aside.”
Hugh knew that honor was more a thing of theory for Giles, who hadn’t fought for his homeland, hadn’t made choices about who and what to shoot. That he wasn’t yet thirty and most of his life choices were already made for him, though he didn’t realize it and it would never occur to him to view it that way. But hewasa decent sort. He was intelligent. He was everything Lillias had said he was. And in Hugh’s mind, while this was something of an indictment, it still brought him some small measure of cold comfort.
Hugh took his shot. The ball milled madly around the pocket, then sank very prettily in.
Time itself seemed to hold its breath as the two of them looked across at each other.
Giles was transfixed. At first. The evolution of his expression was subtle, but not unworthy of him: triumph, relief, sympathy, all had their flickering turn.
“I’m not a brute,” Hugh said quietly.
The following quiet was elegiac. Something had ended.
Neither of them pretended to be playing billiards anymore.
“Well, then,” Giles said quietly but very distinctly, as though he were issuing a statement before a magistrate. “As a man of honor, I can say with full certainty that it’s safe for you to step aside.”
She wasn’t to know that after he wrote the first letter, he’d pulled another sheet of foolscap toward him and stared at it, and then turned to stare out the window. He saw in its reflection her face as he’d first seen her in the twilit dark of the Annex, a startling, arrogant, maddening, vulnerable jewel wreathed in smoke. She wasn’t to know that she’d stopped his breath then and any number of times since, which meant the next breath he took after that was like the first one he’d ever drawn. So it was like he was being born anew every time he looked at her.
And she wasn’t to know, though she might have guessed, that he’d followed Amelia to England in part because he had indeed wanted things to return to the way they were, when in truth his life would and could never be the same.
And she wasn’t to know how he suffered torments over trying to choose words to capture something that was both one emotion and every emotion: fury and jealousy, a lust that awed him with its tenderness, shamed him with its savagery, and tested the limits of his considerable restraint; the terrible regret that his mother would never know her, and that Hugh would never know if she got a dog and a cat of her own. And the gratitude—for the surfeit of pleasure he took in touching her skin, for the revelation that he’d not been fully alive for a very long time. And he knew this for certain because now everything in him and on him hurt as though he was waking in that hospital in Williamsville again, or being cast into a new world, naked. But perhaps that was as it should be. And perhaps that had been the point. He hurt, and he was alive again, because of her.
And she didn’t know that he’d watched, his hand trembling a little, the pendulum on the clock swing and swing and mark off the hours, and that as he did so he’d cursed, finally and for the first time, his inability to make words sing or ache. In the end, all he could do was write his truth.
So all she read was:
I wish you every happiness.
Yrs,
Hugh Cassidy
Lillias was motionless. She stared at the letter in her hands, searching every word for meaning, while behind her the maids began moving about and packing her things.
And then she drew in a breath, and tucked the letter into her sketchbook, like the final page in a story. Every page of the sketchbook was filled now. She’d been awake all night doing just that.
And then she stared out the window.
She couldn’t see nearly far enough.
