Chapter 24 #2
He was making his way to a quiet corner in the parlor, where he could sit for a moment to recover after listening to a particularly loud Lord talk of his new trade routes. He was nearly there when he was intercepted.
“Your Grace, it is a pleasure to see you,” said Lady Marston, the widow of an old business associate whom he had not seen in several years. She looked tired and worn.
“Indeed,” he said, searching for something pleasant to say when his eyes found Anna near the window.
“How is your sister?” She asked, her own eyes now following Frederick’s line of sight to Anna, half-listening to Lord Pemberton hold court on some matter of Parliament, no doubt.
“She is quite well,” he said as he turned his focus back to Lady Marston. “She is around here somewhere. How is your son?”
“He is now thirteen years old and doing well at Eton,” she said with a smile. “I have been fortunate in my circumstances since my husband passed, but I confess I find myself seeking new purpose and engagement.”
“I am glad to hear of it. Your late husband always spoke so fondly of him, and of your household. He honors him well.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said with teary eyes, to which Frederick handed her his handkerchief. “I am sorry for such a display, this is most inappropriate. I will get this laundered, and returned—”
“Think nothing of it, Lady Marston. Truly.”
“You are most kind, Your Grace. I hope one day…”
She did not finish her sentence. Instead, she composed herself and walked to the next circle of conversation.
Frederick was left alone, at least momentarily, and his eyes found Anna once again. Her expression arranged into the particular polite attentiveness of a woman who had heard quite enough about Parliament for one evening.
He stepped a bit closer.
“You see, one must have the appropriate temperament for Parliament. It is not for the weak!”
“I see perfectly, Lord Pemberton. You have explained it so well,” she replied with a smile. “And have you found yourself well-suited to it, my Lord? It must require considerable fortitude.”
“Oh, most certainly, my lady…” Lord Pemberton began, before Frederick tuned him out entirely; he only had eyes for Anna.
She was standing with her weight shifted slightly onto one foot, her champagne glass turned slowly in her fingers.
Frederick noted she was not restless exactly, but present only in the most technical sense.
She was a bright young woman who could run intellectual circles around them without breaking a sweat.
Her attention was somewhere else entirely while the rest of her performed the social requirements with admirable professionalism.
How I wish I knew what she was really thinking…
Frederick snatched a glass of his own from the tray near the door and found a position that offered a decent view of the room without requiring him to join any particular conversation.
Such a move always suited him considerably better than anything Pemberton had to say about Parliament, or anything else.
Thomas had already made his way to Rachel’s side of the room, where they stood slightly apart from the rest of the company, not quite close enough to invite comment and close enough to invite it anyway.
It felt uncanny to watch them talking with the easy, unhurried absorption of two people who have forgotten anyone else is present.
Frederick watched his oldest friend lean down to catch something Rachel said, and the quiet pleasure that crossed Thomas’s face when she laughed at his reply, and found he could not in good conscience be anything but glad of it.
He looked back toward Anna, almost unconsciously.
She had extracted herself from Lord Pemberton while his attention was elsewhere. It was neatly done, a skill she’d clearly honed across several weeks of the Season.
She had migrated toward where Lord Carstairs was holding a smaller, rather more animated conversation with two of the other. He sidestepped a bit closer.
“…and what would you expect from a pig, my Lord?” Anna said, which prompted a laugh from Carstairs. “Surely, the creature has no innate notion of propriety.”
Frederick could only imagine where the conversation had started.
“I suppose not very much, Lady Birchall. I must say, you are a quick wit.”
“Thank you, Lord Carstairs. It is precisely my wit that keeps me out of trouble.”
She appeared to be enjoying herself. She laughed at something else Carstairs said. It was the unguarded version, the one Frederick had catalogued instinctively against the more social variety, and he took a considered sip of his port and looked at the fireplace for a moment.
She is doing exactly what she came to London to do.
The observation arrived without editorial comment, which he thought showed considerable restraint on the part of whatever portion of his mind had produced it.
She is pleasant and lovely, and there is not a man in this room who would not offer himself up cheerfully if she indicated the slightest interest, and you have precisely no claim on any of it, which you knew when the Season began and have managed to forget eleven times this evening alone.
He looked at the fireplace for a moment longer. It was a good fireplace. He had no complaints about it.
Focus on that.
It was Percy who broke up the gathering’s last formality.
The cat had clearly decided, somewhere over the evening, that the noise from the parlor warranted investigation.
He appeared in the doorway and surveyed the room with cool green eyes, dismissing most of it as unworthy of his time.
Then, he made a direct, purposeful line across the carpet to Anna.
He promptly commenced winding himself about her ankles with loud, enthusiastic purring.
“Well, well,” Anna said, delighted, crouching despite her silk skirts to scratch beneath his chin, “at least someone in this house remembers me.”
“Frederick’s cat,” Rachel supplied to Lord Pemberton, who looked faintly alarmed at the animal’s presence among the company.
“His Grace allows a cat to walk about his London home?”
“He allows the creature to do as he likes, he is quite willful. I daresay Percy has dreadful taste in everything except company, apparently.”
“He has excellent taste,” Anna said, scooping Percy up with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance, and the cat settled against her shoulder, purring louder, entirely unbothered by the silk or the company or anything at all beyond the fact that he had found his preferred lap, or, in this case, the nearest available substitute. “Don’t you, you ridiculous feline?”
Frederick, watching from across the room, found he could not entirely disagree with the cat’s judgment.
If he was being honest with himself, he was a bit jealous of the thing.
He made his way over in the end, as he supposed he had known he would from the moment Percy made his choice.
It was his cat, and therefore his responsibility, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Anna looked entirely at home with Percy draped across her shoulder and her evening gloves ruined at the fingers from the enthusiastic scratching, laughing at something Rachel had said while Lord Pemberton retreated in evident bafflement.
“He isn’t usually so forthcoming with guests,” Frederick said, coming to stand beside her.
“He was fond of me. I am not just some casual guest after all.” Anna glanced up, and something shifted in her face, not quite guarded but careful. “I hoped he might not have entirely forgotten me.”
“Percy forgets very little. He is particular, but not inconstant.”
She looked at him for a moment, and he had the uncomfortable sense that the remark had landed somewhere other than he’d intended it.
“How reassuring,” she said, pleasantly, and turned back to Percy, scratching behind his ears.
“Percy.” Frederick reached to extract him from the immediate vicinity of her coiffure, which she could not likely repair at a dinner party, and his hand came close enough to her hair to brush it.
He did so barely, the softest graze of knuckles against the golden loops near her temple, and he drew back as though he’d touched something hot. “I beg your pardon, my lady.”
“It’s quite all right.” Her voice was steady. “He can have the hair. I’ve rather given up on it surviving the evening.”
Percy, divested from his investigation by Frederick’s intervention, made his opinion of this known by fixing Frederick with a long, deeply unimpressed look before bunting his head deliberately back against Anna’s jaw and resuming his purring at increased volume.
“He has your measure, I’m afraid,” Anna told Frederick, with a ghost of amusement.
Frederick was spared having to formulate a response by the arrival of the guests’ carriages being announced, and the comfortable hum of the party beginning to dissolve into farewells.
He was obliged to look rather fixedly out the window for a moment before he could master his own expression sufficiently to see anyone off at the door.