Page 59 of Infamous

Valentine handed it over, and Eddie took a large, wincing swig before handing it back.

‘What does your Miss Li have to say about Nash? I sense a distinctly cold front from her direction whenever he enters a room.’ Valentine took an even larger swig, without a hint of a wince.

‘Oh, yes. I suppose she doesn’t like him much. I don’t see why.’

‘A mystery,’ said Valentine, with a small smirk that Eddie could not decipher. ‘Where is she now? I haven’t encountered her all evening.’

Eddie grimaced, taking back the bottle. ‘She was talking to some lady in breeches she’s never laid eyes on before in her life as if they were the best of friends. Honestly, I have no idea how she can manage to be so friendly to a complete stranger and so unforgiving towards Nash, who has done nothing to earn her ire! And I don’t know what’s so special about this woman, that she had to abandon the party altogether to abscond with her to God knows where. She’smyfriend, after all.’

Valentine gave her a pitying look. ‘Isabella Cliffe?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘Despite the insistence of everybody here tonight that they’re radicals and freethinkers, casting off the shroud of respectability, waltzing their way into a new era .?.?. I’m afraid most of the ladies would still baulk at the concept of doing something quite as daring asputting on breeches. Miss Cliffe is a noted exception.’

Valentine sat down on a side table, ignoring its groan of protest.

‘Ugh,’ said Eddie, also taking a seat. ‘You know, as soon as I saw her, I thought .?.?. why didn’tIthink to do that? It hadn’t even crossed my mind as a possibility. I suppose it’s just evidence that I, too, am waltzing under the shroud, or .?.?. whatever it was you just said.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Valentine. ‘But you know, Miss Cliffe is a few years your senior. She has had more time on this earth to think about who exactly she’d like to be. And she didn’tinventthe concept of ladies in breeches. She probably saw somebody do it, and thought she might like it, and discovered that she was correct. None of us are true originals, Eddie. We piece an approximation of a person together from finding what we like and eschewing what we hate, and somewhere in that muddle we find ourselves.’

‘Youdo not seem to have any trouble at all finding yourself.’

Valentine choked on a mouthful of whisky. ‘Ha! I never found myself, and perhaps I never will. I am uncharted territory. Somebody came up to me earlier and said, “You know, in the right light, you almost look like a lady!” I think she thought she was being kind andprogressive. I told her that I am not a lady, or a gentleman for that matter, and that any resemblance to either is entirely coincidental, but she looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language and almost walked into a wall in her haste to escape.’

‘Ah,’ said Eddie. ‘The shroud.’

‘The shroud indeed,’ said Valentine. ‘God, look at me. Dishing out advice. An elder at the tender age of seven-and-twenty. Thehorrorof it all.’

Eddie snorted. They sat in companionable silence for a moment, and then she sighed.

‘Nash really loves Liza?’

‘Without question.’

‘I see,’ said Eddie, slipping from the table and finding that her hand-eye co-ordination left something to be desired. ‘I’m .?.?. I’m going to find Rose.’

She had given Rose plenty of time to cavort with Miss Cliffe, if that’s what she wanted to do, but enough was enough. Eddie was drunk, and she wasn’t going to stand another moment apart from her.

‘Ah,’ said Valentine. ‘I am not entirely sure that’s a good idea. She might be .?.?. preoccupied.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Eddie, waving a dismissive hand. ‘The house isn’tthatbig. Her tour must be finished by now.’

‘They treated Cassandra thus,’ Valentine said sadly, raising the whisky in farewell. ‘Good luck and godspeed.’

It did seem as if the majority of guests had relocated to the long gallery; Eddie could hear the sound of shouts, laughter and shuffling feet, and she walked in the opposite direction, convinced that Rose would have done the same. There were a few guests still scattered around the ground floor – when she opened the door to the South Parlour, three ladies and a gentleman sprang apart like startled mice and then blinked expectantly at her until she closed it again. There were only three people in the dining room; they were still playing cards, despite the fact that one of them seemed to be asleep. Eddie crept away back down the hall until she reached the library, which she knew had been firmly locked by Liza earlier in the day. The door was slightly ajar now; she pushed it open noiselessly, allowing her to peer inside.

Rose wasn’t within, but Albert was. He and the tall man from the billiard room were standing over by the window, a book open on the desk as if one of them had just been reading it.

But they weren’t reading now. They were kissing. Albert had both arms around the man and his eyes tightly shut, a surprising amount of passion in his expression. She stared at them for another second and then quietly pulled the door closed.

Drunk as she was, Eddie was entirely certain of what she had just seen. In the odd, ringing shock that followed this conclusion, she realised a few things.

Firstly, that Albert wasn’t at all the person she’d thought he was. She had, in fact, greatly misunderstood him. In the muddle of her racing thoughts, she noticed a tiny bud of joy, daring to bloom in her chest; there was something innatelyhopefulto her about what she had just witnessed.

Even if that made absolutely no sense to her. Even though it was Albert.

Secondly, that Eddie had been very, very foolish. A lot of things were slotting into place. Rose and Albert’s arrangement, devoid as it was of romantic love. The fact that Albert – a quiet man who seemed, on the whole, rather conventional, if one discounted his obsession with bunnies – felt so at home among Nash’s rule-breaking, radical friends.