Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
The ballroom at Ashvale was already crowded by the time Amelia arrived.
Light spilled from three enormous chandeliers, catching on crystal and gilt until the whole room seemed to shimmer whenever anyone moved.
Music drifted from the musicians' gallery above, lively enough to encourage dancing and gentle enough to permit conversation between sets, while servants moved steadily through the crowd with trays of champagne and sugared fruit.
Amelia paused at the top of the staircase for no more than a moment.
She told herself she was surveying the room.
Her gaze traveled across the ballroom almost despite her intention, moving from one familiar face to another, searching the clusters of gentlemen near the card tables, the ladies gathered beside the windows, the older matrons stationed strategically where they could observe everyone without appearing to do so.
No dark chestnut hair. No unmistakable height. No composed figure standing slightly apart from the rest of society as though he had been invited under protest.
She lowered her eyes, and glided down the staircase. Of course he was not here. The fact that she had nevertheless looked was her own fault.
"Miss Hartwell."
She turned. Tristan Cavendish, Duke of Ashcombe, stood before her with a glass in one hand and an expression that suggested he had already discovered something amusing.
"Your Grace."
After a moment, Amelia said, almost casually, "I thought the Bacchanalian Circle was usually present at these things."
Tristan looked at her. It was a very small pause. She noticed it immediately.
"The Duke of Ravensmere never really attends balls, Miss Hartwell.
He considers it dreadfully tedious." Tristan said, with the mild, unhurried amusement that seemed to color everything he said He continued watching her over the rim of his glass with an attentiveness that made Amelia distinctly aware she had asked the question with rather more casualness than she'd actually managed to feel.
"I did not ask whether he would be attending."
"You asked whether the Circle generally attended events of this nature, when what you wished to know was whether Ravensmere would be here, which is a very fine distinction, Miss Hartwell, and one I do not believe fools either of us.
" His mouth curved, kind rather than teasing.
"He is at home. He is nearly always at home, unless something considerably more compelling than an Ashworth ball drags him out of it. "
"How unsurprising. I imagine a man who prefers books to people finds little to recommend an evening of dancing and lukewarm claret.
" She said it lightly, aiming for the same easy dismissal she'd perfected over a dozen ballrooms, and thought she'd managed it rather well until Tristan’s expression suggested otherwise, some quiet, knowing sympathy in it that she found far more uncomfortable than outright teasing would have been.
"Perhaps," he said at last.
He did not sound convinced.
Before she could decide whether to be offended by that or relieved that he had chosen not to further pursue the matter, Tristan glanced toward the card room.
"I promised Winterbourne I would rescue him from a particularly unfortunate hand of whist. I shall leave you to your admirers."
"I have no admirers."
"Of course not."
"Your Grace."
He smiled. "Good evening, Miss Hartwell."
And with that, he disappeared into the card room, leaving Amelia to stare after him for a moment before turning her attention back to the ballroom.
She ought to have been relieved.
Instead, an entirely unreasonable disappointment settled over her.
She had known Sebastian scarcely longer than three brief encounters, and yet his absence had acquired a peculiar weight tonight. She had no claim upon his attention, no reason to expect it, and certainly no business feeling its withdrawal.
More importantly, she could not afford such distractions.
This was her first Season. Her parents had been frank about that from the beginning.
They could give her a respectable introduction to society, a few good gowns, and enough invitations to put her in the path of suitable gentlemen, but they could not afford to keep her in London year after year while she waited for something more romantic than sensible.
She needed a good match.
Not merely a handsome face or an agreeable fortune, but a gentleman whose position would secure her future and ease the her parents’ concerns.
Her mother had never said it so plainly, but Amelia had understood.
They were not poor, but neither were they wealthy enough for her to treat the Season as an endless parade of balls and house parties in the hope that something might eventually happen.
She ought to be paying attention.
She ought to be remembering names, families, estates, titles.
She ought certainly not to be wondering whether a particular duke had noticed when she entered a room.
And yet—
"This is absurd," she murmured.
She shook off the wistful thoughts and laughed with a young Mr. Pembroke when he nearly turned the wrong direction during the country dance, accepted an apology from Lord Hatherleigh after he stepped on the hem of her gown, and found herself genuinely amused by a story told by a naval captain who had spent three minutes trying to explain why he considered dancing a greater military trial than any battle he had endured.
A new set was announced. Several gentlemen immediately approached. Amelia accepted the first invitation.
She was having a pleasant evening. A very pleasant evening.
So why did she keep looking toward the entrance?
She noticed herself doing it after the third dance.
Then again when the doors opened to admit a late-arriving party.
Again, when a tall gentleman entered with his mother.
And once more, when someone moved past the doorway and for one ridiculous instant the shape of his shoulders looked familiar.
"You keep looking toward the door, Miss Hartwell." Her partner said with a curious smile as the dance turned them. "Are you expecting someone?"
"Not particularly." She recovered her attention with visible effort, offering a smile she hoped read as merely distracted rather than transparently disappointed.
"I believe I simply enjoy watching people arrive.
It is one of the more entertaining aspects of a ball, I find, guessing who will make an entrance and who will simply slip in unnoticed. "
He accepted the explanation with easy good humor, and she spent the remainder of the set performing an interest in his conversation that she did not entirely feel.
She told herself, firmly that she was perfectly content, that the evening required nothing further from her than pleasant company and a few good partners, that she had absolutely no reason to feel the hollow disappointment that settled deeper into her chest with every hour that passed without a tall, dark-haired duke appearing in the doorway to argue with her about something.
He did not come. The orchestra played its final set, and the candles burned lower, and the ballroom began its slow, reluctant emptying, carriages queuing beyond the gates the way they always did, and Amelia climbed in beside her parents, with a disappointment considerably heavier than she had any business feeling over a man who had never once promised to attend.
Sebastian was three pages into a memorandum concerning a dispute between two of his tenants when Nathaniel was announced.
"You are missing rather a fine ball at Ashvale." He said when he entered the study.
"I am aware. I made a considered decision to miss the Ashworth’s ball several hours ago, and I have not yet found reason to regret it.
" Sebastian did not look up, though something in Nathaniel's posture, too deliberately casual, too clearly pleased with himself, kept a fraction of his attention from the page.
"A pity. Miss Hartwell is in attendance."
The pen stopped mid-stroke.
"Tristan tells me she asked whether you generally attended events of this kind." Nathaniel settled into the chair opposite the desk, watching him with satisfaction. "She has been by all accounts perfectly charming all evening, danced well, spoken with half the room."
"That signifies nothing."
"It signifies precisely what you think it signifies, which is why you have already ruined that sentence you were writing.
" Nathaniel nodded at the blotted ink spreading slowly across the page beneath Sebastian's abandoned pen.
"You have perhaps an hour before the ball concludes, if you intend to do anything about it. "
Sebastian set the pen down with deliberate care , weighing an argument he already knew he had lost. "I have no engagement with the Ashworths."
"No. You have simply changed your coat with remarkable speed on prior occasions for considerably less compelling reasons, and I begin to wonder whether tonight might prove another.
" Nathaniel's mouth curved, insufferably knowing.
"Shall I have your carriage brought round, or do you intend to keep arguing with yourself about it until the decision makes itself for you? "
He suddenly found himself wanting to see whether she had enjoyed the evening and some irrational part of him had also become intensely curious about the expression she would wear when she saw him walk through the doors.
He was in his carriage minutes later, and cursing the London traffic within fifteen, and standing in the Ashworth’s emptying ballroom within the hour, scanning a thinning crowd of departing guests with an urgency he had no intention of examining too closely and finding, at the end of the search, precisely nothing.
The candles were being snuffed along the far wall.
The orchestra was already packing away its instruments.
I am too late. The thought landed with considerably more weight than it should have, for a woman he had known the length of a few encounters, none of them longer than an afternoon.
"You look," Tristan observed, materializing at his shoulder with a drink already in hand and an expression of open, delighted amusement, "precisely like a man who has just realized he rushed across half of London for a woman who left twenty minutes before he arrived."
"I came for the company. Nathaniel mentioned the Ashworths kept an excellent cellar."
"I’d wager Nathaniel mentioned nothing of the sort, and you have never once cared what any host keeps in his cellar." Tristan's grin widened, entirely unrepentant. "You put on your good coat, Sebastian. For a ball you have declined, without exception for years."
"I decline to discuss my coat with you."
"You decline to discuss a great many things with me lately, and every single one of them appears to circle back to the same woman." Tristan clapped him once on the shoulder, entirely too pleased with the evening's proceedings. "You could admit you are disappointed."
"I am not disappointed."
"Sebastian."
"I am annoyed."
"At missing her."
"At the timing."
Tristan smiled.
"Naturally. Come. Let us find you a drink, and you may spend the carriage ride home composing whatever dignified explanation you intend to offer yourself for tonight's rather remarkable exception."
Sebastian said nothing to that, because there was, he found, nothing dignified left to offer, only the raw, unfamiliar frustration of arriving too late for something he had not permitted himself to admit he wanted until it had already slipped past him.