After bobbing a small curtsey that Alice acknowledged with a grave nod, Mrs. Halliwell carried him out of the room and down the corridor.
Then Cassian and Alice were alone with the fallen books and the particular silence of a house that had just stopped holding its breath somewhere down the corridor.
Alice did not look at him.
She did not look at him because the whole time she had been holding Lucas, she had been imagining a different place, and she was having difficulty snapping herself back to reality.
He stepped toward her.
Alas, he did not reach her because Victor, who had followed them from the drawing room at perhaps a minute’s distance, had arrived at the door.
Victor had not come alone. Joanna was behind him. She had risen from her table when her brother and her future sister-in-law had not returned, and now, she was wearing the bright expression of a hostess managing a thing she had not been warned of. Mrs. Pendleton was behind her. Two ladies from the third card table, who had come up out of curiosity, were behind Mrs. Pendleton.
In the corridor outside the door, there was a crowd that had heard a child cry and had not yet been told what the matter was.
Victor stood in the doorway. He had a civil smile on his face, and he was standing with the particular attention he had turned on Cassian for the entire evening.
In the clear voice he had spent the last minute ensuring the assembled crowd behind him would hear, he said, “What a shame, Lady Alice. You would have made such a fine mother.”
The library went very still.
The small crowd in the corridor went still in a different way.
Alice did not turn around. She stood with her back to the door and her hand on the front of her bodice where Lucas’s small fair head had been, and her face went very pale.
As he watched her, Cassian understood with a slow clarity what Victor had just done.
Victor had just told her with a single sentence that what Cassian had said to her in private had not been private at all. He had just told her that Cassian had been discussing her marriage prospects in the smoking rooms and the boxing parlors and the dark corners of clubs at which his oldest friend was, by ancient right, also a member.
Victor had just told her that in front of two ladies, his sister, and his housekeeper in such a manner that the story would be in three drawing rooms in London by the end of the week. He had just told her that because he had decided, at some point in the past week, that he no longer wished Cassian well.
Alice straightened. She did not turn around. She set her shoulders in the disciplined way she had set her shoulders against her father in his study a fortnight ago, lifted her chin, and walked to the door with the bright composure she had been wearing for the better part of a fortnight at every dinner.
She paused at the door. “Lady Joanna.”
“Alice.”
“I am very tired this evening. Would you forgive me if I retire to my room?”
“Of course, Alice.”
“Mrs. Pendleton.”
“My Lady?”
“My maid is in the south corridor, I think. Would you be so kind as to fetch her for me?”
“Of course, My Lady.”
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Alice.”
Alice did not look at Cassian. She did not look at Victor either. She walked past him with the particular courtesy of an earl’s daughter who had been raised to do a great many things except acknowledge a man who had just made her a public spectacle in another man’s house. She walked past the small assembled crowd without acknowledging it and went down the corridor toward the stairs.
The crowd began to disperse awkwardly.
Joanna shot her brother a look that said,We’ll talk about this in the morning. Then she turned and followed the others out.