He had not slept. He had not, strictly speaking, expected to. He had spent the night before at White’s which was a thing he ordinarily did to clear his head and which had this time done nothing of the kind because every man he had drunk with had eventually congratulated him on his betrothal, and every congratulation had reminded him of the betrothal which was a thing he had been attempting not to think about all day.
He had not been successful at that either.
When the letter arrived, he had been thinking of his dining table. Specifically, the corner where Alice had been seated two nights ago. He had been thinking about her gloved hand on the silver. He had been thinking about the shaking spoon.
He had been thinking about how, if a great many things had been different, if there had been no servants in the room and no Joanna and no Matthew, and if he had been a different and worse man, he might have set his wineglass down and stood up and walked the four paces to her chair. How he might have lifted her onto the polished mahogany table and how he might have done a great many other things besides.
He stopped quite deliberately, picked up his pen, and set it back down.
He had been having this particular thought in various forms for three days. The most recent form involved a hand pressed flat against her mouth so that Joanna would not hear from the corridor.
He was, he had decided some time around four in the morning, going to have to do something about himself.
Beadle scratched at the door to the study. “A note, Your Grace. From Westbury House.”
Cassian held out his hand. He did not look up from the page. He did not need to look up. He had recognized the seal from across the room which was a thing he was going to think about later, when he was alone, or possibly never.
He waited until Beadle had withdrawn. Then he waited for three more breaths. Then he broke the seal.
The handwriting was small. Disciplined. Pretty. It had clearly been shaped by a strict governess in girlhood and then made over by the writer into something her own.
Your Grace,
I am told that, between persons of fashion, a proper courtship requires the gentleman to call on his betrothed. You have not called. This does not, I think you will agree, present the image of a man who is patiently in love.
I shall be at Almack’s this evening. I hope to see you there. If you find yourself unable to attend, I shall be obliged to conclude that the appearance of patience has, after all, defeated you.
Your devoted betrothed,
Lady Alice Lockwood.
He read it twice. He read it a third time, and halfway through, he understood that he had begun to smile.
He stopped smiling.
He laid the letter on his desk with great care, as though it might detonate, and sat very still in his chair and stared at it.
Your devoted betrothed. The little wretch. The handwriting was demure. The letter was not. The letter was a glove laid flat on a dueling table, and they both knew it.
She was demanding to be courted. By him.
The thing he had been thinking about on and off for the past two days—the thing about the dining table, the wineglass, the hand against her mouth—moved in him again with renewed and quite unhelpful clarity.
He had learned several things about Lady Alice Lockwood over the past two years which Joanna had told him in fits and starts and which he had pretended every time to be uninterested in.
He knew she played the pianoforte well enough to be invited to play at his sister’s last birthday supper. He knew her stitch work had taken a small premium at the Westbury parish fair. He knew, because Joanna had crowed about it for a fortnight, that she had once managed the entire Westbury household for two months while her mother was in Bath. He also knew, because Joanna had laughed for a quarter of an hour the first time she had told him, that Lady Alice could not, on any account, paint.
She had once, at the age of fifteen, been asked by her drawing master to render a vase of daffodils, and she had returned the page to him blank and said, in the tone of a young woman explaining a perfectly reasonable thing, that she did not see why she should paint something she could already see.
He had liked the daffodil story very much, but he had, of course, not said so.
Suddenly, the study door banged open.
Joanna did not knock. She had never knocked. He had decided, some years ago, that this was a battle not worth picking and had stopped fighting her about it.
“Beadle says you have received a letter from Alice.”
“Beadle is a gossip.”