Cassandra, brushing her hair even though her new maid had already brushed it to a bright sheen, looked out on darkness and listened to the soothing sound of the fountain through the open window and waited for Stephen to come.
He was not long. She turned to smile at him as he tapped on her dressing room door and let himself in.
'Cass,' he said, coming toward her, his hands reaching out for hers,
'alone at last. I love them all, but I thought they would never leave.'
She laughed.
'Your staff would have smirked for a month,' she said, 'if everyone had left early and we had retired to bed even before it was dark.'
He chuckled.
'I daresay you are right,' he said. 'They will smirk for a month anyway when we do not go down for breakfast before noon.'
'/Ah/,' she said, 'you plan to sleep that late, do you?'
'Who said anything about sleeping?' he asked.
'Ah,' she said.
And she released her hands from his and loosened the sash of his dressing gown. He was naked beneath it. She opened it back and moved against him, feeling his warm, strong nakedness against the fine silk of her nightgown.
'Stephen,' she said, her mouth against his throat, 'you have no regrets?'
He slid his fingers through her hair until his hands cupped her face and lifted it toward his.
'Do you?' he asked.
'Unfair,' she said. 'I asked first.'
'I believe,' he said, 'that life is made up of constant occurrences of decisions to be made. Where do I go now? What shall I eat now? What shall I do now? And every decision, small or large, leads us inexorably in the direction we choose to take our lives, even if unconsciously When we saw each other in Hyde Park and again at Meg's ball, we faced choices. We had no idea where they would lead us eventually did we? We thought they were leading in one direction, but in reality they were leading here, via numerous other choices and decisions we have made since. I do not regret a single one of them, Cass.'
'Fate has led us here, then?' she said.
'No,' he said. 'Fate can only present the choices. /We/ make the decisions. You might have chosen someone else at Meg's ball. I might have refused to dance with you.'
'Oh, no, you could not have done that,' she said. 'I was too good.'
'You were,' he admitted, grinning.
'I might have let you go,' she said, 'when I understood that you would carry on with our liaison only on your own terms.'
'Oh, no,' he said, 'you could not have done that, Cass. I was too good.'
'But what are you good for /now/?' she asked him, lowering both her voice and her eyelids. 'Only to talk through your wedding night?'
'Well,' he said, 'since words do not appear to be satisfying you, I had better try action.'
They smiled at each other until their smiles faded and he kissed her.
She knew his body. She knew his lovemaking. She knew how he felt inside her. She knew the sight of him and the smell of him and the feel of him.
But she knew nothing, she discovered over the next half hour – and through the night that followed. For she had known him in lust and in guilt, and she had felt his pleasure and her own almost-pleasure.
She had not known him in love.
Not before tonight, their wedding night.
Tonight she recognized his body and his lovemaking, but tonight there was so much more. Tonight there was /him/. And there was /her/. And four separate times there was /them/. Or, since even that word suggested a plurality and therefore a duality, there was the entity they became when they soared over the precipice of climaxing passion together to that place beyond that was not a place and was not any state that could be described in words or even remembered quite clearly afterward – until it happened again.
'Cass,' he said sleepily when daylight was already showing its face at the window and a single early bird was already practicing its choral skills from somewhere nearby, 'I wish there were a thousand ways to say /I love you/. Or a million.'
'Why?' she asked him. 'Would you now proceed to say them all? I would be asleep long before you had finished.'
He chuckled softly.
'Besides,' she said, 'I cannot imagine ever growing tired of hearing just those three words.'
'I love you,' he said, rubbing his nose across hers after propping himself on one elbow.
'I know,' she told him before he rolled onto her and showed her again without words.
'I love you,' she said afterward.
But he only grunted sleepily and was asleep.
Another bird, or perhaps the same one, was singing to someone else too, someone who was already up in that early dawn. He had not spent the night at Warren Hall. Nor had he gone to Finchley Park with the rest of the family. How could he when he and Elliott had scarcely spoken to each other for many years?
Elliott had accused him of stealing from Jonathan, who was easy prey.
And Elliott had accused him of debauchery, of having fathered the bastard children of a number of women in the neighborhood.
Elliott, who had once been his closest friend and partner in crime.
Constantine had never denied the accusations.
He never would.
He had spent the night at the home of Phillip Grainger, an old friend of his in the neighborhood.
He stood now in the churchyard outside the little chapel where Stephen had married Lady Paget the day before. There were still rose petals dotted about on the path and grass, hurled at the bride and groom by the children.
He stood at the foot of one of the graves, looking down broodingly at it. His long black cloak and tall hat, worn against the chill of the early morning, gave him an almost sinister appearance.
'Jon,' he said softly, 'it seems that the family will go on into another generation. Nobody has admitted anything yet, but I would wager a bundle that Lady Merton is already with child. I think she is decent after all.
I know /he/ is, though I used to wish he weren't. You would like them both.'
A few rose petals, browning around the edges, littered the grave. Con stooped down to remove them, and he brushed one petal off the headstone.
'No,' he said, 'you would /love/ them, Jon. You always did love extravagantly and indiscriminately. You even loved me.'
He did not come often to Warren Hall these days. It was a little painful, if the truth were known. But sometimes he yearned for Jon. Even for this, all that was left of his brother – the slight mound of a grave and a headstone that had already darkened and mossed slightly with age.
Jon would have been twenty-four now.
'I'll be on my way,' Con said. 'Until next time, then, Jon. Rest in peace.'
And he turned and strode away without looking back.
THE world had been reduced to a cocoon of pain and a few blessed moments of respite in which her breath might be caught but no real rest could be grabbed.
It had been a long and hard labor, but Margaret had not stopped assuring her for hours on end that this was the very reason the birthing of a baby was called /labor/.
'Men know /nothing/,' she had said after Stephen had come for one of his frequent visits but had put up no great resistance to being shooed out again. 'They cannot even bear to /watch/ pain.'
Perhaps, Cassandra had thought from deep within her cocoon, pain was difficult to watch when one had caused it but could do nothing either to stop it or to share it. But she did not spare many thoughts to such
