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The announcement is made–Miss Sansa Stark’s engagement to Willas Tyrell–at the party thrown precisely for the purpose of a grand announcement. Raise up the family in this trying time, brush all the unpleasantness under the imported rugs with music and food and the press of a crowd gathered to witness it.
Dany did say it would be an engagement. Swore to it twice as they rode down Fifth Avenue, carriage rocking. She sounded rather too pleased about the prospect when she usually has very little in the way of kindness for his cousin. Jon refused to believe it. Too old for her, Jon insisted, and he still thinks so, as he attempts to grit out a smile and his wife lifts her champagne.
“Raise your glass, Jon,” she says, lips barely moving.
He does, but only to bring the crystal rim to his waiting lips. He won’t toast the happy couple, nor will he do Dany’s bidding. Not tonight. He’s in no mood to be agreeable.
Dany does say he’s taciturn and overly sensitive, so he might as well play the part the way her opera friends do nightly on a stage lit too bright.
“She’s your cousin. Pretend to be pleased.”
“I’m happy for her of course.”
His hand flexes at his side.
Dany looks sidelong at him, pale brow arched. “Oh yes, very. Listen, try not to murder the man in front of this lot. They’ll sue and I’m not sure your confidence would stand up to the task of self-representation.”
Her dress is red. Blood red. Her favorite color. She never fades into the background. Not even among these people who whisper behind fans about her. Nor should she, and yet, her bold temperament is perhaps not as well suited to his as he once believed.
She’ll insist he dances with her tonight, though he would prefer to hide in the palm room, nursing this damnable ache that’s spreading through his chest. Just long enough so that he can pull himself together to congratulate Catelyn on the match. Or Bran if he isn’t feeling up to facing the matriarch of the family.
“It’s a shame she couldn’t get what she wanted. I suppose that’s a new sensation for her.” Her head tilts, as the musicians begin to play. She brings the coupe to her mouth, covering it as she amends, “Who she wanted. But the Tyrells are climbing like roses, aren’t they? She’ll add a lovely old-world aura to all that vulgar American newness.”
Sansa Stark is America, she’s as American as they come, first family and all, but he understands the import. There is the New York of old and what’s coming to sweep that all away in a cloud of coal dust.
“That mansion is a monstrosity.”
Willas looks down at his bride-to-be as if she’s made of moonlight, twinkling in the Stark ballroom that is half the size of the Tyrell one.
White. Virginal. Untouched.
Just last week Jon spread his fingers until they spanned her jaw and tipped her head back, so her perfectly pink lips parted like an opening bud before she fled from the glass gardens, trailing the smell of hot house gardenias.
Not unsurprising behavior from a bastard relation, even one who pretends to be decent.
His heart throbs.
If only it was just sin tucked in his breast. The right preacher could drive it out.
“I didn’t know you had architectural opinions.”
Yes, moonlight. Sansa Stark is a moonbeam captured in Willas Tyrell’s open palm, as he tows her towards the dance floor where she and Jon have never publicly stepped out together.
He frowns down into his glass and grimaces against the burn of the bubbles as he swallows. “I don’t.”
“Perhaps they’ll let her decorate it in her own style. There’s endless money there.” Her voice lilts, teasing, prodding at the wound. The right family was important once, now the right amount of money is the only thing that matters. “Or is it the family you object to? Such a snob for one born on the wrong side of the blanket, aren’t you?”
“If Old Ned was alive–”
“Yes, he was very fond of you, I’m sure, but Catelyn Stark would have never, Jon. Never allowed it. You could be as rich as Croesus and she’d look down her nose at you. You know that. She’s as provincial as they come. You too for some unknown reason.”
She’s only hissed out the assertion when Sansa’s eyes meet his through a gap in the crowd. He might only imagine the fleeting swoop of unhappiness pulling at her features, the same thing he imagined on her pretty face when he returned from Vienna with Dany wrapped around his arm in a silk dress cut too low for Fifth Avenue society.
It seemed a fortuitous event when he met the beautiful widow with old family ties to New York, though Dany had never seen the city herself. There was a hint of scandal about her. But there was about him too, thanks to the circumstance of his birth and his newly acquired habit of staring rather too long at a girl meant for a grander gentleman than himself. What he wanted was outrageous in its presumption, and then the perfect solution to all his pitiful longing presented herself with almost silver hair and eyes like the lilacs that dripped before his mother’s dressing window in the spring.
They were happy. But he missed New York. So they boarded a ship.
They ought not to have come here.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mutters, chest rising and falling inside his starched shirt, as he stares across the ballroom.
“Catelyn Stark despising you or you spending too much time with your dear little cousin? I can expand on both.”
“No need,” he says, as the gap closes and Sansa’s watery gaze is blocked out by tuxedoed shoulders. “But you could lower your voice.”
“You ought to be glad people like the Tyrells are rising in this world,” she says without paying him any mind. “Catelyn Stark will never allow you to sit at the head of her table, but the new standard won’t care about your birth or my two dead husbands.”
Only one is dead, but Jon wouldn’t think to correct her.
“The new way will only care about what’s between your ears and in your pocketbook. I know there’s some intelligence in there,” she says as her finger trails the shawl collar of his jacket. “If you would only use it.”
“I’m sorry my profession isn’t impressive enough for you and your aspirations.”
She’d like to conquer New York, his wife, though she has the wrong personal history and the wrong husband for it. She imagined she would shine here the way she did in Europe thanks to her beauty and boisterousness and willingness to make a bold bet.
She boldly bet on him too. Her worst gamble.
“Even in the law you could prosper more than you do,” she insists still too loudly. It’s a well-worn argument between them now. “If you’d make the right connections.”
Not the kind of connections of which Ned Stark would approve. The people she wishes him to befriend hold no appeal.
“I’ll do my best,” he says, mostly to prevent any further upheaval.
Her cheeks already are starting to heat and Jaime Lannister has turned his eye on them, lip curling in amusement. It’s the effect of too much champagne, too much dancing around the truth. And while he wouldn’t mind calling for the carriage, making a scene at Sansa’s engagement party is not at the top of his to-do list.
What he’d like is to go to his cousin and profess things he ought not to. He wishes he could sink down on his knees to beg forgiveness. Either for loving her when she was so above his notice or not confessing it before she was lost to him, bobbing away like foam on the sea. He’d beg with his fingers grasping the embroidered hem of her ballgown, wrap his hands around her delicate ankles, kiss up the side of her stockinged calf, and then peel the silk down until his heathen hands touched flesh. He wants her hands buried in his curls.
She would never.
He’s mad. Like his grandfather, the one they committed to Bellevue.
Before his misstep last week, he’d never even touched her bare hand since she entered society.
“And there might be hope for us yet, you and me. With pretty little Sansa wed and times changing,” she says, lifting her glass, “you might even say our marriage is saved.”