A Romantic Alibi

After that tumultuous morning had passed, it was early afternoon.

The place where Wilhelmina and Cassian sat facing each other to properly settle the terms of their contract was none other than the drawing room of the Clifford ducal residence. Draped in languid afternoon sunlight, the room was far quieter than a certain other ducal drawing room — and yet a peculiar tension hung in the air, thicker even than the silence.

"Was there some problem with the carriage I sent to your residence?"

Lounging at his ease on the sofa across the table, Cassian snapped his pocket watch shut as he asked. The form was impeccably polite; the substance was nothing more than a rebuke for having arrived well past the appointed hour.

"No. There wasn't."

Wilhelmina, perfectly aware of this, replied without so much as a flicker of her eyelids.

"Sleeping in and arriving late are, after all, essential virtues of a well-bred lady."

It was a brazen piece of sophistry. Cassian let out a dry laugh, but he did not trouble himself to argue the point.

Wilhelmina glanced lightly around the room.

"Is your uncle not at home today?"

"He's nearby," Cassian replied evenly. "Close enough to safeguard our reputations, yet far enough that he cannot overhear a word of our conversation."

"A most appropriate distance."

Wilhelmina nodded, satisfied, and Cassian straightened in his seat. In a calm tone, he came to the point.

"Last night, we confirmed that both parties possess sufficient intent to enter into this contract. Do you agree, Miss Priestley?"

"Yes. Entirely."

Wilhelmina lifted her teacup with a gloved hand as she assented. Cassian nodded.

"Good. Then we ought to begin discussing the specific terms of the contract."

"There's something I need to say first."

"Of course there is." Cassian shrugged and picked up his teacup. "What is it?"

"Reaching an agreement on the finer points of the contract will take considerable time. But there's something else that's rather more urgent."

"Ahem." Cassian cleared his throat with gentlemanly restraint. Setting down his cup, he asked, "And what might that be?"

"How shall I put it... a rather romantic alibi?"

"A romantic alibi?"

Cassian's left eyebrow shot up with a flicker of genuine interest. Wilhelmina elaborated in the kindly tone of a most benevolent schoolmistress instructing a rather slow pupil.

"Simply put, it's the preliminary work of making this utterly implausible marriage appear not as a political maneuver or a calculated transaction, but as the natural consequence of an irresistible passion that arose between a man and a woman."

Cassian made a thoughtful sound at Wilhelmina's crisp explanation. His fingers began tapping a regular rhythm upon the table.

"Would it even work? Our respective circumstances are hardly a secret to the public."

"Even if no one is actually fooled, we still have to pretend." Wilhelmina was unyielding.

"And why is that?"

"If Your Highness wishes to be accused of desecrating the sacred vows of marriage before the Church, I certainly won't stop you."

Setting down her teacup, Wilhelmina smiled radiantly.

"But one would think any creature possessed of even the most rudimentary intellect would prefer to avoid such a messy affair. Wouldn't you agree?"

"Indeed," Cassian murmured, almost admiringly. "How exceedingly refined and elegant of you. At sea, we tend to put it rather more bluntly — something about whether a man's head is merely decorative."

"Another advantage of this approach is that it buys us ample time to agree on the contract's terms — while people remain firmly convinced that we're merely enjoying a little affair."

Wilhelmina's reasoning was, as always, startlingly pragmatic and simultaneously blasphemous. She was, at any rate, a long way from moral fastidiousness — a quality she shared, to some degree, with Cassian himself.

"So, to summarize your proposal in simpler terms, Miss Priestley." Cassian laced his fingers together and inquired lazily. "I am to throw all caution to the wind and pretend, in front of everyone, that I am utterly, hopelessly smitten with you?"

"Ugh."

For a moment, Wilhelmina's face crumpled as though she had accidentally stepped in horse dung at the roadside.

"It's rather nauseating to hear it put that way, even though I proposed it myself. Ah — don't misunderstand. I didn't mean that Your Highness as a person is repulsive."

"How tremendously comforting."

He drawled the sarcasm, but Cassian fell silent for a moment, thinking. It did not take him long to finish a few minor calculations.

"Let us be perfectly clear on one point."

Those eyes, pale as the moon, locked onto Wilhelmina across the table as though pinning prey.

"If I pretend to love you passionately — can you actually bear it?"

"......"

Caught off guard by a thrust she hadn't anticipated, Wilhelmina's mouth closed as though her words had been snatched away. Cassian did not miss the faint tremor in the eyes of a woman who had, until now, never once been at a loss for a retort.

"I'll warn you now — you'd best prepare yourself."

This clever opportunist did not miss his moment. He wore the most beautiful of smiles — the sort that softly creased those dazzling eyes, framed in lashes of gold.

Any respectable gentleman of Winster was expected to hold membership at a club or two. Only then, according to the prevailing wisdom of the age, could he be considered a proper gentleman at all.

It was a tedious, moth-eaten standard — and yet, regrettably, present-day Winster was populated largely by fools who believed that a gentleman's legitimacy counted for nothing unless it was conferred by somebody else. Small wonder, then, that the city's most distinguished clubs found their doors perpetually thronged with hopefuls.

The clubs, of course, filtered this surplus of gentleman-aspirants through criteria of their own devising: exceedingly particular, microscopically detailed, and at times unspoken, even capricious.

And yet, amid this ever-swelling flood of membership rulebooks, there was one establishment that drifted serenely against the current: the Obsidian Club.

Thanks to this unique and rather romantic stipulation, the club served as a steadfast politically neutral ground, unsullied by the muddy brawl of either the Royalists or the Reformists — and as a peaceful sanctuary for Duke Priestley, the unaffiliated Foreign Minister, and the nobles who followed him.

...Or rather, that had been the case until yesterday.

"So who was the first guest to arrive, then?"

"His Highness Cassian. And then, wouldn't you know it, His Highness Edward came bursting in exactly five minutes later."

There could be only one reason why the two titans currently shaking the entire political landscape of Winster over the question of the Regent's seat would visit the Obsidian Club.

"Did they both ask for His Grace Priestley the moment they arrived?"

"Need you even ask?"

"And did you see His Highness Edward's face when he spotted His Highness Cassian, who'd arrived first?"

"Naturally. He didn't let it show, but he was rather taken aback."

It was no exaggeration to say that every gaze in the club was fixed upon the billiard table where the three men had gathered.

As befit gentlemen of such distinguished reputation, not one of the three betrayed so much as a flicker of displeasure. They had simply rolled up their sleeves over their waistcoats and were each selecting a cue. And yet the peculiar dissonance of that particular combination of three was not so easily dispelled.

A gentleman clicked his tongue behind his newspaper.

"Who on earth proposed that wager of billiards in the first place?"

"His Highness Cassian."

"Good God."

As everyone shook their heads in dismay, the game commenced all the same.

"Who shall take the first shot?" Edward asked. With his faded-gold hair and neatly trimmed mustache, he was in every respect the ideal image of a Winster gentleman, not a hair out of place from the standard of propriety.

"I will."

As befit the man who had proposed the game, Cassian stepped forward without hesitation. Watching his younger brother's back as he leaned over the billiard table, Edward drew a slow mouthful of smoke from his lit cigar.