The weather was strange that night. Rainy, unseasonably cool, almost stiflingly humid. Inside the car, Rose lifted a hand to the fogged window and traced the outline of a bird with the tip of her gloved finger.
"What is that supposed to be?" asked Cal, the sneer evident in his voice.
For someone on the way to his own birthday celebration, he was in an exceptionally dark mood.
Rose sighed and rubbed out the drawing, refusing to let him mock her.
In the week since her mother had left, she'd said hardly a word to Cal and he had reciprocated her silence. True, he had stopped being antagonistic and seemed to have given up on controlling how she spent her time or where she happened to wander, but the total stillness that came with being ignored was almost harder to bear. Without any external chatter to drown out her thoughts, her mind refused to calm itself for even a minute.
*****
She stayed on his arm and allowed herself to be an object of decoration, as was expected. She smiled prettily and spoke only when spoken to. Years of programming had made it easy for her to be a proper young lady when she so chose.
Through dinner and cocktails she forced herself to endure mindless talk of business and politics and philanthropy, Cal's well-wishers, congratulations—congratulations on their marriage, congratulations on Cal's takeover of Hockley Steel, congratulations on their baby—whose real father would never be known, and by the way, Cal, have a very happy birthday.
The moment Cal brushed her off to wander deeper into the crowd, she slipped out into the lamp-lit courtyard and breathed for the first time in what felt like hours.
*****
She glimpsed him later in the poker room, caught up in a game, indulging himself in brandy and cigars. It was late. She was almost dead on her feet and beginning to feel nauseated from the crushing blur of sensations around her—loud orchestra music, chatter, women's painful, brightly colored evening dresses, the smell of perfume and cologne and food and tobacco smoke.
The party had run its course for Rose, and as soon as Cal finished up his game of poker she was going to ask him if they could leave. Perhaps he would see her distress. Perhaps he would take pity on her and agree.
Perhaps.
She stood back and watched the scene in the smoke room for a moment. One of the men said something to Cal, who laughed brashly and threw back another brandy shot.
How could one person manage to look so arrogant, so obnoxious?
Rose turned away.
Her mother swept her up minutes later and shoved her into conversation with Louise Carnegie, wife of steel mogul Andrew Carnegie, who was a friend and business mentor of Nathan Hockley's. Rose knew her mother expected her to be charming and perfect like she'd been all night, make the Hockleys look good, but her patience for acting had worn thin and she stopped caring.
When she finally turned away, Cal had disappeared from the poker room.
Damn it.
She ran off into the crowd to find him, ignoring her mother when she called for her to come back.
*****
"Are you enjoying your party?"
Rose had intended to sneak up on Cal, ask the question very dryly, but somehow she floundered. When she saw him standing alone outside on the balcony and opened the door to join him he had looked up. And when she said the words her voice came out sounding foreign, like it belonged to someone else.
"I have a splitting headache."
Rose looked at him, startled.
That wasn't the sort of thing he would normally tell her, even if it were true, even if it were all he could think about. Normally, he would have smirked and said, "I'm having the time of my life, sweet pea."
But those days were gone.
He leaned against the balcony rail, his hand shaking slightly as he took a drag from his cigarette.
"Cal," Rose said, alarmed. "Are you all right?"
"I'll be fine," he replied, answering her directly for once and not putting on airs, shooting back something sarcastic or telling her off for asking.
In spite of herself, Rose felt uncomfortable. She had never seen him like this, ever.
She stepped forward and put a hand on his arm. "Would you like to leave early?"
"Yes. Run and tell Hoffman I'll be out in a minute," he said, referring to his chauffeur. He turned to go back inside without another glance at her. She watched him through the arched windows as he got dragged into conversation with an older couple she didn't know. He had straightened his posture and plastered the million dollar smile back on his face. Many times before Rose had seen him in this state and wondered whether it were genuine or not. Now, she didn't wonder anymore.
*****
She realized he was rather drunk as they walked from the hotel out to the car, and her discomfort increased. What had happened to him? When had he let himself become such a wreck?
He didn't need help walking but she went with him to his bedroom anyway, wondering frantically where all the servants were. It was late, she supposed—they had probably gone to bed, probably assumed that she and Cal would have remained a lot longer at the party.
She wanted to get away. She wanted to retreat to her own room and lose herself.
Cal collapsed on his bed. "Get Edith for me," he said, leaning forward with one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sudden wash of light when Rose lit an oil lamp.
Rose thought that was the name of the head maid. Who, perhaps, had some sort of medical knowledge—she looked old enough to have had previous training as a nurse.
"I don't know where she is," said Rose quietly. She sat next to him on the bed and wracked her brain for something she could do to help.
It wasn't quite that she was worried about him for his own sake. No, it was more…she couldn't quite describe it, not even to herself, but seeing him like this upset her. He had turned into someone else, someone who wasn't Cal. She didn't want to watch him drown in his own pathetic vulnerability. She hated who he was most of the time, but just then she would have given anything to have him back.
She had wanted him to pity her. Well, perhaps not pity, but at least empathize and understand.
But she had never wanted to see him for what he actually was—not a monster, as she had once thought, but a deterioration of permanence that had never really existed.
"Rose—"
"Shh."
And for once he didn't tell her to shut up, didn't tell her to watch herself.
She helped him remove his jacket and draped it over a chair.
"Just lie down, Cal," she whispered. She dimmed the lamp because she could see it wasn't helping his headache, and then she turned to the door to leave, but he got up and stopped her.
"Cal," she said, trying to pull him back to the bed.
"I want—"
"Shh. Just lie down," she repeated. She put her hands on his shoulders and forced him to sit again, then went over to the basin in the corner and brought him a glass of water. After a moment of hesitation, she returned to sit beside him, deciding she would have to coax him into bed before she could hurry off to her own room.
"I did my best, Rose." His fingers went limp around the empty glass and it rolled across the floorboards. "I don't know what else I could have done. Nothing was ever good enough for you."
Rose looked at him, her mouth suddenly dry.
"It's fine," she said, although that wasn't what she had meant to say. She ought to seize on this and scream at him, scream until he understood her, until he realized that regardless of how spurned he might have felt it was nothing compared to what she experienced when she thought of the future that lay ahead of her—
"I never tricked myself into believing that I'd ever have more than your respect, but you denied me even that."
"I'm sorry," she whispered. It wasn't an apology for anything she had done; it was an apology for the fact that he viewed her in such a light. She had tried to save her own vitality, and he saw that as selfish and ungrateful. His ignorance could have made her weep.
Again she tried to get up, but he grabbed her, pulled her back. "Not that again," he growled, giving her a shake. She could smell the tobacco and liquor on his breath. "You always knew exactly what you wanted to say, but you couldn't give me anything more than one word replies."
"Cal—"
"How did you expect me to fix my mistakes when you refused to tell me what they were?"
Rose could hardly believe what she was hearing. She tried once more to free herself, but he wouldn't let go. She stopped struggling.
And she thought back to their relationship before Jack.
It was true, of course, that she had been less than communicative. He hadn't often tried to talk to her sincerely, or try to get to know who she was, and the fact that her mother had pressured her so hard to accept his proposal had made her even more predisposed against him. From the moment they met, at a yacht party thrown by a mutual family friend, Rose had written him off as just another spoiled aristocrat.
Which he was. His arrogance and snide lack of interest in meaningful connection had put her off; later on, when she'd begun to see hints of a controlling and sometimes even violent streak, she had been frightened. There had been one afternoon she remembered in particular, when they had been having lunch together, and a maid had accidentally knocked over a cup of tea into his lap. He'd snapped—thrown the empty teacup so it shattered on the floor at her feet, ordered her to pack her belongings and had Spicer Lovejoy escort her out. After that, any thought Rose might have had about trying to relate to him had dissolved and she had retreated into herself. It had been a stupid incident, but somehow, it caused her growing epiphany to peak. Cal didn't have it in him to be patient or understanding, so what hope did she have for their relationship?
Once or twice she had seen a flash of something else. Very brief moments during which his façade seemed to flicker and she wondered, in the back of her mind, if there might be something underneath. But if she tried to look closer it was gone, vanished just as soon as it had appeared.
She assumed he was a lost cause and resigned herself to suffering.
"I'm sorry," she said again.
And this time it wasn't just that she felt sorry for him. This time she wondered, in spite of the unacceptable treatment Cal had subjected her to, if maybe she had it in her to give some of her own behavior a second glance.
Because she knew she was far from perfect.
Cal still held her roughly, his fingers digging into her arms.
She looked up into his reddened eyes and searched.
For anything, a spark, a window into his thoughts, a flicker of understanding. But no. His eyes were vacuous and dead. He was a bitter drunk, and she would never know him.
"I'm sorry," she whispered a third time, almost in tears.
And for the first time she didn't cry for herself…she cried for what existed between them, for what he might have been in some other life.
"Did you ever for even a moment feel more than just resentment?" he asked in monotone, as though he already knew the answer.
She shook her head, and a single tear spilled down her cheek. "No," she whispered, hardly able to choke the word out.
Later she would find it impossible to remember whether she had leaned forward or he had—perhaps they both had, at the same time—but she did remember registering surprise, that she didn't go stiff and cold when their lips brushed. She had kissed him before on the occasions when he'd pressured her to consummate their relationship, hoping that it would sate him to prevent anything more from happening, but she had been quite wooden during those moments and had blotted the memories from her mind. Now, something shifted, and at some place deep within herself she forgot who he was and what he had done.
She could feel his heart pounding. And she remembered, or perhaps realized for the first time, that he was actually alive…
His hand moved to the back of her head, digging into her hair, increasing the pressure between them, and she could taste the brandy on his tongue, and maybe this was different now, maybe something had changed, maybe he needed her—
Are you nervous?
No…
…you're trembling.
I'll be all right.
Reality hit Rose like a sudden blow to the solar plexus, and she could have sworn that for a fraction of a second her heart stopped.
She pulled back.
Her eyes were closed and she could see every line and shadow of Jack's face, feel his hands brushing over her skin, rough from work but gentle and full of care, and in her memory Cal's expression was tightening and her face stung as though she had just been slapped—
When she opened her eyes she saw Cal as he was now, not polished for dinner as he had been that night, but drunk and sick, his eyes filled not with rage but with bitterness and resignation.
"Leave now, Rose," he said blankly.
She stood and hurried from the room without looking at him again.
She could hardly breathe.