Chapter 6 #2
Lady Margaret’s eyes narrowed. She was not a fool, and she had been navigating social deceptions for half a century.
But Alistair was smiling at her with an expression of such self-deprecating charm that to accuse him of lying would have required a level of social aggression even she was not prepared to deploy.
“You jostled her.”
“I am a notorious oaf.” He placed a hand over his heart.
“Ask anyone. My mother despairs of me. I have broken more glassware than I care to recall, and I am told my dancing is a menace to public safety. This poor girl was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is to say, anywhere within range of my elbows.”
A ripple of laughter ran through the crowd. The tension broke like a fever. Lady Margaret’s mouth twitched, and although she did not quite smile, the rigid line of her shoulders softened by a degree.
“You are impossible,” she said.
“I have been told so. Frequently. By people whose judgment I trust implicitly.” He produced a handkerchief from his pocket, white linen, immaculately pressed, and offered it to her with a slight bow.
“I cannot restore your gown, but I can offer this, and my most abject apologies, and a promise to keep my elbows at a safe distance for the remainder of the evening.”
Lady Margaret took the handkerchief. She dabbed at her gown, which was beyond the help of any handkerchief, and made a sound that was halfway between a harrumph and a concession. “See that you do.”
“I shall.” Alistair turned to the debutante, who was still frozen in place, her tear-streaked face a mask of disbelief. He reached into his coat and produced a second handkerchief, because of course he carried two, Sophia thought, of course he did, and pressed it gently into the girl’s hand.
“There now,” he said, and his voice had changed.
The theatrical charm was still present, but beneath it ran something quieter, something that sounded almost like kindness.
“No permanent damage done. Lady Margaret is far too gracious to hold a grudge against an accident, and the lemonade was, I am told, not very good lemonade to begin with. You have done the company a service by reducing the supply.”
The girl blinked at him. Her mouth opened and closed. “I, thank you, my lord, but it was not, I mean, you did not—”
“Hush.” He said it so gently that the word landed like a benediction. “Go find your mother. Splash some water on your face. And if anyone asks, tell them Lord Alistair Cavendish is a clumsy fool who cannot be trusted near refreshment tables. It has the advantage of being widely believed.”
The girl managed a watery smile. She clutched the handkerchief to her chest like a talisman and fled toward the ladies’ withdrawing room, her white muslin skirts billowing behind her.
The crowd, sensing that the entertainment had concluded, began to disperse.
The orchestra struck up a new tune. Within thirty seconds, the space around the refreshment table had returned to its ordinary function, and Lady Margaret had been escorted toward the card room by a solicitous companion, and the whole incident was already hardening into anecdote.
Sophia had not moved.
She stood at the edge of the palm screen, her fan forgotten in her hand, and she watched Lord Alistair Cavendish accept a glass of wine from a passing footman as if nothing at all had happened.
He did not look toward the withdrawing room.
He did not scan the crowd for approval. He simply stood there, drinking his wine, and the expression on his face was not the smug satisfaction of a man who had performed a clever trick.
It was something else. Something she could not name.
“Miss Ainsworth?” Arthur Finch’s voice came from somewhere behind her. “Are you quite well?”
“Yes,” Sophia said. The word came out wrong. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I am perfectly well. I was merely—”
She did not finish the sentence. She did not know how to finish it.
Across the ballroom, Alistair Cavendish lifted his head. His gaze travelled across the crowd, past the dancers, past the chaperones, past the clusters of gossiping matrons, and found her.
He did not smile. He did not nod. He simply looked at her, and in that look was something that made the noise of the ballroom fall away.
It was not the charged, combative glance of their first meeting.
It was not the speculative curiosity of the Marine Parade.
It was a question. An acknowledgment. A shared recognition that they had both seen what had just happened, and that what had happened was not what it appeared to be.
Sophia understood, suddenly and completely, that the man who had stepped forward to save a frightened girl from public humiliation was not the man she had been taught to despise.
He was not the dissolute rake of Lady Beatrice’s drawing room.
He was not the cynical aristocrat who had traded barbs with her at the Hargraves’ reception.
He was something more complicated, something more interesting, something she had no framework for understanding.
He had lied. He had lied publicly, smoothly, without hesitation, and he had done it not to advantage himself but to shield someone weaker.
He had taken on the role of the fool, the role he played so often that the world believed it was his nature, and he had used it as a weapon.
Not against the vulnerable, but in their defence.
The thought unsettled her. It rearranged something in her mind, shifted the furniture of her assumptions, and she did not like the new arrangement.
Alistair raised his glass. The gesture was almost imperceptible, a tilt of the wrist, a fractional lift. Then he turned away and was absorbed back into the crowd.
Sophia let out a breath she had not realised she was holding.
“Miss Ainsworth.” Arthur Finch had moved to stand beside her. His voice was careful. “If I may, I believe you have just seen something that surprised you.”
“I have seen many surprising things this evening, Mr. Finch. A dowager baptised in lemonade. A notorious rake playing the hero. Myself, hiding behind a palm.” She opened her fan with a practised flick. The shepherdesses smiled their placid smiles. “It has been an educational night.”
“And what have you learned?”
She did not answer. She was not certain she could.
The ball wound on. Sophia danced with a baronet who spoke of crop rotation, and with a naval captain who spoke of the French, and with her brother Benedict, who squeezed her hand and said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Soph. What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
Benedict did not believe her. She could see it in the furrow of his brow. But the dance separated them before he could press further, and when she next saw him, he was deep in conversation with their mother near the card room door.
It was past midnight when the crowd began to thin.
The older guests departed first, then the chaperones with their charges, then the young men who had drunk too much and the young women whose slippers had given out.
Sophia found herself near the terrace doors, watching the carriages line up along the sweep of the drive, their lamps glowing in the darkness like a string of earthbound stars.
She had not spoken to Alistair again. She had not tried to.
But she had been aware of him all evening, the angle of his shoulders as he danced, the flash of his smile as he conversed, the way he moved through the room as if it were a stage and he the only player who had read the full script.
And she had been aware, too, of the way her awareness of him had changed.
Before tonight, she had watched him with wariness, with the defensive alertness of a prey animal scenting a predator.
Now she watched him with something closer to curiosity.
To hunger, even, though she shied away from the word.
“Sophia.”
Her mother’s voice. Lady Eleanor looked tired. The lines around her mouth were deeper than they had been at the start of the evening, and her grip on her reticule was tight enough to whiten the knuckles.
“We are leaving. Your brother is bringing the carriage around.”
“I am ready.”