Chapter 18
Eighteen
“Quite the turnout,” Gabriel said sardonically, as he entered the dining room beside Tiffany.
The baron’s poetry excursion had thinned the Wide River crowd considerably.
Half the house party had gone along for the trip to Horsham, either because they were genuinely fond of poetry or simply unwilling to be left behind.
What remained for dinner was a small, oddly youthful gathering: Gabriel, James, the Warwicks, the Winthrop sisters, and a further scattering of guests who had declined the Winthrop invitation.
Escorting Tiffany to James, Gabriel removed himself to find his seat. He was placed at the head of the table as always, and he was midway through an idle observation to one of his riding friends when Rosalie entered.
She looked beautiful, dressed in a luxurious silver gown. But that was not the trouble. She had looked beautiful before, countless times, in fact: in formal attire, in her riding habit, in her morning gowns, in his borrowed coat on a cold night.
Her appearance that evening was different.
Her hair had been arranged in a complicated chignon, curled and pinned in the fashionable style he’d seen on the debutantes that Season.
Pearls dripped from her hair in strings, and from her ears.
There was an artificial color on her cheeks.
Her gown was cut lower than anything he’d yet seen her wear.
And she carried herself into the room with a deliberate sway that caused his eyes to move to her hips and then to her face in shock when he caught himself staring.
“Goodness,” said his companion, visibly impressed by Rosalie’s new look, his mouth hovering above the rim of his glass. “Miss Winthrop is a sight for sore eyes this evening.”
Gabriel scowled but did not comment. He tensed as Rosalie looked at him from the doorway and whispered something to Lady Howard, who had entered with her in a similarly grand evening gown. Rosalie circled the table slowly, examining their place cards.
“It seems we are neighbors this evening,” she said as she took the seat beside Gabriel. His companion promptly rose from his seat and pulled out her chair. She smiled and settled her skirts with an artful motion. “I do hope I have not kept you waiting, Your Grace.”
“Not... at all.” He found himself watching her closely. His companion returned to his seat and was swept up in another conversation with James, thank heavens. “Is everything... Are you quite alright, Miss Winthrop?”
“Do I not seem alright?” The smile she offered was well-made, but it did not reach her eyes.
“I thought it was time I made a proper effort at this house party. My sister brought some dresses with her. A woman ought to know how to dress for her company, especially when the company is so... formidable. Do you not like my dress?”
“Why... I have never found you lacking in effort or fashion before,” he murmured, drinking from his wine glass to avoid staring at the wash of creamy skin between her neck and bustline. The wine tasted bitter, and he grimaced. “But you look lovely, yes.”
“You are... kind to say so.” She reached for her wine and let her fingers linger a moment too long against the stem, glancing at him from beneath her lashes.
Did he imagine her gloved fingers trembling?
An intake of breath, and then she spoke.
“Am I to understand that we will be having our own poetry recital tonight?”
“That seems to be the plan, though I did not encourage it myself.” He set down his glass. “Who told you that?”
Hesitation flickered across her face, quickly smoothed over. “Oh...” She shrugged daintily. “One hears things.”
“Are you being...” He hesitated too, then persevered. This was Rosalie, who was usually honest to a fault. “Are you being purposefully mysterious?”
“No,” she said too loudly, then repeated it in a more dignified way. “It is only that... one might have heard a great many things at Wide River this week... or sensed things... I find myself wondering which of them are worth believing.”
Now, he was intrigued. “Such things as what?”
“Little things...”
“Such as?” he repeated emphatically.
It seemed she could not come up with a lie. He had never been so confused by her, and he found himself laughing. Rosalie looked unimpressed, and her vexed expression gave away the fact that this was a performance, even if it did not help explain why she felt the need to put on a show for him.
“Why are you laughing at me?” she asked.
“You amuse me tonight.”
“That was not the plan,” she said under her breath.
“What?”
“I... Nothing.”
“Miss Winthrop...” He glanced around. The other guests were seated and engaged in their own conversations. The servants entered with the first course, a white soup, and he watched them serve in silence, Rosalie staring ahead. “Why are you—”
“Your cravat is... very nice,” she cut in.
He touched the silky cream fabric. “It is no different from my usual cravats,” he said.
“Yes, well... It brings out... your jaw tonight, Your Grace.” She winced, pain sweeping over her face. “I meant to say... the contours of your jaw... which is strong and fine, like you.”
Gabriel choked slightly on his wine.
“I only mean to say... I have noticed it. Many women must notice it, and your finer qualities.”
“Well...” He looked up at the chandelier to stop himself from laughing. What the devil was wrong with her? “I cannot say my jaw has drawn particular comment until tonight.”
“Then...” She shook her head, visibly struggling. “People were not looking closely enough.”
Gabriel waited until the servant served them before he leaned forward and smiled. “You are very free with your compliments this evening, Miss Winthrop. Should I be alarmed? Has something happened?”
“No! You are simply... a very... complimentable gentleman... I think.”
“For someone who reads as much as you do, I would have expected a tighter command of the English language. That cannot be a word.”
He glanced across the table without quite meaning to and found James watching them both with a blank stare.
Gabriel returned his attention to his plate, unsettled.
Rosalie continued to compliment him, gently and artfully, at intervals throughout the remainder of the meal.
How nice his conversation was, and how lovely his hospitality was; the deliciousness of the dish had just been set before them, and the perfect luminescence of the room.
Every saccharine word sat wrong. The sweetness of her was almost unbearable.
Is she trying to spoil herself in my eyes?
He thought once the dessert course arrived.
Is she purposefully trying to imitate the young ladies she knows I despise, after that foolish moment in the meadow, and the way I drunkenly apprehended her before that?
She must have sensed my desire for her. She must have sensed it, and loathed it, and therefore assigned herself the task of making herself undesirable to me.
After the meal, the ladies withdrew to the drawing room to begin preparing their poems for the evening’s entertainment.
He mulled over the last of his Madeira wine alone, trying not to feel hurt by Rosalie’s forced change of temperament.
James caught his eye across the quickly emptying table and rose.
“Was there something wrong with your dinner companion tonight?” James asked when he arrived beside Gabriel, a hand on the back of his chair. “You look... put out.”
“You would not believe me if I told you,” Gabriel said, confused, as he downed the last of his sweet wine. “But you noticed she was different?”
“I scarcely recognized her when she walked in,” James concurred. “What did you do to her?”
“Me?” Gabriel drew back. “I did nothing to her.”
“Curious.” James tapped the back of his chair. “I quite like the way she looked before.”
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed, turning his glass to the light. It cast patterns on the mahogany table. “So did I.”
“You seem...” James stopped himself, but a look from Gabriel encouraged him to continue. “I did not expect that anything about Miss Winthrop could rattle you quite so much. Perhaps that was my mistake. You are rattled. Do you want me to have a word with her?”
“Even if I did wish that, I do not know what I would want you to say.”
James smiled. “That you are mad for her, and that you find her lovely in ways you can scarcely express, even to me?”
“No,” Gabriel said, not because it was not true, but because the words made him feel hot and restless all over. “She does not need to hear anything like that from either of us. She should be left alone.”
“If you want my advice, whatever she has done to displease you should be pointed out to her.” James straightened and looked toward the door.
“It is a difficult task to tell a woman when she has erred, more difficult even than to tell her when she has stepped correctly.
But it is necessary if you want this courtship to continue.
And you do want it to continue, do you not?
That was the problem, Gabriel thought. Pretend or real, short-lived or not, I have no idea what I want anymore from our courtship... or from her.
Despite this, he found her sometime later on an upstairs balcony.
The poetry session was halfway through, and it had been suggested that the guests should take a break for air.
Rosalie had slipped out of the room first with a word to Lady Howard, who had become fast friends with Charlotte and Tiffany, and was talking in a little knot with them by the fire.
The balcony was only large enough for two people and opened from one of the windows in the upstairs gallery. It overlooked the park at the back of the house, so far elevated that he could see where the forest began and ended, the meadow tucked somewhere within.
Rosalie leaned against the iron railing. She had taken off one glove and was turning it over, looking out at the darkness. For a moment, before she heard him, she looked like herself again.