20 February, 1894 — Swan & Crown Pub

Ford hadn't spoken to Cash since any of this had started, and if this hadn't already been planned before the Valentine's Day fiasco, he probably would have been quite content to keep that streak running as long as possible. He hadn't figured out where exactly Cash sat on the spectrum of truths and lies, and consequently wasn't sure what he was going to say about it. He knew what Noble would have said, if Noble had been asked: friends, no matter how good of friends they were, did not get the truth of the situation. He ought to tell Cash what he was telling everyone else, which was that he really quite fancied Jemima Farley and suspected they would be happy together, even if the arrangement hadn't begun exactly as one might have hoped. And he could dodge questions about what had happened on Valentine's Day as though he were embarrassed about it, and focus on the future, and pretend to be hopeful about it. The difficulty with telling Cash any of this was that he thought Cash knew him too well to believe any of it, and Ford was not entirely sure what would come out of his mouth if Cash pressed him too hard on the holes in his story. He really never had been good enough at lying to pull off something like this.

But it would have been suspect to cancel it, so after work he trudged through the sludgy streets of London to the pub they'd agreed on before. Cash was there before him, which wasn't surprising given how Ford's feet had dragged on the way over. Ford waved and smiled, already nervous, then detoured to the bar to get a pint of cheap beer. This gave him another minute or two to rehearse all the possible ways that he could begin this conversation — it was probably better to say something about it rather than letting it hang in the air between them for so long — but ultimately when he slipped into the booth with his glass in hand all he managed was another nervous smile and a "Hi."

---

How are you was the sort of innocuous question that Ford ought to have an answer to, and to his credit if anyone other than Cash had asked it he would have had no difficulty responding with a superficial remark and a feigned smile. As it was, though, his mouth felt suddenly dry and he had no idea what to say. "Uh," he managed, then took a far too large drink of his beer.

"Good, yeah," he said when he set the glass down on the table. He didn't know what to do with his hands, which was a common problem when standing nervously in ballrooms but a new and exciting problem to have while sitting down at a table. He leaned on one elbow and fixed his eyes on the fog on the side of his pint glass. "Good. Good."

He had to say something about the engagement, obviously. Cash would have heard about it. Cash didn't really care about society, but if his cousin had heard the news by Monday Ford was sure Cash would have heard about it by now. "So, I'm — uh," he began, then had to stop and clear his throat. "So — you probably heard?"

---

"Ye-es," Ford said, drawing the word out as he swished his thumb against the edge of the pint glass and cleared off a few beads of condensation. Asking if Cash had heard was the right way to go about it, he decided, because it saved him having to find a way to actually verbalize it. He had been doing a fair enough job of pretending so far — at home with the girls over the weekend, for the past three days at work, when people talked to him out on the street — but somehow it was harder with Cash. Probably he shouldn't even try to pretend with Cash, probably it was a lost cause, but they were also in a public enough area that he couldn't tell him the truth, either. Or at least, the parts of it he was telling Tycho. Some of it he couldn't tell Cash regardless of where they were.

"Miss Jemima Farley," he confirmed. He felt like he should have followed that up by telling Cash something about her, but he didn't know anything about her, so he didn't have anything to say. He glanced across the table and gave Cash a tight smile as if to say so that's that and then returned his eyes to his beer.

---

Ford shrugged, about the beer; that at least he didn't have to lie about. "Ummmm," he said to Cash's second question, actually thinking it through. Technically he had an answer to this question, if you used a pretty superficial definition of the word know. The real answer, of course, was that he still didn't know her, but that wasn't something he could say.

"We met at the Sanditon, actually," he said. "During the hurricane. She, ah — her dress caught fire."

---

Ford considered saying the usual places; it was a lie, but vague enough that he thought he could get away with it. Not that he thought Cash would believe him, but he assumed Cash already didn't believe him, so that was a lost cause. And Cash was distant enough from society-at-large that Ford conceivably could have been flirting with women at parties and maybe he wouldn't have noticed. It wasn't a lie that work on anyone who was paying attention, because Ford and Miss Farley had been seen together probably a grand total of four times since the hurricane, but he didn't really have a better story.

But he also didn't know why he needed to bother with a story that neither of them were going to believe. He shrugged. "You heard about the party?"

---

Ford didn't like the way Cash said a lot of things, but there was nothing to be done about it. That was the state of things, as he already knew very well. That was the whole reason he was going to have to marry her in the first place.

"She would have been ruined, after that," he said. Would have been, had Ford not agreed to marry her; at the end of this she was probably still going to be whispered about for weeks or months but there was at least a chance that eventually she might recover from it — if being married to him did not ruin her life in even worse ways in the meantime, which it very well might. "And it was my fault," he continued. This didn't feel like a lie, even though Cash might misinterpret it. Ford had been the one to tell Mrs. Dempsey it was exactly what it looked like. If he hadn't been there that night Miss Farley might still have ended up ruined, but she might not have, and now they were never going to know.

"So now we're getting married," he concluded. Technically he had not said anything Cash didn't already know, or hadn't already heard, but circumstances being what they were Ford thought this was about as close as he could safely come to an admission that he was desperately freaking out about this.

---

Ford looked wide-eyed at Cash. He had not anticipated this question, and therefore had no answer for it. Most people had no trouble making assumptions about what had happened in the coatroom, and there were only so many things that it was my fault could mean, weren't there? And even if there was still room for some doubt, he had never imagined Cash would actually ask, given the subject matter. It wasn't as though they had ever shared details of their love lives before; this wasn't something they talked about. But maybe Cash could feel that it was off, that Ford was lying by omission about almost everything, and maybe that was why he asked... but it wasn't as though Ford could tell him, in the middle of a pub, even if he'd wanted to.

His cheeks flushed. He took a drink of his beer. This time-buying did not help him figure out what to say. He had the sense that it was rather unfair for Cash to have asked, because he must have known there was no middle-of-the-pub appropriate answer.

"You got married to make your father happy," he pointed out, defensive and sulky. "There are worse reasons than because it's the right thing to do."

---

Ford was starting to wonder if he ought to be taking Cash's refusal to let this drop personally. Was it so impossible to believe that he might have gotten someone to fall in love with him? — but this was a short-lived consideration, because of course what Cash couldn't believe had nothing to do with love at all, and it was out of character for Ford to get caught undressing a young woman in a coat room during a ball. And obviously Cash was right that there was more to the story than that, but it was hardly as though Ford could admit to that.

"And there are worse people to be marrying," he protested. He had no real evidence that this was true, since he didn't know her, but he had to hope it was. "Planned or not."

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