“If you’d been the one delivering lectures, you would have managed to be a little more circumspect.”
“Maybe.” Violet shrugged. “Probably not. You’ve always been a dab hand at turning aside criticism with laughter. I saw what you did with that barrel today. It was brilliant. I don’t think one of them understood that pointed little comment you made about feeding the poor like good Christians.” She snickered.
“Violet.” He took her hands, pressed them between his. “Take this seriously. They will send you to prison. They’ll do it to silence you, to silence me. I can’t let that happen to you.”
Silence pressed all around them in the darkness, and suddenly she was that dark, still oak once more.
“Oh?”
“There’s something I don’t talk about much,” Sebastian said. “Something…well. Do you remember when my sister Catherine passed away?”
“Thrown by a horse,” Violet said.
“Yes. Well.” He took a deep breath. “I was the last one to see her. I was up in the hayloft examining a litter of kittens when she came into the stables. She was in tears, over what I don’t know. I sat up there watching her cry, thinking to myself that if I showed her the kittens, she would cheer up and smile.”
“Sebastian, you must have been five years old at the time.”
He shrugged. “I decided not to say anything for the most foolish of reasons: I was too occupied to climb down the ladder. If I called out to her, I would startle the mother. And they were just tears, after all. So I kept quiet and watched her go.”
“You cannot blame yourself.”
Blame? It was nothing so simple. He shook his head. “No, not that. But she was distraught and not watching what she was doing, not paying attention. If she’d been paying attention…”
“It was a terrible accident,” Violet told him. “You had no way of knowing what would happen. And even if you’d spoken up, it still might have gone the same way.”
“Maybe.” Sebastian turned away. “But then, maybe not. All I could think when I heard was, next time, show her the kittens.” He took a deep breath. “And so I suppose that’s what I have done ever since. If I can make people laugh, I do. I don’t like watching anyone walk away from me unhappy. It makes me feel all wrong. But if I can make someone smile, I will.”
She made a noise of protest, but he set his fingers on her lips.
“It bothers me,” he said, “to see one person frown if I can change that around. Violet, how do you think I will feel if you’re charged tomorrow? If you’re sentenced to a term of prison?”
“I doubt it will come to that,” Violet said. “The lawyers say that peeresses, so long as they remain unmarried after their husband’s death, cannot be charged with felonies except in the House of Lords.”
“The lawyers,” Sebastian said grimly, “also said they can still charge you with a misdemeanor.”
She was silent for a longer moment. “Well, if they do, there’s nothing I can do except respond to the charges, is there?”
He let out a breath. “There is something more. If you can’t escape this through whatever legal mumbo-jumbo Oliver and Robert and Minnie are cooking up, tell them it was all a joke. That I put you up to it. That you were foolish enough to trust me, but that I was to blame.”
She became very quiet and pulled away from him. She turned her face toward her own home, where a solitary window blazed with light. Her jaw twitched.
“What,” she finally said with a touch of scorn, “and have you sent to prison in my stead? As if I would do anything so craven.”
He’d known she would balk. He’d expected it.
“Besides,” she said, “that would merely implicate us both.”
“They’ll leap at the chance,” he said. “I’ll offer to plead guilty—to raise no contest at all—so long as they allow you to walk free.”
“That presupposes that I would tell a lie to save my skin.” She pulled her hands from his. “You know me better than that.”
“First,” he said, “it’s not a lie—just the truth, mangled only a tiny portion.”
“Stretched like taffy.” She snorted.
“Second.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew the thing he’d brought along. “Second, Violet, for what it’s worth—no, I didn’t expect you to go along with my plan. And so…” He held out the marble he’d saved from Oliver’s wedding.
She stared at it glinting in his palm in the moonlight. “Even marbles have limits,” she breathed.
“The limits of friendship.” He stared at her, willing her to understand. “Between the two of us, Violet, how deep does our friendship run?”
She turned away from him, putting one hand to her forehead in distress.
“How many years have we known each other? All our lives. How many years have I loved you? More than I can count. It hasn’t been long since you’ve begun to…” He swallowed. “Since you’ve begun to return my deeper feelings, I know, but—”