Chapter 22
“Greenstone, if you do not dance with Lady Cassandra tonight, half the room will call it a declaration.”
Pringle said it in the corridor at the head of the great stair, half a minute before Cole was to be announced into the ballroom, in the voice of someone delivering one last warning he expected to be wasted.
The corridor was lit too brightly for an honest conversation, and the noise from the rooms below was the noise of two hundred people who had been waiting for the door to open since nine and were going to make Lady Eversley pay for the hour at which it had.
“The other half will call it a declaration if I do, Pringle.”
“That is not the question,” Pringle said.
“It is mine.”
“You have made your mind up, then,” Pringle said.
“I have made it up at intervals through eight weeks, and it has improved with the practice. I have it now in working order.”
“You will not change it for me.”
“I shall not change it for you. I am grateful that you asked. You may put your name down on a list at the back of your head as having been on the side of caution. It will be useful to you afterward, when the rest of London is rewriting the evening.”
Pringle laughed without amusement, and went down. Cole gave him the half minute he was owed and went down himself.
The Ridge ballroom had been built for one purpose, which was to hold a great assembly of people without seeming to.
Lady Eversley had spent three weeks of her undivided attention on the seeming, and it showed in every detail of the room, the chandeliers freshly run up, the floor chalked in Eversley arms in pink, footmen in green livery placed as pieces on a board.
Cole noted them as he came in, because counting the pieces was the office the body did when the mind was holding itself in reserve.
“His Grace the Duke of Greenstone.”
The room turned at the name. He had not, in fact, ever before had a room of three hundred people turn at once at his name, and he understood, going down the three shallow steps from the door, that he had been training for several years now to be the man this happened to, and the training had not been as complete as he had supposed.
Cassandra was at the foot of the steps with her parents.
She was in white satin, with a circlet of pearls along the hair and her grandmother’s emeralds at her throat, lovely as Cole had ever seen her and as a woman dressed to win a public sentence.
Her mother had a small fixed smile of her own.
Her father, who had still not spoken six sentences to Cole in the whole of his acquaintance, inclined a degree.
“Your Grace.”
“Lord Eversley. Lady Eversley. Lady Cassandra.”
“You have come,” Lady Eversley said.
“I have come, Lady Eversley. You issued. I am not in the way of refusing your invitations.”
“You are very welcome.”
“Thank you.”
The marchioness withdrew with her husband by a half pace. It was a withdrawal she had practised countless times in her life, the elegant clearing of the floor for a daughter, and Cassandra was now alone at his elbow in a pocket of the room everyone could see but no one could hear.
“You have come to make us both ridiculous.”
“I have come to be honest, Lady Cassandra. I should not have thought the two would so often resemble each other in your hands, but I find tonight that they do.”
“Miss Carrow cannot give you what rank requires,” Cassandra said.
“Rank has required many things from me, and has rarely been right. I am not going to be sent on its errand to a woman it did not earn for me.”
“You will embarrass yourself,” Cassandra warned.
“I shall. I have been embarrassing myself for eight weeks already in your county, and the practice has been clarifying. The man who came home in September could not have been embarrassed without being embarrassed by it. The one who stands here tonight is not, on the whole, attached to his dignity. The dignity has been the cost of the eight weeks, and I have paid it. I find I am not, this evening, in the market for a second round of it.”
“My mother will not forgive you,” Cassandra said.
“Your mother is not the person whose forgiveness I am working for.”
“Mine.”
“Lady Cassandra, I have already had this conversation with you. We had it in your green drawing room on Friday week, and we had it plainly, and I shall not insult you by repeating it now in a corridor you have spent six hundred pounds dressing for the occasion. I owe you the room more than I owe you the rehearsal.”
“You owe me a dance,” she said.
“I owe you a dance only if you ask me for one. I shall not refuse if you do. I shall not, however, lead you out by way of an announcement that has not yet been agreed between us. It is for that reason that you have not, this evening, found my name on your card.”
“You have looked at my card.”
“I had it described to me. Three different gentlemen of my acquaintance have offered information of various reliability about the writing on your card tonight. I have not put my own hand to it, because I had hoped that not to put my hand to it would be the clearer message.”
She was, very briefly, simply angry. He saw it through the careful surface, the same way he had seen it once before, in the green drawing room when she had set down the cup with her hand entirely steady and her eyes for one half-second wholly furious.
The anger went down again into the surface.
She managed it, the way she managed everything.
“You will not regret me, Your Grace.”
“I had not proposed to regret you, Lady Cassandra. I had only proposed not to enter into matrimony with you. The first is a longer and more elaborate sentiment than the second, and I have not the temperament for it.”
“Cassandra,” said Lady Eversley quietly from a yard off, who had read the conversation by its faces and had come to extract her daughter before the surface failed. “Lord Beresford is asking for you. He has been looking for the supper dance these ten minutes.”
“In a moment, Mama.”
“Now, my dear.”
Cassandra inclined her head a quarter of an inch.
She did not say goodnight to him, which was a small precise discipline, and she went away with her mother as though she had not lost an argument she had not, in any case, agreed to have.
Cole stood where he was a moment longer and watched her go, because the room was watching her go, and a duke who was not capable of watching her go was a duke whose look would be talked about by breakfast.
Then he turned, because the room had now opened in the way a room opens when a small unspoken arrangement has come undone in front of it, and he saw the Carrows.
They had come in by a side door with the Linwoods, behind a small party of Linwood relations who had been pushed forward to make a fence of company around them.
Lord Linwood was tall enough to do most of the work of the fence himself.
His wife was two and sixty and unbothered.
The Carrows behind them were Sir Marcus very upright with his hand under Lady Carrow’s elbow, and Lady Carrow with her chin level, and Melody at her father’s other side in a gown Cole had not seen before.
White she had refused, as she had refused everything else white in the autumn, and the gown was not white tonight either.
She was attired in a deep gold silk that recalled the very hue of an early September afternoon at home, a warm canvas that served only to heighten the brilliance of her bright grey eyes and the lustre of her glossy raven hair.
She carried a fan he had not seen, with painted ivory sticks, folded in her gloved hand at the level of her hip, held like the instrument she had been told a fan was and had practised making it.
She saw him across the room. The bow she did not give him. Her head inclined a fraction instead, and she looked away.
Cole, who had been a soldier and had read a hundred faces in the half-second before a charge, did not let himself read this one for the half-second longer he wanted to.
He turned and went, instead, to Lady Linwood, who was standing not three yards from him by a column.
“Lady Linwood. I am hoping you will dance with me.”
“You are hoping it for the wrong reasons, Your Grace, but I shall do it anyway. I have not danced with a duke in eleven years and one cannot be choosy. Take my arm. We shall walk across the floor like two people who have nothing to apologise for, and Lady Eversley may make of it what she pleases.”
“I had thought you might decline.”
“I had thought of declining for half a minute. I gave it up at once. A woman who has been a Brook Street fixture for forty years does not pass up the chance to be looked at on the arm of a duke at the Eversleys’ own ball. I shall enjoy this. You shall not. The arrangement is fair.”
They went out onto the floor for the first set of the second half, a country dance Lady Eversley considered a great condescension to her younger guests. Cole led Lady Linwood to a place near the head of the line in plain view of where the Eversleys were standing.
The room registered it without a sound, in the half-second of held breath a ballroom does before it decides what to think, and then it released the breath and went on. Pringle, beside one of the great urns of hothouse roses, raised his glass an eighth of an inch in Cole’s direction.
“You are not bad, Your Grace.”
“I have rehearsed since Wednesday.”
“It shows,” said Pringle. “I did not propose to be flattered.”
“I had not proposed to flatter you. I had proposed to thank you, Lady Linwood, for taking the figure of speech I sent you yesterday and treating it as a proper invitation.”
“You sent me a sentence that asked me whether I had a strong knee. I have, as you observe, a strong knee. I am two and sixty and have outlived two husbands and three governesses, and I have not yet found a question I prefer to be asked. You do me credit. Turn me here.”