Chapter 5
Owen had been home from the Bannerman’s ball scarcely long enough to regret attending it before he was required to endure a second engagement.
It was a dinner party this time.
Two events in two evenings would have been excessive under any circumstances.
Yet when his mother informed him of the invitation at breakfast, and when Harrow, with the easy treachery of old friendship, agreed that it would do him good to go, Owen saw at once that resistance would cost more than submission.
So, he went.
The room itself was perfectly appointed, which made it no more bearable.
Candles burned in such abundance that the whole company appeared arranged for inspection.
The ladies shone, the gentlemen circulated, and every table seemed to hold something delicate enough to be admired and entirely useless enough to suit the setting.
Conversation rose and fell in bright little currents around him. It was all surface, no depth.
The only sound missing was artillery. It would, he thought, have improved the evening.
“Do stand up straighter, Owen,” said his mother under her breath, though he was already standing as straight as any man in the room. “And pray do not look as though you have been sentenced.”
“I was not aware I had concealed it so poorly.”
His mother cast him a sharp look which would once, perhaps, have inspired greater alarm. “You are impossible.”
He was spared the necessity of answering by the approach of Lady March, who had with her a daughter of such studied delicacy that Owen suspected she had been arranged by artful hands not ten minutes earlier.
“Lady March,” his mother greeted her warmly. “How very pleased I am to see you.”
Lady March curtsied. Her daughter, Miss Virginia March, lowered her eyes with the exact degree of modesty calculated to attract notice to the rest of her.
“My lord,” said Lady March in a voice that was the embodiment of maternal sweetness. “We have heard so much of your return. It must be a great adjustment after so long abroad.”
“It is an adjustment,” said Owen.
Miss March glanced up. “I should think London must seem charming after so much hardship.”
Owen looked at her. He had no doubt she meant to be agreeable, yet the remark struck him with the same odd flatness as so many others he had heard since his return.
Charming.
It was the sort of word used by those to whom difficulty was chiefly weather-related.
“It is certainly different,” he agreed.
Miss March smiled as though she had drawn him into confidence.
Lady March pressed closer, speaking to his mother of routs, assemblies, opera nights, and the various solemn trivialities by which a season justified its existence.
Before Owen could be led deeper into that current, Harrow appeared at his shoulder.
“Why, Westbridge,” his friend spoke silently, in a tone meant only for Owen, “you look as though you are weighing the advantages of escape by the window.”
Owen sighed. “I had not yet decided whether the drop would kill me.”
Harrow took a glass from a passing servant. “If it did not, your mother would.”
“That,” said Owen, “is the only persuasive argument against it.”
His mother heard enough of this to turn and fix them both with disapproval. “Captain Harrow, I depend upon you to improve my son, not encourage him.”
Harrow bowed with admirable gravity. “I improve him constantly, madam. He is merely resistant to treatment.”
“Then you must persevere,” she smiled.
“I always do.”
She swept away then, and at length, he found himself hemmed in by three women at once: a widow eager to recall his father’s virtues, her daughter eager to display her pianoforte opinions, and a second girl, whose aunt had clearly instructed her to appear thoughtful, for she said very little but looked at him as if silence itself were a distinction.
Owen answered where he had to and bowed when required, but his thoughts slipped away entirely. They returned, against his better judgment, to the woman from the previous evening.
He had not learned her name. That omission ought to have placed the matter beyond further reflection, and yet it did not.
He could still hear the dry steadiness with which she had told him that broad declarations about youth belonged properly to men of at least fifty.
He could still see the quick intelligence in her face when she had looked at him, the wariness that never quite left her, and the laugh he had drawn from her only after some effort.
It had not been an easy laugh. That, perhaps, was why he remembered it.
She had spoken of France without embellishment and without invitation.
She had not offered confidence, yet neither had she tried to dress reserve in charm.
When he had mentioned the army, she had listened differently from other women, without the shallow eagerness for tales of danger that London so often mistook for understanding.
She had listened as if war meant what it ought to mean: not a spectacle, but consequence.
He had not imagined that. He was certain of it.
And because of that certainty, the contrast between her and every woman his mother now wished him to admire became more marked by the minute.
The women around him were, for the most part, very accomplished.
No doubt they danced well, sang prettily, and knew how to conduct themselves in every room to which they might be brought.
Yet their ease in such scenes only made them seem to him more entirely formed by them.
Nothing in them suggested distance, thought, or pain.
Nothing suggested the world beyond the room.
The woman from last night had suggested all three.
He had the distinct impression, though he could not have said why, that she knew how cruel life could be. That impression unsettled him more than it ought.
It also made the present company feel unbearable.
They had just begun to move toward the dining room when Owen’s attention, which had been only half engaged by Miss Annesley’s remarks on Almack’s and entirely exhausted by his mother’s management of him, was abruptly caught and held elsewhere.
Harrow, who a moment before had been at his elbow, was no longer beside him. Owen glanced across the room and saw him standing near the far side of the fireplace, talking with animation to a young lady in white muslin and pale blue trimming.
It was the same girl Harrow had danced with twice the previous evening.
Owen paused in spite of himself. He had not expected to see her there.
Indeed, until that instant, he had not known he had expected anything at all.
Yet the sight of her stirred at once another thought, swifter and more unreasonable than he liked: if this young lady was present, then perhaps her chaperone was, too.
His spirits, which had been sinking steadily for the greater part of the evening, lifted with disconcerting ease.
He told himself it was only curiosity. Still, he looked around the room with more interest than he had yet shown it.
And then he saw her.
She was seated a little farther down the room among a cluster of ladies whose gowns appeared to have been designed in competition with tropical birds.
Feathers nodded above elaborately dressed heads, while ribbons, bright silks, and jewels caught the candlelight at every turn.
The whole group glittered and fluttered so industriously that any quieter woman among them ought to have vanished entirely.
She did not. If anything, she stood out the more for her restraint.
Her gown was elegant but plain beside the others.
Her hair was dressed without excess, and her whole appearance was marked by a simplicity that should have made her easy to overlook and somehow had the opposite effect.
There was no display about her and no attempt to dazzle, yet the absence of artifice made her more striking than the women around her.
She looked as though she belonged to herself in a way the others did not.
Practical, he thought. And beautiful.
The word arrived before he could help it, and with a degree of certainty he found inconvenient.
She was not beautiful in the loud, triumphant style so many women cultivated, but in a manner infinitely more dangerous to a man’s peace: calm, composed, and impossible to dismiss after once being noticed.
As if she felt his gaze, she looked up. For one brief moment, their eyes met across the room.
She gave the smallest inclination of her head, which was barely more than an acknowledgement, then turned away to answer something said by the lady beside her.
But the effect of that slight recognition remained absurdly strong.
It was, Owen thought, like being singled out in a crowd without any public notice being made of it. He had spent the whole evening surrounded, addressed, admired, and managed, and none of it had made him feel so distinctly seen as that single measured glance.
He sat down at the table more attentive than he had been all night. His mother was placed beside him, which under ordinary circumstances would have been only a trial. That evening, it presented an opportunity. The covers had scarcely been removed before he leaned the smallest degree toward her.
“Mother, who is the lady in gray silk, three places beyond Lady Mortimer? The one seated between the woman in orange feathers and the girl in lilac.”
His mother followed his gaze, and the instant she identified the object of his inquiry, her expression altered in a way Owen did not much care for.
“That?” she replied, with quiet dismissal. “She is nobody for you to concern yourself with.”
He kept his eyes on his plate. “A severe judgment, when I asked only for a name.”
“You asked enough.”
He waited, because he knew that his mother would elaborate, because she could never bear a silence when she felt herself in possession of superior information. However, she did lower her voice when she continued.
“Her father is dead. Her mother has long been an outcast. There was some very disagreeable business years ago, accusations, impropriety, scandal, I hardly remember the particulars. The whole family is under a cloud. No one sensible would wish to be connected with them.”
Owen’s hand stilled very slightly upon his glass.
He looked again, though not so directly as before. The woman in question was listening with composed politeness to one of her neighbors, yet there was something in her expression which suggested she was enduring rather than enjoying the exchange.
“Is that so?” he inquired.
“It is,” his mother confirmed, turning to face him fully. “And now, I need you to stop wasting another thought on a woman like her.”
His mother’s tone made it plain she considered the matter settled.
Then, because she could never rest content with one dismissal when two might be given, she added.
“And in any case, she looks exactly what she must be: quiet, dull, and entirely without consequence. I cannot imagine what made you notice her.”
Owen did not answer at once. Dull was the very last word he would have chosen.
Nothing in her had struck him as dull.
Reserved, certainly. Guarded, yes.
But there had been intelligence in every glance she gave, wit in every reply, and a steadiness he had not encountered in any of the evening’s brighter ornaments.
He turned back to his mother. “You still didn’t tell me her name.”
His mother gave the smallest sigh of impatience. “It was… something Finch.”
The name landed at once in his mind.
Finch.
He knew it. Not well, not clearly, but enough for the memory of some old murmur to stir. He could not at once place the details, only the impression. He remembered disgrace, whispered about with relish by those whom it had not touched.
Miss Finch, then.
He repeated the surname inwardly and found it suited her less poorly than he would have expected. He wondered what her Christian name might be, and was immediately irritated with himself for caring.
“Pray do not look so thoughtful over it, Owen,” his mother’s voice brought him back to the present moment. “There are twenty more suitable women in this room alone.”
He almost smiled at that, though without amusement.
If there were twenty more suitable women in the room, he had already been presented to half of them and had found none worthy even of memory.
Miss Finch, by contrast, had occupied his thoughts since the previous evening armed with nothing but a dry tongue and an unwillingness to flatter him.
That fact should have warned him off. Instead, it made him want to know more.