Chapter 3
It was a lady. Or rather, a group of ladies gathered around another. One of them fluttered her fan like she was brushing away a beetle.
“It really is too much to express. I’m beyond astonished at your audacity.”
The second followed where the first had led, sniffing into a large handkerchief.
“Why did you even come, knowing the dreaded curse you bear and the imminent displeasure it would cause to all present?”
“Perhaps she thought herself above us,” another chimed in. “Or wished to do us away.”
The first, a tall woman in a ghastly orange spencer, raised herself on tiptoe, craning over the other two like an oak above hemlock.
“I heard on very good authority that everyone and anyone close to you suffers an immediate and ignominious death.”
“Is it only those you love—excuse me, loved—who die,” the second lady added, “or also those with whom you come in contact?”
All three girls feigned to fall back then recovered, laughing.
Frederic felt the heat rising through his jacket.
He would expect as much, perhaps, from an illiterate unfortunate but from ladies of the ton!
Not even wine could excuse comments so unfeeling, so vulgar.
He turned his head, breathing through his nose.
It was too much to be borne, too much to endure.
And yet, she—the silent listener—only sighed and looked at the ground.
The second lady pulled at the sleeves of the other two. She fidgeted with her handkerchief, lowering her voice so that Frederic strained to catch it.
“What if—” she tremored, “what if she really is cursed? Ought we to prod her so?”
The other two turned back to the lady.
“You see? Look at the damage you’ve caused merely by your presence.”
“You’ve set Blanche all a quiver—she looks as though she might drop ill at any moment.”
“Leave, before you put all of us in danger.”
Frederic stepped into the shadows just outside the circle of their perception. Three ladies, as they called themselves, surrounded the solitary figure clothed in diaphanous blue silk. Their abusive tone carried across the square in which they stood, adjacent to a flowing fountain.
“I repeat,” one of them claimed, “you’re an abomination—a curse to society. You had better stay home. Who invited you to this assembly in any case?”
The other two ladies cackled like crows in a murder.
“If you had come to a ball in any one of our homes, we would have thrown you out.”
The solitary lady turned her face from them, heavenwards, towards the moon. Frederic’s voice, dark and harsh, cut through the shadows.
“That would presume, of course, that she had accepted your invitations.”
He stepped forward into the moonlight. The ladies whipped around.
With no small pleasure, Frederic savored the horror in their eyes as they realized who he was.
He raised his chin and stared at them levelly.
They withered and lowered their gazes. He waited until the anger that would infuse his voice subsided to a rumble.
“It would seem,” he said, slow and deliberate as the nell of a bell at a funeral, “that the dance inside has been too long deprived of your participation.”
The ladies shifted nervously like colts in a stable. The tallest, orange-clad lady opened her mouth then shut it again.
“I suppose,” he said, “I expected at least a show of good breeding from educated ladies, but I find myself disappointed.”
The tallest lady blushed and raised her head indignantly, her eyes sparking. Her gaze met his, however, and—in a fit of rare wisdom—she said nothing. The other ladies, likewise, were silent, staring with fixed attention at the grass or shrubbery.
“Leave,” he ordered. The shortest one dabbed her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Now.”
The ladies scattered, skirts trailing after them as they fled back inside like sheep before a wolf. He shook his head. Would that they would find enough idle entertainment inside to keep them diverted from further harassment. He turned back to the solitary lady and bowed.
“I hope, my lady,” he said, his voice as gentle as it had been coarse, “that you are none the worse for your experience.”
The woman, who had turned her face to the ground at his entrance, raised her face to him. Frederic caught his breath. The contours of her silhouette crept over him like an embrace from a long-lost friend. The moonlight quivered in her eyes, framed by an entrancing twine of dark brown curls.
“I hope,” she said, “I haven’t inconvenienced you.”
He held on to the timbre of her voice, savoring each tone like a melody. It sounded—to his starstruck fancy—like one he had heard before.
“Not at all,” he replied, with a short bow. “There is no inconvenience.” Her answer echoed around his mind, and he strove to focus on it. “But are you quite well? Un—unscathed?”
She smiled—painfully, wistfully.
“Oh—” she said, “As to that—don’t trouble yourself unduly, sir. I suppose I am used to it.”
Frederic clenched his teeth. Now, only as he returned to himself, did he notice a long, lurid scar stretching from one corner of her eye almost down to her jawline. So it was she—the cursed lady about whom Felicity had so glibly gossiped. Even so, he shook his head.
“No one ought to be used to it.” He turned back towards the house, watching the candlelight dance on the windows. “You ought to have said something in your own defense, at least, instead of letting them torment you.”
The lady’s blush heightened, and she looked at the ground. The nerve of idle tongues! His angry gaze searched out the three fleeing ladies. He had half a mind to drag them back and insist on an apology. The lady raised her eyes. They sparked oddly.
“I have no reason to deny the obvious,” she said. “Ill-timed, perhaps, their comments might have been and not quite good natured but not wholly untrue.”
Frederic raised his eyebrows. So, she did have a spark, at least, of spirit, beneath her modest silence.
“Too closely do tongues pierce where they ought to comfort. The time of those who call themselves peers would be far better spent if they acted more often as such.”
“It sounds,” she said, a little more mildly, “as though you speak as one with personal experience.”
Her voice reminded him of something—somewhere. He wrinkled his brow, searching to place it.
“I don’t mean to pry,” she hastened to add. “But I suppose I understand is what I mean to say.”
She looked at the ground again. If not for the scar on her face, Frederic might easily place her as one of the most beautiful women he had ever met.
“My experience with grief has, perhaps been more poignant than some,” he said. He looked at the stars and his mouth twisted wryly. “I suppose that comes from what fate may decree.”
Her eyes snapped to his. He read in them a growing alarm.
“I don’t put much stock in fate,” he added, “but sometimes it’s convenient to use as a scapegoat when no others are to be had.”
The alarm receded, replaced by a heavy somberness.
“I’ve come to many balls,” she said, “though fewer recently.”
She sighed, chafing her hands. He didn’t mind when she wasn’t looking at him.
The curve of her profile—he blinked. He was forgetting himself.
It didn’t behoove a gentleman to stare at a lady like a slab on the butcher’s table.
Or a piece of art at an exhibition, he added privately.
He straightened, attending her words more closely.
“Most—” the lady colored yet more deeply, avoiding his eyes, “—some, I mean, of the balls I’ve attended before have been—”
She trailed off, looked away, and sighed. He kicked at a stone.
“If I understand correctly,” he rephrased, “past ball experiences have not been as kind to you as you might have wished.”
“I—yes. I suppose.”
He looked down at his shoes, hiding his face. How well he remembered.
“The balls themselves haven’t been so terrible,” she said, “but the patrons—”
She turned from him a little, towards the decorative fountain behind her.
Frederic needed little prompting to fill in either her incomplete answer or her discomfort in it.
It had been many years since his own discomfiture had passed, since the idle taletellers had moved on to more juicy gossip—but the burn of it sat with him still.
She must have heard comments. Frederic’s irritation rekindled. Even a blind and deaf dormouse at a ball like this would have heard something—more of the palsied nonsense Felicity had repeated earlier.
How impressive, he marveled, that even with the deprecation she had suffered previously, she was willing to attend yet another event that would possibly lead to similar results.
He studied her, in the moonlight, as she turned away from him.
There was something different about her—like the bottom of a deep lake speckled with afternoon sun.
The little talent he possessed for art did not limit his appreciation of it, and the honesty of her experience made him feel all the more empathetic to her situation. Her eyes, finally, rose to his.
“Perhaps, at least as far as the ladies are concerned, they gossip because,” Frederic said honestly, “your beauty outshines theirs, and they cannot bear the comparison.”
The lady’s blush rose from her neck like the light before dawn. She stepped a little closer to him, turning her face so that her scar would be more prominent.
“You cannot blame them, considering how fearsome an injury I sustained,” she argued, turning her head. The lurid red line highlighted her point. “I do look—cursed.”
The word fell from her lips like a stone. Frederic shook his head.
“I could blame them for much less, but even more justly can I blame them for their utter inconsideration.” He stepped away, feigning interest in the topiary.
Perhaps, he wondered, that was why topiary had been conceived of in the first place.
“One who has suffered such as you have deserves no further pain, even and especially at the hands of foolish gossip.”
“I hope,” he said, turning back to her, “that you pay them no heed.”
She turned from him, then, and sidled toward the fountain.
“I have little concern for myself,” she said. “As strange as it may seem, I do find solace in better friends than those you have just seen.”
Frederic pursed his lips over those ladies being called friends.
The lady turned her head, alert and listening. A moment later, he heard it, too—the determined hustle of maternal feet.
“Your Grace!”
He turned. His mother approached, bobbing through the hedges like a sloop in full sail, followed closely by the grey-haired woman he had seen before. Her curls bounced like an angry tit over its nest.
Behind them—and here, Frederic raised his eyebrows in astonishment—trailed an assemblage of ladies, speckled occasionally with the coats of gentlemen. The whispering dames and their daughters, whose voices had alerted him to their presence, created a marketplace of hubbub and information exchange.
Frederic was disgusted at the grossness of the spectacle, yet he also felt admiration at the endurance of the patrons in passing through the garden so quickly after consuming ample refreshment.
The first members of the group trickled into the space nearest the house, feigning fascination with whatever garden feature appeared nearest them. A few curtsied timidly to the dowager duchess. His mother’s eyes flashed from him to the lady behind him, and her mouth pinched into a thin line.
A hapless and oblivious dowager stumbled to the front, her dress snagging on the hedge.
“It’s quite cool out,” she breathed. Her cheeks were rosy with wine and good spirits. “Won’t we have some dancing?”
A lady near her elbow grabbed her like a fisherman after a catch and pulled her closer, whispering something in her ear. The dowager’s eyes widened.
“You don’t say!” She looked at him reproachfully. “And from such an excellent family!”
Mercifully, the dowager’s conversation partner heaved her around, complimenting something about the garden path behind them. The rest of the throng was coming now, like a stream engorged by a flood.
Frederic breathed once, long and slow, through his nose. Whatever was coming with the inexorable rustle of muslin and the babble of loosed lips almost certainly wasn’t something he’d find appealing.
The ladies stepped into the space behind the fountain, filling it in with their skirts like plums in a bowl.
“How scandalous!”
“Alone for all that time—”
“Claimed he had been making love to her, I didn’t believe it, of course, but now—”
“She said they’ve been paramours, you know, all this time—”
The gentlemen spoke quietly behind long frowns. Frederic looked among them, challenging them with his eyes. None would meet his. Their lips, however, whispered along with their partners’.
Frederic set his jaw. He bowed, partly—it must be said honestly—in defiance. The ball, it seemed, had come to them.