She turned and walked away with the small steady steps her governess had taught her when she was nine that a lady ought to use when she was walking somewhere very particular and did not wish to be judged on her gait.
She did not look back. In fact, she did not look back for the whole length of the path home. But she felt him standing among the plane trees behind her, watching her go for as long as the path remained in his sight.
CHAPTER 13
Alice had read the same page of the same novel four times when her mother knocked on her door.
It was not the sort of knock her mother usually made. She generally entered her daughters’ rooms without ceremony. She had been the lady of this house for thirty years; she would not be kept on the threshold by a chambermaid.
This knock was tentative. It was, Alice realized after a moment, exactly the knock she would have expected if a chambermaid had been by just now and told her mother that she had been crying.
She had not, in fact, been crying. She had been very close to it.
She had been very close to it for nearly three hours since she had come back from Hyde Park and been led upstairs by Sally, who had said, “You shall lie down for an hour, My Lady. Theheadache shall pass,”in the way Sally said things when she meant, “I have noticed, and I will not say anything.”
Alice had not lain down. She had sat in the window seat with the novel open on her knee and had read the same page four times.
“Alice, may I come in?”
“Yes, Mother.”
The Countess walked in and closed the door behind her. She did not immediately make herself comfortable as she usually did. She did not sit at the dressing table. She did not pick up Alice’s brushes. She did not begin to chat. She crossed the room, sat down at the foot of Alice’s bed, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at Alice in the window seat.
Alice recognized the look at once. It was the look her mother had given her when she was eleven on the day she had cracked her elbow on the nursery stairs and had hidden the bruise from Sally for three days because she did not wish to be grounded.
“Sally tells me you have a headache.”
“I do.”
“Sally also tells me, having been pressed on the matter, that there is no headache.”
“Then Sally has betrayed me.”
“Sally has been with you for sixteen years, Alice. She has never betrayed you. She is a great deal more devoted to you than I am on most days, and the fact that she has today walked herself down to my parlor and stood in the doorway and saidMy Lady, you must speak with Lady Alicemeans that whatever happened in the Park is not a headache.”
Alice closed the novel. She did not put it down. She kept it on her knee, with her fingers between the pages, as a small shield against the conversation. “Mother.”
“Alice.”
“What did Sally tell you?”
“She told me that you and the Duke of Langton walked among some plane trees, that the Duke spoke to you in private for the better part of a quarter of an hour, that you came back with your face composed in a manner that has, since you were nine, meant you were not going to admit to anything for at least a fortnight, and that she could not on her honor say what you had spoken about. Sally is a discreet woman. I do not require her discretion, but I require yours.” She paused. “What did the Duke say to you, Alice?”
Alice looked at the novel. She did not know how to begin.
She did not exactly know what she had been told. She had been told that he did not want to have children. She had been told that he would not be swayed. She had been told that he was sorry. She had not been told the reason. She had been told that there werereasons. She had been told, by silence, that the reasons were not things he meant to speak of in a public park or perhaps anywhere.
She had been told, at the dinner table three nights ago by the way he had pressed his thigh against hers in steady, silent reassurance through the soup course, that he had begun to care about her.
She had been told, on a terrace at the back of Almack’s by the small, wounded stillness of his body when she had said his Christian name, that he had not, in the time she had known him, been kissed by anyone for whom he had cared before.
She had been told, in Hyde Park by his face when he had saidI am sorry, that he was, in some private way she had not yet looked at, breaking his own heart to tell her.
She did not know how to say any of that to her mother. In fact, she did not know how to say any of that to herself.
“He has told me he does not want to have children.”
Her mother went still.
