Chapter 2
The First Skirmish
The carriage had deposited them at the entrance to the Brighton Assembly Rooms a quarter-hour past, and already Alistair Cavendish found himself cataloguing the exits.
A habit, not a plan. The chandeliers threw too much light across too many faces arranged in the same expressions they had worn last Season and the Season before that.
He accepted a glass of indifferent claret from a passing footman and let the current of arrivals carry him toward the main hall.
The air was a particular compound he had never encountered anywhere but here: salt-damp wool from the seaward windows, the sweet-sharp bite of too many perfumes competing for dominance, and beneath it all the mineral chalkiness of the building itself, as if the rooms were slowly reverting to the cliffs from which they had been carved.
He breathed it in and felt, as he always did, the slight pressure behind his eyes that preceded an evening of performance.
“Alistair, you’re scowling.”
His mother materialised at his elbow with the silent efficiency of a woman who had spent three decades navigating rooms exactly like this one.
Lady Beatrice Cavendish stood tall enough to meet his eye, her silver-threaded hair dressed in an arrangement that suggested architecture more than coiffure. She did not touch him. She rarely did.
“I am contemplating the chandeliers,” he said. “They’ve cleaned them. I preferred the dust.”
“You preferred nothing about them. You are simply determined to find fault before anyone finds it with you.” She scanned the room without appearing to move her head. “The Ainsworths are here.”
He did not ask which Ainsworths. The name landed with the particular weight his mother reserved for it, a syllable pronounced as if it were a verdict.
He followed the faint inclination of her chin and saw them near the far windows: Lady Eleanor Ainsworth in a gown of pale grey silk, her posture a study in controlled anxiety, and beside her a young woman he did not recognise.
Dark hair. A great deal of it, arranged with less architectural ambition than his mother’s but considerably more life.
The girl was not looking at the chandeliers or the company or the musicians tuning their instruments in the gallery.
She was looking at the room as if she were reading it, her attention moving across faces and gestures with a focus that bordered on impolite.
“The daughter,” his mother said. “The one they’ve brought for the Season. Sophia, I’m told.”
“You are always told.”
“It is my business to be told.” She accepted a glass of wine from the same footman who had served Alistair, though Alistair had not seen her signal for it.
“I trust you will remember that the Cavendish name does not benefit from proximity to that family, however charming the individual members may appear.”
“You haven’t met her.”
“I don’t need to.”
Across the room, the girl’s gaze reached their corner and stopped.
She did not look away. Most people did, when they recognised him, a quick flick of the eyes toward safer territory.
This one held his glance for three full seconds before returning her attention to her mother, and in that interval Alistair felt something shift in the texture of the evening.
Not interest, precisely. More like the prickle of awareness that precedes a change in weather.
“I’m going to walk,” he said.
“Alistair.”
“I will be the soul of discretion. I am always the soul of discretion.”
“You are never that.” But she let him go, because she understood that holding him would draw more attention than releasing him, and Lady Beatrice Cavendish did not make tactical errors.
He circled the room slowly, exchanging nods with men he had known at Oxford and smiles with women whose names he had trained himself to remember.
Lord and Lady Hargrave. Miss Cecilia Thorne, who had been disappointed in her expectations of him two Seasons ago and still looked at him with a blend of resentment and hope.
Mr. Arthur Finch, whose earnestness was so complete that Alistair found it almost admirable, like a dog that persisted in retrieving sticks thrown into a frozen pond.
“Cavendish,” Finch said, intercepting him near the refreshment table. “I had not expected to see you here so early in the week.”
“I am full of surprises.”
“You are full of something.” Finch smiled, and the smile was genuine, which was why Alistair tolerated him. “Have you met the new arrivals? The Ainsworth party brought a daughter. Rather striking, in an unconventional way.”
“I have not had the pleasure.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” Finch’s expression flickered with the awareness of having stumbled into delicate territory.
The Cavendish-Ainsworth cold war was old enough to have acquired its own etiquette, a set of conversational tripwires that everyone learned to avoid.
“Well. I’m sure you’ll be introduced eventually. Brighton is only so large.”
“Tragically.”
Alistair extracted himself and continued his circuit.
The musicians had begun a country dance, and the floor filled with couples arranging themselves into patterns.
He watched without watching, his attention drifting back to the dark-haired girl by the windows.
She had been claimed by a young man in regimentals, her hand resting on his sleeve with the careful lightness of a woman who had been taught exactly where to place her fingers and how much pressure to apply.
Her mother stood nearby, nodding approval with the mechanical regularity of a metronome.
He found himself cataloguing her the way he catalogued paintings before deciding whether to acquire them.
The line of her jaw. The way she held her shoulders, slightly back, as if bracing against an expected impact.
The intelligence in her eyes, which was the first thing he had noticed and the thing he could not stop noticing.
Most of the young women in this room had been trained to arrange their faces into expressions of pleasant vacancy.
This one looked as though she were thinking something she had no intention of saying aloud, and the effort of not saying it was visible in the set of her mouth.
The dance ended. The soldier returned her to her mother.
Alistair watched Lady Eleanor lean close to her daughter’s ear and speak words that made the girl’s expression tighten almost imperceptibly.
Then Lady Eleanor’s gaze found him across the room, and her face went still in a way that was louder than a shout.
He raised his glass to her. A small gesture, barely a salute. She did not acknowledge it.
“You are baiting her,” said a voice at his shoulder. Lord Henry Blackwood, an acquaintance of long standing and minimal substance, had appeared with two glasses of champagne and the air of a man who expected entertainment.
“I am standing still. If she chooses to interpret that as provocation, the fault lies in her imagination.”
“The fault lies in your family’s rather theatrical history with hers, and you know it.
” Blackwood handed him the second glass.
“Some absurd boundary quarrel in Derbyshire, was it not? A surveyor, six feet of land, and two old men who preferred hatred to humility. Or something equally grand and ridiculous.”
“It was both. They ruined each other. It was the one thing they collaborated on.”
“And yet here you are, a generation later, staring at the granddaughter as if you’re considering whether to finish the job.”
Alistair drank. The champagne was too warm. “I am not staring. I am observing. There is a difference.”
“Is there?”
He did not answer, because the musicians had struck up a waltz and the floor was rearranging itself, and he had just seen Lady Eleanor steering her daughter toward a cluster of eligible men with the focused intensity of a general deploying troops.
The girl’s face was composed, but her hands were clasped too tightly in front of her, and Alistair recognised the particular quality of her stillness.
It was the stillness of someone who was counting the minutes until she could leave.
He knew that stillness. He had perfected it himself.
“Introduce me,” he said.
Blackwood blinked. “To whom?”
“The Ainsworth girl.”
“Are you mad? Your mother will have your head. Her mother will have your head. It will be a very crowded beheading.”
“I am not proposing to elope with her. I am proposing to dance with her. People dance. It is what these affairs are for.”
“People dance with people they are not actively feuding with.”
“The feud,” Alistair said, setting down his empty glass, “is between dead men. I have never exchanged a word with the girl. I am curious to discover whether she is worth the effort of avoiding.”
Blackwood looked at him for a long moment. Then he sighed, the sigh of a man who had known Alistair long enough to recognise the particular set of his jaw that meant argument was futile. “Fine. But when this goes badly, I am telling everyone I tried to stop you.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
They crossed the floor. Alistair was aware of his mother’s gaze following him, a cold pressure at the back of his neck, but he did not turn.
Lady Eleanor saw them approaching and her expression shifted through three distinct phases: alarm, calculation, and a rigid courtesy that looked as though it had been nailed into place.
“Lady Eleanor,” Blackwood said, bowing. “May I present Lord Alistair Cavendish? I believe you are acquainted.”
“We are.” Lady Eleanor’s voice was ice wrapped in silk. “Lord Alistair. How unexpected.”
“I hope not unwelcome.” He bowed over her hand, which she withdrew as soon as decency permitted.
“I wondered if I might request the honour of an introduction to your daughter. We have not met, and I dislike being the only person in a room who cannot claim acquaintance with someone so clearly destined to be talked about.”