The sound that escaped Penelope’s lips was closer to a sob than a laugh, but it carried a fragment of something she had not felt since the carriage had carried her away from the estate—something warm, something human, something that reminded her she was not entirely hollowed out.
“Refuse Sir Edmund,” she said. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and gripped Hyacinth’s fingers with renewed force. “Whatever I do or fail to do with my own disaster—refuse him. Write to James Crawford. Tell him yes. Tell him you choose him—the bad handwriting and the crop reports and the wild flowers and all of it. Do not spend the rest of your life sitting across from a man who never asks what you dream about.”
Hyacinth’s chin trembled. “My mother will disown me.”
“Your mother will come round. She is dramatic, not heartless.”
“Sir Edmund will be humiliated.”
“Sir Edmund will find another woman with a respectable name and agreeable temperament before the Season ends. He is not in love with you, Hyacinth. He is in love with the idea of you, and there is a universe of difference.”
Hyacinth stared at her. Then she leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Penelope’s shoulder and breathed—one long, shaking breath that carried the sound of a woman letting go of the life she had planned in order to reach for the one she wanted.
“And you?” Hyacinth whispered against her shoulder. “What will you do?”
“I have no idea,” Penelope admitted at last. And she was certain that she could feel her heart break.
CHAPTER 30
“There he is. London’s prodigal duke, returned at last to civilisation.”
Waverly’s voice carried across the card table with the booming goodwill of a man three brandies past discretion. Alastair paused in the doorway of the smoking room, surveying the scene before him—the low-hanging haze of cigar smoke, the amber glow of oil lamps on polished mahogany, the familiar chorus of chips clinking and glasses refilling and men laughing at jokes they’d told each other a hundred times before.
He knew this room. Knew every crack in the leather armchairs, every stain on the carpet beneath the faro table, every face that turned toward him now with varying degrees of welcome. He had spent the better part of a decade in rooms precisely like this one, performing precisely the version of himself that these rooms required.
Tonight, it all felt like putting on a coat that no longer fit.
“Waverly.” He crossed the threshold and accepted the brandy that appeared in his hand before he’d asked for it. The staff at the club remembered his habits. How reassuring. “I see you’ve managed to lose your fortune without me. I’m almost touched you saved any for my return.”
“Lost nothing. Won twelve pounds off Brightmore before supper.” Waverly pulled a chair out with his boot. “Sit. Play. You look as though you haven’t seen a deck of cards since the Dark Ages.”
Alastair sat. The chair was the same one he’d occupied on countless evenings—second from the end, angled toward the window so he could watch the room without appearing to. His body remembered the posture, the careless slouch, the way to hold a glass so the candlelight caught the crystal just so. Muscle memory. The body going through motions the mind had abandoned.
Brightmore dealt without ceremony. Alastair picked up his cards, arranged them with practised efficiency, and discovered that he did not care what they said.
“So.” Waverly leaned back, studying him with the blunt appraisal of long acquaintance. “The country air didn’t agree with you, then? You look?—”
“Dashing? Irresistible? Dangerously well-rested?”
“Like you haven’t slept in a fortnight.”
Alastair’s mouth arranged itself into the grin he’d worn like armour since he was twenty-two. “Sleep is for men without imagination.”
He raised. Brightmore folded. Waverly called. The game continued, and Alastair let the familiar rhythm of bet and counter-bet carry him through the next hour whilst the room filled and emptied around them in the usual tidal pattern of London’s social creatures—arriving in packs, breaking apart, re-forming around new gossip and old grievances.
He should have felt at home. This was his kingdom, after all. His terrain. The smoky, candlelit universe where Alastair Reed, Duke of Blackmere, reigned with the easy confidence of a man who wanted nothing and therefore could not be disappointed.
Instead, every sound grated. The scrape of chairs. The forced laughter from the corner where Lord Ashworth was telling the same hunting story he’d been polishing since Michaelmas. The clink of crystal that had once sounded like celebration and now sounded like—what? Noise. Purposeless noise, filling the space where silence would have been unbearable.
He won three hands in succession without pleasure. Waverly commented on his luck. Brightmore grumbled about loaded dice. A passing acquaintance—Lord Hatherley, whose name Alastair recalled only because the man owed him forty guineas from a bet placed in the spring—clapped him on the shoulder and declared it was capital to have him back in town.
Capital. Yes. Everything was capital.
The days that followed were worse.
He attended a dinner he could not taste, a comedy at Drury Lane he walked out of at the interval, a succession of evenings so interchangeable they ceased to exist as separate events and became instead a single, endless attempt of a man trying to wedge himself back into a life that had been emptied of its only purpose. His townhouse was intolerable—four walls and silence thick enough to choke on, the ghost of ink stains on his desk from letters he had written and not sent, each one beginningPenelopeand ending in the wastepaper basket because he could not find words adequate to the catastrophe of his own making.
He went back to the club because there was nowhere else to go.