Chapter 13
A Forbidden Kiss
The music had been wrong all evening.
Lady Beatrice Cavendish stood at the threshold of the Brighton Grand Ballroom and let the discordance wash over her.
Not the orchestra — the musicians were competent enough, a string ensemble from London that she had approved herself three weeks prior.
No, the wrongness lay elsewhere. In the spacing of the dancers.
In the pitch of the laughter. In the way certain glances slid sideways and caught on things they ought not to catch on.
She had been watching society assemble and disassemble itself for thirty years. She knew the rhythm of a ballroom the way a sailor knew the rhythm of tides. And tonight the tide was pulling in directions it should not pull.
Her son had not arrived.
That was the first wrong note. Alistair was never late to a ball.
He was, in fact, pathologically early — a habit she had cultivated in him since boyhood, the understanding that a Cavendish did not make entrances.
A Cavendish was already present, already established, already in command of the room before anyone thought to look for him.
Tardiness was for people who needed to be noticed.
Alistair did not need to be noticed. He simply was.
And yet the ballroom contained no Alistair.
Beatrice accepted a glass of champagne from a passing tray and positioned herself near the eastern colonnade, where the sight lines were longest. The chandeliers threw their light in calculated cascades, illuminating silk and satin and the particular sheen of old money pretending not to notice new money.
Lady Hargrave was holding court near the refreshment table, her daughter a pale satellite at her elbow.
Mr. Arthur Finch stood by the French windows with the air of a man who had been placed there by someone else and had not yet found a reason to move.
The debutantes clustered and scattered and clustered again, their movements as patterned as the quadrille they would dance later.
And there — near the far wall, half-turned from the crowd — Miss Sophia Ainsworth.
Beatrice did not allow her gaze to linger.
She had learned, decades ago, that observation was a discipline.
The amateur watched openly and was seen watching.
The professional watched without appearing to watch, accumulating detail the way a naturalist accumulated specimens, each one labelled and pinned in its proper place.
Miss Ainsworth wore a gown of deep green — not the pale greens of the season, not the insipid mint or celadon that the other girls favoured, but a colour that belonged in a forest. It made her look older than her twenty-one years. It made her look like someone who had made a decision.
She was not dancing.
She was not speaking to anyone.
She was, Beatrice realised with a small tightening at the base of her throat, watching the door.
Waiting.
The same door Beatrice was watching.
The same door that had failed, for forty-seven minutes now, to produce Lord Alistair Cavendish.
Beatrice took a sip of champagne. The bubbles were too aggressive. She set the glass on a passing tray and did not retrieve another.
Across the room, Miss Ainsworth turned from the door and began to walk. Not toward the dance floor. Not toward the other debutantes. Toward the eastern corridor, where the alcoves were, where the light fell away into something softer and less observed.
Beatrice watched her go.
Then she turned her attention to the door one last time, and what she saw there made her fingers go still on the handle of her fan.
Alistair had arrived.
He stood in the entrance with his hat already surrendered to a footman, his coat already gone, his posture already arranged into that particular languor he wore like a second skin.
But his eyes — his eyes were not languid.
They were scanning the room with an intensity that Beatrice recognised.
She had seen it before, in the gallery, when he had spoken of the Brighton Observer.
She had seen it in his study, when he had read those essays four times over and still not put them down.
He was looking for someone.
His gaze swept the dance floor, the refreshment table, the clusters of matrons and the eddies of eligible young women. It swept the eastern corridor.
It stopped.
Beatrice did not need to turn around to know what he had seen. A flash of dark green disappearing into the shadows beyond the colonnade. A figure that moved with the particular purpose of someone who did not wish to be followed, and yet — and yet.
Alistair began to walk.
Beatrice opened her fan. The ivory was cool against her palm, the painted shepherdesses frozen in their eternal pastoral dance.
She had carried this fan for twenty years.
It had seen her through three Seasons as a debutante, through her marriage to a man she had not loved and had not disliked, through the raising of a son who had inherited all of her perception and none of her patience.
She fanned herself once, twice.
Then she closed the fan with a snap that no one heard, and she followed.
Not closely. Not obviously. A matron of fifty did not skulk through corridors.
She progressed. She made her way with the unhurried certainty of someone inspecting her own domain, which, in a sense, she was.
The Brighton Grand Ballrooms were not Cavendish property, but they might as well have been.
Beatrice had shaped this Season the way a gardener shaped a hedge, trimming here, encouraging there, removing what did not belong.
The eastern corridor branched twice. The first branch led to the card room, where elderly gentlemen were already settling in for the long siege of whist. The second led to a series of alcoves — small, curtained recesses designed for private conversation, for the exchange of confidences that could not be spoken under the chandeliers’ glare.
Beatrice paused at the junction.
From the card room came the murmur of voices, the click of counters, the occasional bark of laughter. From the alcoves came nothing at all.
She waited.
The corridor was dimmer here, lit by wall sconces rather than chandeliers.
The light pooled in amber circles on the carpet, leaving stretches of shadow between.
Beatrice positioned herself at the edge of one such shadow, where the wall curved slightly, creating a natural alcove of its own.
She could see the first curtained recess from here. She could see the second.
She could not see the third.
But she could hear.
Not words — not yet. The curtains were velvet, heavy, designed to muffle. But tone carried. Cadence. The particular rhythm of two voices that had found each other and were not ready to be found by anyone else.
Beatrice closed her eyes and listened.
* * *
The alcove was smaller than she had expected.
Sophia had discovered it by accident, fleeing a conversation with Lady Hargrave about the relative merits of different lace patterns, and had ducked behind the velvet curtain with the intention of staying only long enough to compose herself. Five minutes. Perhaps ten.
She had been there for twenty when the curtain stirred.
She knew who it was before she turned. Not because she had heard his footsteps — she had not; he moved like a man who had learned to walk silently in houses full of sleeping servants and wakeful mothers.
Not because she had seen his face. Because the air in the alcove changed.
Because the space behind her ribs did something it had never done before anyone else, a kind of quickening that was not quite fear and not quite anticipation and not quite anything she had a name for.
“You’re hiding,” Lord Alistair Cavendish said.
She turned. The curtain fell closed behind him, sealing them into a space barely large enough for two people to stand without touching.
The sconce on the wall behind her threw his face into partial shadow, carving the angles of his jaw and cheekbones into something sharper than daylight ever allowed.
“I am recovering,” she said. “There is a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Recovery implies intention to return. Hiding implies intention to remain.”
“And which is it?”
She did not answer. She could not, because the truth was that she had not decided.
The ballroom had felt suffocating tonight in a way it had not felt before.
The music had seemed louder, the laughter more brittle, the weight of all those watching eyes more oppressive.
She had needed to breathe. She had needed to think. She had needed —
She had needed something she could not name, and then he had appeared, and the need had not diminished. It had sharpened.
“You were late,” she said.
“I was.”
“That is unlike you.”
His mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “You have been observing my habits, Miss Ainsworth?”
“I observe everyone’s habits. It is my chief occupation.”
“And what have you observed?”
She should not answer that. She knew she should not answer that.
The alcove was too small, the light too low, the noise from the ballroom too distant.
They were alone in a way they had never been alone before — not on the seafront, where the wind and the gulls and the possibility of witnesses had kept them tethered to propriety.
Not in the gallery, where Lady Beatrice had been watching from the doorway.
Here, there was only velvet and shadow and the sound of his breathing, which was not quite steady.
“I have observed,” she said, “that you perform boredom the way other men perform enthusiasm. That you use languor as a shield. That you watch people more closely than you want them to know, and that you remember everything.”
He went still. Not the stillness of composure, the stillness of a man who had been struck and was deciding whether to show the wound.