Chapter 5 #2
It was nothing dramatic — a group near the supper room door parted to let a footman through, and in the gap that opened and closed again in the space of a heartbeat, she saw him.
Hampshire.
He stood on the far side of the ballroom with Lord Broadford, a glass in his hand that he was not drinking from.
He was thinner than she remembered, the lines of his jaw sharper, the set of his shoulders carrying a tension that had not been there before.
He was listening to Broadford but not hearing him — she could tell, even from this distance, by the way his gaze moved restlessly across the room, touching faces and dismissing them in quick succession.
She knew the instant he found her. His whole body went still — a sudden, animal stillness, as if every muscle had locked at once. The glass in his hand tilted slightly. He did not correct it.
For three full seconds, neither of them moved. The ballroom noise pressed in around her — laughter, music, the clink of crystal — but it had become distant, muffled, as if someone had draped a cloth over it all. She could hear her own blood beating in her ears.
Then someone stepped between them, and the connection broke. Nora exhaled — she had not realized she had been holding her breath — and turned away, her hand finding the marble column again, gripping it until her knuckles went white beneath her glove.
The fire at White’s had been built high, but still the chill crept in from the windows, from the gaps beneath the doors, from places David could not name.
He sat in the leather chair nearest the hearth with his legs stretched before him and a brandy warming between his palms, rolling it back and forth, trying to settle the storm in his chest.
The club was quiet at this hour. Two gentlemen spoke in low tones near the window, their conversation a murmur.
David made no effort to hear. The room smelled of tobacco, old port, and the particular leather-and-polish scent that had been embedded in the furniture for decades, absorbed into the very grain of the wood.
A clock ticked on the mantelpiece — steady, unhurried, indifferent.
He had seen her.
The brandy was untouched. He raised it to his lips and drank without tasting, the warmth sliding down his throat and settling in his stomach where it did nothing to fill the hollow that had opened there the moment she had looked at him across the ballroom.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.” Lord Broadford lowered himself into the opposite chair, one ankle crossing the other as he regarded David with a steady, assessing gaze that bordered on concern. “Or, more accurately, as if a ghost has seen you.”
“Something of the sort.” David did not meet his eyes. He studied the fire instead — the way the flames peeled themselves from the logs in sheets of gold and orange, curling upward and vanishing.
Broadford was silent for a long moment. He was good at silence, better than most men David knew. He did not fill it with platitudes or questions but simply waited, his own glass resting on the arm of his chair, the amber liquid catching the firelight.
“She was at the ball,” David said, finally.
The words felt like pulling a nail from wood — slow, resistant, something that had been hammered in deeply.
He looked down at his hands, at the glass between them, at the ring he wore on his smallest finger that had been his father’s.
“She looked…” He stopped himself, shaking his head once. “It does not matter.”
“Of course it matters.” Broadford’s voice was low but firm. “It is the very reason you are sitting here in the dark, drinking brandy you are not tasting, rather than going home to bed.”
David said nothing. The fire crackled, sending a shower of sparks upward. He could still feel the exact moment their eyes had met — the jolt of it, like a physical collision, the way the entire ballroom had contracted to a single point and then expanded again when she looked away.
He pushed his hand through his hair and exhaled.
“What am I to do, Broadford?”
His friend regarded him for a long moment. “I think,” he said, carefully, “that you already know the answer to that.”
The evening had swallowed the last of the light by the time the carriage drew to a halt on the quiet street.
Frederica heard it from the drawing room — the scrape of wheels on cobblestone, the snort of a horse settling into its traces.
She set down her embroidery and went to the window, standing far enough back that she could see without being seen, the way she had learned to stand at every window in every house she had ever lived in.
A figure descended from the carriage. Not tall, but broad through the shoulders, with a heaviness in his bearing that was distinctive even in silhouette. He stood on the pavement for a moment, adjusting his coat, and then looked up at the house.
At her window.
Frederica stepped back, her shoulder striking the edge of the curtain. Her breath had gone thin and sharp, and she pressed one hand against her stomach, willing the nausea to pass. Behind her, the fire crackled in the grate, the sound too loud, too much like footsteps on gravel.
He did not approach the door. He stood there — patient, unhurried — the way a man stands when he wants you to know that he can wait. The streetlamp behind him threw his shadow long across the paving stones, stretching it to the very edge of her front steps.
She could not see his face. She did not need to.
After what might have been one minute or five, he lifted his hand — a slow, deliberate gesture, as if tipping an invisible hat — and then turned back to the carriage. The door closed. The wheels began to move. The street returned to silence.
Frederica did not move from the window. She stood with her hand still pressed to her stomach, her fingers pressing hard into the fabric of her dress, and watched the empty street until the weakness in her legs forced her to the nearest chair, where she sank into its depths and pulled her shawl tight about her shoulders.
The embroidery hoop lay where she had left it on the side table. The needle glinted in the firelight, the thread still taut from the last stitch she had made — a half-finished flower that would never be completed.
She did not ring for her companion. She did not call for the butler. She sat in the near-darkness and listened to the house settle around her, every creak of the floorboards a footstep, every sigh of the wind in the chimney a voice.
When the clock struck nine, she rose and locked the drawing room door herself, testing the handle twice before she could persuade herself to step away from it.