She obliges him with the box, not stirring herself much further than that; between the strain she's been under and her acute awareness of her husband's stresses, this just feels like a dam bursting of utter absurdity and she doesn't feel inclined to do much more for the time being than sit here and get quietly drunk. Because she's allowed, that's why- tomorrow, perhaps, she'll smile at Sebastian until he gives her the full accounting of his own delightfully free will, but tonight she is so very bloody tired of it all.

"I developed the taste for them quite recently," she observes, thinking of LeMat's world, and Moody, and Italy; she'd always enjoyed the odd covert cigarette (a terrible habit and favourite vice to be privately indulged), but not cigars, before. She wonders if his Narcissa has a preference, if she'd discovered the fancy some other way. She must smoke, she supposes, since he doesn't blink now.