Chapter 30
As many times as I have set foot in this house, it has never been for such a happy occasion.
Anna stood in the doorway of the drawing room and took in the flowers first. Rathbourne House had been adorned with hundreds of roses, arranged in an artless way that was organic and elegant.
The candles had been lit two hours before sunset, so that they glowed perfectly as the guests arrived.
She caught the hum of a room full of people genuinely pleased to be there, which was rarer than it should have been at parties.
She felt the warmth of it move through her chest before she remembered to be careful.
I almost forgot whose house this is. If I am lucky, I will not have to speak to him. It is not avoidance. It is tact. I am here for Rachel and her engagement, and nothing else.
She took a glass from a passing tray, smiled at the familiar footman, and began to work her way around the perimeter of the room in the direction of Rachel. She was intercepted before she reached her by old Mrs. Grantley, a perennial busybody.
“Lady Birchall.” Mrs. Grantley said as she materialized at her left elbow and her closest friend, Lady Hurst, at her right.
“Mrs. Grantley, Lady Hurst,” she said with a forced smile.
“Such a happy occasion,” Lady Hurst said as she fanned herself with peacock feathers. “And we hear you are having quite the successful Season yourself, Lady Birchall. Lord Wexford has been most attentive by all reports.”
“Lord Wexford has been… very kind,” Anna said.
“We wondered…” Mrs. Grantley began with a wide smile that made Anna want to turn and run.
“When there might be a second announcement to celebrate?” Lady Hurst finished, because they had clearly been doing this for long enough to have achieved an efficient division of labor. “Perhaps tonight?”
“I would never overshadow my dear friend’s engagement party, nor could I say such a thing.”
“Oh, we meant no harm, dear,” Mrs. Grantley laughed as her bosom shook.
“What I can say is that today is Lord Larthby and Lady Rachel’s evening, and I think we would all do them a disservice by spending any of it speculating about anyone else. Don’t you agree?” Her voice was as sweet—and its sourness as well hidden—as lemon drops.
“Of course, dear. Well, we must make the rounds!” Lady Hurst said as she guided Mrs. Grantley to their next victim.
Anna found Rachel eventually, caught in a maelstrom of well-wishers near the window, her face flushed with a happiness she had stopped trying to keep polite.
It held the same luminous quality Anna had seen in the parlor four days ago when she had confessed it all to her.
Lord Larthby stood at her side with a limitless smile before excusing himself.
Anna took the gap and slipped in, and Rachel seized her hand immediately.
“You look wonderful,” Anna said. “You are so radiant!”
“I feel wonderful,” Rachel said. “Have you had a chance to speak with Thomas? He has been looking for you.”
“I have been waiting to find him unoccupied for longer than two minutes.”
“That is fair,” Rachel laughed. “I fear the same fate is mine. Please… find me later? We can get some air on the terrace.”
“Sounds like a plan, Lady Larthby,” Anna said when she was pulled into the next throng of guests, and the evening moved on.
After a few passing conversations and flutes of champagne, Anne ended up near the balcony windows, breathing a moment’s space between conversations. She saw the moment Lady Oldbarrow found Rachel. Anna was close enough to overhear.
“My dear girl.” Lady Oldbarrow took both of Rachel’s hands and held them.
“He is a good man. I have known him nearly as long as his own mother has, and I tell you so with full knowledge of his history and no illusions whatsoever about his character.” She paused.
“He will make you work for it, at intervals. All the best ones do. But he is good, and he is capable of great loyalty, and he has looked at you tonight like a man who has found the thing he didn’t know he was looking for.
Bravo, my girl. Your mother would be proud. ”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “That means more than I can easily say.”
“It is only the truth.” Lady Oldbarrow released her hands and patted her cheek once. “Now, go and find your young man. He is over there trying to have a conversation with Lord Barker, and he looks like he is suffering.”
Thomas found Anna before she found him, appearing at her shoulder with a glass of champagne she hadn’t asked for but accepted wholeheartedly. They started walking about the room, and he fell into step beside her effortlessly.
“I understand I am meant to be congratulated,” he said. “And threatened.”
“In that order certainly,” Anna agreed. “Congratulations. She is my dearest friend in the world, and if you make her unhappy—”
“I know, I know. You are not the first to say such words. I suspect Frederick will have broken most of the relevant bones before you get the opportunity,” he said as he gestured across the room.
Anna followed his gaze before she could stop herself and found that Frederick was looking right back at her.
Their eyes met across the length of the room.
It was a second, no more. Full of electricity and heat and fire, and then nothing.
He looked back at his guests, and she looked back at Thomas, and neither of them acknowledged what had happened.
“He will be glad to have her well settled,” Anna said, a pleasant smile plastered across her face. “He has worried about her a great deal.”
“He has worried about her a great deal,” Thomas agreed, then raised an eyebrow. “He worries about the people he loves with a thoroughness that leaves very little room for anything else. Including himself.”
Anna looked down at her glass and began to trace the bottom with her finger.
“He will find his way,” she said, in the same pleasant tone that was beginning to sound effortful (even to herself).
“Anna.” Thomas said her name quietly, not unkindly, and when she looked up at him, his eyes were on her. “You don’t need to do that with me.”
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked down once more, which was an admission of a kind, and he accepted it without pressing it. A quality he shared with his soon-to-be wife. Anna decided then that she really liked him.
“I am not judging anyone,” he said, carefully.
“Not you. Not Frederick. And I want to be clear that nothing you say here goes further than the two of us. I am speaking as your friend, new as this role may be. And as his, which is older than I care to admit.” He was quiet a moment.
“He is not a simple man, whatever he may appear to those on the outside. You may have gathered that already.”
“I have gathered something of it.”
“His father…” He paused, and Anna felt her stomach grow tight.
“It is not my story to tell. And I won’t tell it.
But I want you to understand that Frederick has been carrying things alone since he was 13, things that most men would have…
lesser men would have…” He stopped again.
“He learned, when he was very young, that he was the one who kept things together. That composure was his vocation, and everyone else’s comfort was his responsibility, and his own… ”
“Aas not the priority?”
“Yes. And that takes some time to unlearn. Do you understand?”
Anna was quiet. Around them the party continued its bright hum.
“His father,” she said, at last, not quite a question.
Thomas met her eyes. “It’s not mine to say.”
“No,” she said.
She looked across the room again. Frederick was talking to Rachel now, his head bent toward his sister’s.
There was something in his face, a devotion that he didn’t show the rest of the room.
Anna could see the real warmth, the unguarded version of Frederick.
She felt so drawn to the part of him that existed under all the careful composure, like a moth to a flame.
She thought about a young man who had learned to keep things together while everything was falling apart.
She thought about a man who had kissed her in a carriage as though she were the only thing in the world worth reaching for, and then apologized for it.
She realized in that moment it wasn’t that he didn’t care for her.
It was that he did not know how to want things for himself.
Her chest ached for Frederick, past and present.
“Anna,” Thomas’s voice was gentle. “For what it’s worth, I think you already know him better than most people ever will. He simply hasn’t realized it all yet. Or can’t let himself.”
“Thank you, Thomas,” she said, and meant it, and raised her glass toward Rachel, who was laughing now at something Frederick had said, radiant in the glow of a perfect party. “For tonight. And for the rest of it.”
Thomas raised his own glass. “He will get there,” he said, quietly, to the room rather than to her. “He’s stubborn, not a lost cause.”
Anna watched Frederick across the crowded, candlelit room.
She saw the man who had taken composure as a shield before he was old enough to know he would need one.
She finished her champagne. Around her, the party carried on, warm and bright, full of the happiness of people celebrating something real.
Anna stood in the middle of it and ached for a man across the room who was not looking at her, and told herself that this, too, she would endure.