Chapter 9
Charlotte Langley’s arrival put an end to whatever uncommon ease had begun to settle between them. Owen heard her voice before he fully turned.
“Why, Lord Westbridge, I had wondered where you had disappeared to.”
There was warmth in her tone, but it was the sort of warmth he had known too long to mistake for feeling.
Charlotte had always known how to pitch her voice to suit her audience.
As a girl, she had used that very softness to charm older ladies into indulgence and younger gentlemen into admiration.
Now, she used it with greater polish, and far less innocence.
He faced her with all the civility required. “Miss Langley.”
She smiled as if the formality amused her. Charlotte was beautiful in the way fashionable women often were: perfectly arranged, perfectly self-possessed, with not a ribbon or curl out of place.
Before the war, before distance and grief and experience had altered his judgement, Owen might once have considered her exactly what his mother would have wished in a wife.
Their families had long known one another.
Charlotte had beauty, consequence, and every outward accomplishment society prized.
There had been a time when such things had seemed enough.
Now they struck him as surfaces only. He saw too clearly what lay beneath them.
Charlotte had beauty, certainly, but it was beauty sharpened by calculation.
She had wit, but rarely kindness. And she moved through the world with the easy confidence of a woman who had spent her life under the shelter of her father’s name, drawing consequence from his reputation as if it were an inheritance more valuable than any fortune.
Her gaze pointed then to Aurelia. There was nothing openly rude in the look, only curiosity managed into politeness. Charlotte did not know her. That, at least, was some small mercy.
“I do not believe we have met,” she said. Then, turning back to Owen with the smoothest smile, she added, “Will you not introduce me?”
Owen felt, absurdly, an immediate reluctance.
It was not that the request could be denied.
In any ordinary circumstance, it would have been the simplest thing in the world.
Yet there was something in Charlotte’s manner, akin to an interest too suddenly awakened, that made him wish, for the first time in his life, that social forms were less binding.
Still, he had no choice.
“Miss Langley, allow me to present Miss Finch. Miss Finch, Miss Langley.”
The two women inclined their heads. Charlotte let her eyes pass once over Aurelia, not in any way that could be faulted, not long enough to appear insolent, but with just enough delicacy to make the scrutiny more cutting than frankness would have been.
“How do you do, Miss Finch,” she chirped. “There is something very refreshing in a lady who does not trouble herself to compete with the rest of the room. One sees so little confidence in plainness these days.”
The insult was so artfully veiled that anyone standing a few feet away would have heard only civility. Yet Owen heard it at once for what it was.
Aurelia’s entire appearance was marked by that quiet, good taste which Charlotte, in her worship of show, would never know how to value. The remark was meant to place her outside the bright contest of fashionable women while pretending to admire her for it.
Owen found, with surprising force, that he disliked Charlotte intensely in that moment.
Aurelia, however, did not so much as blink. “How do you do, Miss Langley,” she replied. “I have always thought it best not to alarm people by too much ornament.”
Charlotte smiled, though the smile sharpened at the edges. “How sensible. Excess can be so unfortunate in the wrong circumstances.”
Owen spoke before she could carry the cruelty any further. “Miss Finch has the advantage of not requiring artificial improvement.”
Charlotte turned her gaze on him, amused now, though not pleased. “You are very ready to defend taste tonight, Lord Westbridge.”
“No,” he said coolly. “Only to recognize it.”
For a brief instant Charlotte’s expression thinned. Then she laughed lightly, as though everything between them had been no more than easy social play.
There had been a time, Owen thought, when he might have mistaken her for charming.
Now he saw only the quick instinct to diminish another woman for the crime of not dressing like an ornamented fool and the easy confidence of someone who had never had to consider whether her place in the world was secure.
Charlotte, sensing perhaps that she had not produced the effect she wanted, turned her smile back upon him. “I shall not interrupt longer. Mama has been in search of me these ten minutes, and I should not like to be thought neglectful.”
“Perish the thought,” said Owen.
She laughed as though he had amused her, curtsied to Aurelia with perfect surface grace, and moved away.
Owen looked after her for a moment, then back at Aurelia. The old military matter, the Finches, the weight of his own unasked questions … it all seemed suddenly too near.
Perhaps it would be best if the whole affair were forgotten now.
Yet even as the thought crossed his mind, he knew he did not want to forget it. And he certainly did not want to forget Miss Finch.
***
Owen was in his study the next morning. It was a sober room, fitted up for consequence rather than for comfort, though comfort had not been neglected.
Shelves of well-bound volumes lined the walls, while a large mahogany writing table stood near the window.
The fire burned low upon the hearth, lending warmth to the leather chairs and the Axminster carpet, and the faint scents of paper, smoke and polished wood gave the place an air of privacy in which serious conversation could easily become something dangerous.
He was seated at his writing table with a dispatch open before him and no idea what it said.
He had read the same line three times and retained none of it.
Each time he looked at the page, another image rose in its place: Miss Finch’s face as she had spoken of the scandal and Charlotte Langley’s careless malice.
A knock on the door brought him back to the present moment.
He muttered for whoever it was to enter, expecting one of the maids with tea or his mother with some fresh campaign of domestic persecution.
Instead, Thomas strolled in without waiting for ceremony, with his hat in hand and an ease about him that made the room feel suddenly over-serious by comparison.
“You look,” Thomas said pausing just inside, “like a man who has either lost a battle or been asked to attend a musicale.”
Owen leaned back in his chair. “The latter would be the greater hardship.”
“Glad to hear you have some perspective.”
Thomas crossed the room and glanced at the neglected papers on the desk. “You do not have your coat on.”
Owen lifted an eyebrow. “I had not realized I was expected anywhere.”
Thomas gave him a look of exaggerated patience. “You are expected precisely where I told Miss Blackmore you would be.”
Owen frowned. “You told Miss Blackmore I would be somewhere?”
“Yes, with me, calling upon her and her cousin before the walk.”
Owen stared at him.
Thomas seemed wholly untroubled. “I promised I would pay a visit this morning. It would be poor form to arrive alone when I have spent half the week praising my closest friend. Besides, Miss Blackmore expects you.”
“And why,” Owen said slowly, “should Miss Blackmore expect me?”
“Because,” Thomas pointed out, “she is seventeen and in love, and has therefore decided the world ought to arrange itself into pleasing pairs.”
Owen shut his eyes briefly.
Thomas laughed and dropped into the chair opposite. “Come, Westbridge. Do not look so hunted. We are only paying a call, not storming a French position.”
“That,” Owen pointed out, “depends entirely upon the household.”
“It is two ladies in a respectable drawing room.”
“One of whom asks disquieting questions.”
“The other,” Thomas returned, “looks at me as if I have invented spring.”
Owen could not help the faint pull at one corner of his mouth. Thomas saw it at once and pointed triumphantly.
“There, you are not dead after all.”
“I never claimed to be.”
“No, only determined to behave as though the entire business of human feeling were an administrative inconvenience.”
Owen gave him a cool look. “You seem very cheerful for a man in danger.”
“In danger?”
“Of making a fool of yourself.”
Thomas grinned. “My dear fellow, that danger passed the moment I first saw Clara Blackmore at the Bannerman’s ball. I surrendered then and have felt vastly better for it ever since.”
He said it so simply that Owen looked at him with a kind of unwilling curiosity.
There was no shame in Thomas’s face, no calculation, no attempt to temper the admission into something cleverer or less sincere.
The man spoke of affection as he might have spoken of sunlight, as something natural, unavoidable, and rather pleasant.
It struck Owen that some men seemed to move toward feeling as easily as others moved toward warmth.
“You make it sound absurdly easy,” he said.
“Perhaps it is.”
“No.”
Thomas tilted his head. “No?”
Owen looked away, toward the rain-paled window. “Nothing worth having is easy.”
Thomas expression softened, though the brightness did not leave it. “I was not speaking of worth, only of falling.”
For a moment neither man spoke. Owen thought of Aurelia’s voice and of the strange unease that had followed him since leaving her the night before.
Falling, perhaps, was easy. It was what waited beneath that was difficult.
Thomas rose at last and set his hat back upon his head.
“Well, do philosophize on your own time. At present, you are required to put on a coat and come with me. I have no intention of allowing Miss Blackmore to think I invented your coming. And if Miss Finch is obliged to chaperone us, you may at least spare her the tedium of my undivided company.”
That last was delivered lightly, but Owen heard more in it than Thomas likely intended … or perhaps he intended it perfectly.
Owen stood up, and it made Thomas smile at once, as if he had known from the start that he would. “Excellent. I knew you were a man of sense.”
“I am a man who has been ambushed.”
“By affection, duty, or me?”
“Presently,” Owen spoke reaching for his coat, “I see no meaningful distinction.”
Thomas laughed outright and clapped him once on the shoulder as they turned for the door.
When they stepped into the corridor, Thomas was still smiling, easy as ever, already speaking of the weather, of Clara’s laugh, of how absurd London was and how much more tolerable it became in good company.
Owen listened in silence for a while.
Beside him, Thomas seemed all motion and lightness, as though the world had made itself briefly simple. But under Owen’s ribs there remained the heavier thing: the truth not yet faced and the growing sense that before long he would no longer be permitted the luxury of looking away.