CHAPTER FIVE #2
“I am newly wedded, my lord,” she said carefully. “I am told very little with certainty.”
The gentleman looked pleased by the answer. “Then allow me to supply one certainty. We are very nearly neighbors, you and I. My own poor acres sit just across the river from your husband’s little cottage.”
Theodore’s voice remained perfectly courteous. “Greaves.”
The earl let the word cottage rest a moment before continuing. “I have always found it charming that a man with Lockton to his name keeps a cottage of thirty rooms by way of modesty.”
Ellen turned the name over silently.
Greaves.
Theodore’s tone did not change by so much as a hair, and the courtesy of it was complete enough to close over the conversation like a lid. “My acreage does very well without being thought of. We will not keep you from the tables.”
Greaves smiled as though something had been confirmed rather than refused. “As you wish. One must never keep a gentleman from his game, especially when he has already won so handsomely.”
His eyes touched Ellen again.
“Your Grace.”
The bow he gave her was soft, polished, and empty. Then he withdrew into the crowd in the way of water receding, leaving the place where he had stood looking exactly as before.
Ellen waited until he was far enough away that no one could pretend to overhear.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“The Earl of Greaves,” Theodore said. “A political acquaintance.”
“Political acquaintances do not usually make a room colder by entering it.”
His eyes moved to her then, briefly. “You have been observing.”
“I have had little else to do.”
The words came out before she could make them gentler.
Theodore accepted them without visible injury. “Greaves is not a man with whom you need concern yourself.”
“That is a very careful sentence.”
“It is a sufficient one.”
“For you, perhaps.”
His gaze remained steady. “For tonight.”
The flatness of it was its own instruction, a door closed quietly in her face.
Ellen understood that the subject was not to be opened, and she filed the name away in the growing drawer of things her husband would not explain to her, beside the door he would not open, the warmth he would not spend, and the violets she still had not decided how to understand.
She was looking away from him, across the room, when she saw the red coat.
The red coat stood at the far side of the room, half-turned from her, a militia officer in conversation with two other gentlemen.
The set of his shoulders was exactly right, and the dark hair above the collar was exactly right, and for one violent instant Ellen’s heart rose into her throat with such force that the room seemed to tilt away from her.
Her hand closed hard on Theodore’s sleeve before she knew it had moved.
Theodore steadied her at once.
He did not turn his head. He did not ask what she had seen, and he did not draw attention to the sudden pressure of her fingers against his arm. He merely firmed beneath her grasp, small and controlled, the sort of movement no one else would notice, and somehow the floor came back under her feet.
The officer at the far side of the room shifted.
Ellen held her breath.
Then his profile showed, and the cruel little hope ended as quickly as it had risen.
It was not Vance.
It was a stranger, only a stranger, a man who resembled him from behind and only to a woman who wanted, desperately and foolishly, to be wrong.
Ellen released Theodore’s sleeve at once, her gloved fingers curling back into her palm as if she might hide the evidence of having reached for him. “Forgive me,” she said quietly.
Theodore kept his gaze fixed on the room. “There is nothing to forgive.”
“I thought I saw someone,” she said, attempting to restore her voice to the calm Augusta had pressed into her earlier along with the pins.
“I am fully aware.”
The answer was too quiet.
Ellen looked up at him, startled despite herself. His expression remained directed toward the company before them, his posture unchanged, his hand still a steady guard at her back.
“You know?” she asked.
Theodore’s eyes moved briefly over the crowd before returning to the same fixed point. “My powers of observation are not yet failed, Your Grace.”
There was no cruelty in the words. That made them worse somehow, because cruelty could have been resisted, while this careful, indifferent accuracy left her with nothing to answer except the truth of it.
Ellen lowered her gaze. “Then I hope you are also discreet.”
His hand did not move from her back. “Always.”
“That must be convenient,” she said, arranging her face before anyone nearby could find satisfaction in its disorder.
“Often,” Theodore replied, his tone so even that she could not tell whether he meant to end the subject or spare her from it.
She might have laughed in another life, or another matrimony, or another room. In this one, she only drew a careful breath, settled her hand more lightly on his arm, and put her chin back where Augusta had placed it.
She survived the rest of the evening on pride, which was the one fund she had not allowed to run dry.
Near midnight, after another quarter hour of candles, murmurs, and faces she could no longer bear to sort into names, Theodore bent his head slightly toward her. “We are going.”
Ellen looked up, relief moving through her before caution could conceal it. “Now?”
“Yes.”
She searched his face, though she knew by then that his face rarely gave what one asked of it. “Has something transpired?”
“Enough has happened,” he said.
It was not comfort. It was not explanation. Still, the words loosened something inside her, and she could not deny the relief that came with permission to stop enduring the room.
She nodded. “Then I am ready.”
Augusta joined them near the entrance hall, her eyes moving at once from Theodore’s face to Ellen’s, and whatever she found there made her mouth tighten. “Leaving so soon?”
“The hour is late,” Theodore said, drawing on his gloves with unhurried precision.
Augusta looked at him over the edge of her fan. “The hour has been late for some time.”
“Then we are overdue,” he replied.
Augusta’s gaze remained on him for a moment longer, sharp enough to have carried a dozen accusations had she chosen to speak them aloud. She did not. She merely turned toward Ellen and adjusted the edge of her wrap with a brisk, near-tender efficiency.
“Come, child,” Augusta said. “The night has done enough admiring of you.”
Ellen tried for a smile and managed only the faint shape of one. “Has it been admiration, my lady?”
“Of a kind,” Augusta said dryly, and offered no further mercy.
Ellen let Theodore hand her into the carriage, the dark interior swallowing the last of the candlelight and music behind her. She took her seat with her face turned to the glass, watching the lamps of the square slide past in wavering gold as the carriage rolled away.
Across from her, Augusta looked at Theodore over the top of Ellen’s bent head.
It was a long, level, weighted look, one that needed no words to be perfectly legible. Theodore met it without shifting in his seat. After a moment, he nodded once, as if accepting a rebuke no one else had heard, and turned to his own window.
Nothing was said the whole way home.
She understood a thing fully for the first time.
She had entered into a matrimony which belonged to a world that did not want her and was not going to learn to want her.
The whispers tonight had not been an accident of one cruel evening. They were the climate. She would live in that climate now, behind a name that protected her from everything except the people who used the name.
And Vance was not coming to take her out of it.