Chapter 3
TWO DAYS LATER
“Ishould never have promised to help you. What if we are caught?”
Eleanor looked up from the dressing table. “We will not be caught.”
“You cannot possibly know that.”
“Frances.” Eleanor set down the ribbon she was holding and turned on the stool to face her properly. “I have thought about this for a long time. Every single detail. I have gone over it so many times that I could recite it in my sleep, and I am telling you, we will not be caught.”
Frances looked at her friend, then at the two identical costumes laid out across the bed, then back at her friend. “Tell me again,” she said. “All of it.”
Eleanor took a breath. “Tonight the house will be full, two hundred guests at the very least, possibly more. Everyone in masks and costumes. Alexander has invited half of London, and no one refuses the Duke of Whitestone.”
A small, tight note entered her voice at his name, but she pushed past it. “In a room of two hundred people in disguise, no one will be looking too carefully at any one face. That is the entire point of a masquerade.”
“Go on.”
“We dress identically. Both of us as the Goddess Diana.” Eleanor smiled. “Are you not glad we have the same hair color?”
Frances held back a sigh. “Go on, Ellie.”
“When the ball begins, you will go down in my stead while I hide in there.” She nodded toward the door that led to her small dressing room.
“After perhaps an hour, once the rooms are full and the dancing is well underway, I will slip out through the side door to the mews where Malcolm will be waiting. No one will know.”
“Are you sure about that?” Frances asked. “There might be two hundred people, but most of them know you rather well.”
“You know all of my circle. You have spent three Seasons with them. You know whom Eleanor Moonwell dances with, whom she avoids, and what she says when Lady Ashworth corners her about her embroidery. All you must do is get through the evening without anyone looking too closely.”
Eleanor reached across and took her hand. “And then, before midnight, you go out through the garden as though you are stepping out for air, and the carriage I have arranged will take you home. By the time Alexander notices I am gone, Malcolm and I will be well on our way.”
Frances looked at the costumes on the bed for a long moment.
She knew that this was the point where a sensible person would say no.
She also noticed that Eleanor’s hand was trembling slightly around hers and that the brightness in her friend’s eyes was the light of someone holding themselves together through sheer determination, who had been doing so for several days.
“All right,” she said, and Eleanor’s grip tightened immediately. “But if we are caught, I am telling everyone it was entirely your idea.”
“It entirely was my idea,” Eleanor agreed, and for the first time since Frances had arrived, she laughed.
They dressed without the lady’s maid’s help—Eleanor had sent her off on an errand with enough specificity to keep her occupied for the better part of the evening—and they helped each other with the small, fiddly things that usually required assistance.
The costumes were well-made, flowing white with a gold border, and the masks were full-faced and carefully matched.
Standing side by side in front of the glass, Frances had to admit it was quite effective.
She looked at Eleanor’s reflection and saw herself, and when she turned to look at her own reflection, she saw Eleanor.
The whole setup was either very clever or absolutely terrifying, and she had not yet decided which.
When the first sounds of the guests began to drift up from the floors below, Eleanor drew her into an embrace. “Frances, you are saving my life, and for that, I owe you.”
Frances held her tighter. “You deserve to be happy.”
“You may call upon me for whatever you need. I promise.” Eleanor pulled back and smiled.
“Then I shall hold you to it,” Frances said with a grin.
With one final embrace, Eleanor ran into the dressing room to hide.
Frances sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the house fill up around her. Then she told herself to breathe and checked the clock on the mantelpiece rather more frequently than was useful.
She had just made up her mind that it was time to join the ball in Eleanor’s stead when a knock at the door made her flinch so sharply, she nearly came off the bed entirely.
Frances pressed her hand to her chest. Then, in the steadiest voice she could muster, “Who is it?”
“You are late for the ball,” a deep, male voice called from the other side.
Frances’s stomach dropped somewhere in the approximate direction of the floor. That was the Duke.
For a moment, she contemplated joining Eleanor in the dressing room, but then the lady in question poked her head out. She made a gesture that Frances interpreted as ‘go on then’.
This is it. Frances stood and adjusted her mask. She thought briefly of every decision that had led her to this moment, and then she opened the door.
Whitestone was dressed for a ball at which he clearly had no intention of actually participating in the spirit of the occasion—everything immaculate and formal with only a silver demi-mask conceding to the evening’s theme.
Frances was deeply, profoundly grateful for her full mask.
She stood very still beneath it and kept her breathing even by force of will. Then he offered his arm.
She took it, and they walked.
His arm beneath her hand was solid in a way that she had not quite anticipated, not that she had anticipated anything, and the warmth of it came through the fabric of his coat, making it rather difficult to keep her attention where it needed to be: on the hallway ahead of them, not on the arm she was holding.
Stop it, she told herself firmly and focused on the middle distance.
They had almost reached the top of the staircase when he stopped.
Frances’s heart went immediately from a manageable pace to something considerably less so. She kept her eyes forward, her hand still on his arm, and she hoped the mask was doing everything she needed it to.
He was looking at her. She could feel it.
“You seem taller,” he said.
Frances took a breath that she devoutly hoped was not audible. “The Goddess Diana is tall and regal, brother,” she said, pitching her voice to Eleanor’s particular cadence which was a shade warmer than her own. “I had the shoes made for accuracy.”
There was a pause that lasted long enough that she was genuinely unsure, for two or three of the longest seconds of her life, which way it was going to go. Then he turned back toward the staircase, and they continued walking.
Frances discovered that it was possible to feel profound relief and profound terror simultaneously, a new experience she did not particularly wish to repeat.
The ballroom was everything Eleanor had promised, full to the point of warmth and bright with candlelight, two hundred people in costumes, and masks moving and talking and dancing. Frances let out a slow breath.
Here, at least, I am simply one person among many.
The Duke drew them to a stop just inside the doorway. He surveyed the room for a moment with the look of a man taking inventory, and then he turned to her.
“Ensure your dance card is full tonight,” he said. “I will be watching you.”
Frances looked up at him, and behind the mask, she pressed her lips together against everything she wanted to say, which was quite a lot. Instead, she curtsied and said nothing at all which she suspected was the most Eleanor-like response available to her.
He held her gaze for one more moment then moved away into the crowd, and Frances turned to face the ballroom and began the work of becoming someone else entirely.
She knew Eleanor’s circle well enough—three Seasons of shared dinners and assemblies and morning calls had seen to that—and she moved through the room with the particular confidence of someone who knew exactly which conversations to join and which to avoid.
She danced when asked, spoke when spoken to, and laughed at the right moments, and if the mask helped considerably, she was grateful for every inch of it.
It was going rather well, all things considered, until a young woman in a blue domino caught her arm with a delighted smile.
“Lady Eleanor! I had begun to fear you were not coming. Where, might I ask, is your friend Lady Frances? I did not see her arrive.”
“Indeed, I am surprised she is not here,” another young woman agreed, appearing at the first one’s elbow with the timing of someone who had been waiting for a gap in the conversation. “You two are quite inseparable.”
Frances smiled. “Lady Frances is indisposed tonight, I’m afraid. A tiresome headache. She sends her regrets.”
The young women made sympathetic noises, and the conversation moved on, and Frances filed away the small, strange feeling the exchange had left in her chest to examine at a later time.
She had been to dozens of balls in the past three Seasons.
She had danced at all of them, pleasantly enough, with the small, rotating collection of men who either did not know about the Pembroke debts—which had been repaid—or did not care.
The rest of the ton, though not unkind, usually avoided her company.
She had grown used to it, but tonight, wearing Eleanor’s name, she had danced four times before supper and had three more requests she had been obliged to decline.
So that is how it is, she thought, watching a young lord she recognized bow over her hand with an attentiveness he had never once directed at Lady Frances Pembroke in three years of shared social engagements. She filed that away too, under a different heading.
The evening wore on, and the nervousness that had been manageable in the first hour began to accumulate. Across the room, she could see the Duke—not difficult to spot, even masked, given that he was the tallest man in the room.