Page 16

“Please.”

“I do not think Gregory is the man you believe him to be.”

“I have not made up my mind what I believe him to be.”

“Yes, that is very wise.” Augusta pulled a cushion into her lap and studied its fringe. “He is the sort of man who would pick up an entire house and carry it on his back rather than admit that it was heavy. You will find it maddening and will want to shake him. He will tell you nothing, ever, that he can avoid telling, and then one afternoon he will do something so quietly and unmistakably good that you will forget you were ever cross.” She looked up. “He is not what he seems, Phillipa. The man is somewhere underneath, and it takes some patience to get at him.”

“That is what I am afraid of,” said Phillipa, before she could stop herself.

“Patience?”

“Being wrong.” It came out smaller than she meant, and she went to the wardrobe so that she would not have to see her friend’s face. She ran a finger along the ribbon. “I keep thinking that I am standing at the edge of the same cliff again, Augusta. I know it is different. I know it is a great deal different. He asked me, and I said yes, and I named my price, and nobody has stood over me and told me what to say. But then I lie awake and I think: is it truly different? Or have I merely learned to say yes so sweetly that no one notices there was never a question?”

The room was quiet.

“May I say something?” said Augusta, at last.

“Of course.”

“The last time, you were told what you must do, and you did it, and you hated every minute. This time, you were asked. You made terms. You said yes.” Augusta tipped her head. “Were you asked, Phillipa?”

“I believe so.”

“Believe so, or know so?”

Phillipa thought of a stone bench and a leaf on a boot. She thought of the way he had waited, patient as a tree, for her to say what she wanted, and the astonishing fact that he had actually wished to know. She thought of done, said so easily, and the smallest crack in his voice when he spoke of his sister.

“I know so,” she said.

“Then it is not the same cliff.” Augusta stood and shook out her skirts, smiling. “It may be a different one. I will not tell you it is a safe one; I do not believe in that kind of cliff. But it is yours, and you have looked over the edge with your eyes open, and that is all any of us can do.” She crossed the room and, with unexpected gentleness, touched Phillipa’s cheek. “Now put that gown on before you crease it to death. I refuse to have a Duchess of Brawnhite who cannot manage a hem.”

The last night was the longest.

She lay in her narrow childhood bed with the curtains drawn back and the moon laying a long pale bar across the coverlet, and she did not sleep. She turned onto one side, and then the other. She counted the leaves of the trellis, which she could not see. She recited the order of precedence, which she could not forget. She lay very straight and thought: tomorrow.

At some hour after midnight she understood that she was not going to be able to do it.

It was not the nerves. She was almost sure it was not the nerves. Augusta had talked her out of the cliff, and it was a good talking-out, and she believed most of it. What was left was something smaller, and sharper, and much harder to reason with. She had promised to raise a child she had held for perhaps an hour of her life.

On the other side of London, in an oak cradle, there was a small warm weight who would wake up tomorrow and belong to her, and she did not know if she was ready.

She sat up.

Ridiculous, she told herself. You cannot go. She was a lady, and it was past one, and the dark streets of Mayfair lay between them. It was a mad idea. It was the most improper thing she had ever contemplated.

Brawnhite House was three streets away.

She got out of bed. She put a cloak over her nightgown, the plain gray one she wore to St. Anthony’s in the rain, and tied it at her throat. She took her slippers in her hand and crept down the back stairs in her stockings, past her parents’ door, past the sleeping dog, and out through the morning room, where the latch of the garden door had never once in her life been oiled, and eased it open with her breath held.

Then Phillipa Hewes, twenty-two years old, the Earl of Creighton’s only daughter, and the bride of tomorrow’s wedding, slipped out into the dark.

CHAPTER 8

The Duke of Brawnhite was getting married in ten hours, and he was celebrating by drinking whiskey alone in his drawing room.

It was not, he reflected, a very festive method. He had sent the fire down to embers and let the lamps burn low, and sat in a wing chair with his boots stretched to the fender and the glass tilted against his knee, and he was not thinking about tomorrow at all. He was thinking, with some persistence and a great deal of irritation, about a woman’s eyes.

They had done something odd when she spoke of the orphanage. They had lit. She had been sitting on that bench with her spine as straight as a fireplace poker and every word chosen with care, and then she had said, it is the one thing I want, and something in her face had come open like a window. He had not been prepared for it. He had wanted, with a violence that startled him, to give her everything in London to make it happen again.