He said nothing.
"Because if you are here as his messenger," Cassandra said, "you should go. But if you are here as yourself, you should stay, because I had started to believe you were becoming that person—the one who comes as himself." She looked at him steadily. "I would like to know which it is."
Marcus looked at her for a long moment. Then he put on his hat and left.
She heard his footsteps on the stair. She heard the street door. She sat at her worktable in the lamplight and did not move for some time. And then she picked up her brush and went back to work.
And she did not allow herself to think about it until she was in bed—at which point she thought about it for a considerable while before she finally slept.
Ten days of silence followed. No letters, no visits.
Cassandra worked. The engraving went forward. The Bath exhibition was announced: Ivory Miniature Portraits by C. Vane, First Public Showing, and invitations went out. Tabitha managed the practical arrangements. Cassandra mounted the pieces herself, one by one, and wrote the labels in her own hand.
She did not hear from Marcus.
On the eleventh day, a letter arrived. She recognized the handwriting, but not the quality of it: looser than his usual, the pen pressure variable—the kind of handwriting that happens when someone writes quickly because they are afraid of stopping.
He did not apologize. He did not defend himself. He wrote:
"I have spent a week trying to recall your face from memory, and I cannot do it. I have tried in the morning and at night and in the study where your mother's portrait hangs, and I can bring nothing to mind with any certainty. I do not know if this makes sense to you as a confession, but it is the only true thing I have to offer. The blankness where your face should be is the full measure of what I did not do. I am not asking you to return to anything that existed before; there is nothing in what existed before that is worth returning to. I do not know what I am asking. I wanted you to know that I understand at last what the word 'nothing' means when it is what a man has given."
Cassandra read the letter twice. She set it down on the worktable beside the piece she was finishing: the last piece for the exhibition, a young woman of 23 who had sat for her three times with great patience and very good cheekbones.
She went back to work.
In the corner of the label for the final piece, in the space where she had written C. Vane on every other label, she wrote instead:
Lady Cassandra Annesley, Countess of Marwood.
She looked at it for a moment. Then she picked up the piece and carried it to the mounting board.
The exhibition opened on a Friday afternoon in November in a long room above a tea shop on Milsom Street that Tabitha had arranged through a connection of her father's.
The light was good; Cassandra had inspected it twice. The pieces were hung at eye level on pale cloth, each one with its small, handwritten label. By 4:00, the room was full of people who had come partly for the art and partly for the story, because by now everyone in Bath knew the story, or a version of it.
Cassandra stood near the door and received people, answered questions, and accepted compliments with the particular grace of a woman who has decided that being seen is not the same as being exposed. Tabitha circulated with a plate of small cakes and the satisfied expression of someone whose instincts have been vindicated.
Marcus arrived at 4:30.
He came in quietly, without announcement. He was dressed well but not conspicuously, and he did not look for Cassandra first. He moved through the room the way he moved through any room: with the measured, unhurried attention of a man who has learned to be present in public spaces. He stopped in front of the first piece, and then the second, and then moved on.
Cassandra watched him from across the room and did not approach.
He stopped in front of his mother's portrait. It was hung near the center of the exhibition, between two pieces Cassandra considered among her best work, and it was unmistakably the same portrait that hung in his study at Marwood Court: the same ivory, the same light, the same particular expression that she had worked from a description and an earlier painting and had somehow, in the process, managed to catch.
He stood before it, and she watched his face. She watched the moment when he recognized it, and the moment after that, when he understood what the recognition meant.
He stood there for a long time. The other guests moved around him. Two women stopped beside him, admired the piece, and moved on. He remained, and Cassandra remained where she was across the room, and Tabitha caught her eye and said nothing.
By 6:00, the room had begun to empty. The late light came through the windows and fell across the pale cloth and the small ivory faces. Tabitha gathered the empty plates and quietly made herself absent. The last two guests collected their coats and went out.
The room was nearly empty when Marcus turned from his mother's portrait and found Cassandra standing a few feet away.
He looked at her. She looked at him.