Chapter 23
“You look remarkably pleased with yourself for a man who claims to have no fondness for balls, Your Grace.”
“I am merely pleased with the carriage ride, Duchess. It has been a fine evening for it.” Julian’s mouth curved, his eyes holding hers across the carriage.
Louisa was becoming increasingly convinced that they should have ridden in separate carriages. It had seemed an entirely sensible arrangement when she had descended the stairs and found Julian waiting in the entrance hall.
It had ceased to feel sensible the moment he had turned.
He looked, she thought reluctantly, absurdly handsome.
Evening clothes suited him rather well, the severe black of his coat throwing the breadth of his shoulders into sharper relief, the crisp white of his cravat making the warmth in his green eyes all the more impossible to ignore.
And then he had smiled, only a little, but enough that something traitorous in her chest had forgotten entirely how it was meant to conduct itself.
Worse still, he had looked at her as though she had momentarily robbed him of speech.
She had endured the first several minutes of the carriage ride in determined silence before deciding that silence was infinitely more dangerous than conversation.
“A fine evening for a carriage ride. Of course.”
“Precisely that.”
Louisa smoothed her green silk skirt, watching the lights of Winterbourne House grow larger through the window as the carriage rolled up the long drive, torches lining the approach, the faint strains of an orchestra already audible even at this distance.
She had dressed with more care tonight, had let her maid spend a full half hour arranging her hair in a style she did not usually bother with, and told herself the whole time that it meant nothing beyond ordinary vanity for a large gathering.
The carriage drew to a stop before the great stone portico, and Julian handed her down, his palm warm against hers. He did not release her hand quite as promptly before offering his arm instead.
Winterbourne House blazed with candlelight in every window. The ballroom itself was a glittering crush of silk and jewels and laughter, easily two hundred guests already assembled beneath the great chandeliers.
Louisa took a breath of the warm, perfumed air and felt Julian’s arm steady beneath her hand.
“Ashvale! And the Duchess, how well you both look.”
Lord Winterbourne descended upon them almost immediately, and within moments, they had been pulled in two different directions, Julian claimed by a cluster of gentlemen.
“… and I said to Lord Ashby, if the roads are not properly maintained by spring, the whole county shall suffer for it, and he had the audacity to suggest that the expense ought to fall to the tenants rather than…”
Louisa nodded at what she hoped was an appropriate interval, having lost the thread of Lady Ashby’s monologue some minutes ago. Her feet were beginning to protest inside her dancing slippers, though not nearly so much as her smile.
She cast a glance beyond the small circle of ladies.
The ballroom glittered beneath the chandeliers, dancers weaving between pockets of conversation while servants threaded silently through the crowd with silver trays. Somewhere across the room, she caught sight of Julian deep in conversation with three gentlemen she did not recognize.
Or rather, he appeared to be deep in conversation. At that precise moment, he looked up, and their eyes met across the room. It lasted no more than a heartbeat before they both looked elsewhere.
She found herself smiling.
“Your Grace?” Lady Ashby’s voice called, and Louisa blinked, realizing that her attention had strayed.
“You were saying?”
“The drainage, Your Grace.” Lady Ashby fixed her with a slightly wounded look. “I had just begun explaining the difficulty with the eastern culverts.”
“Of course. The drainage.”
Louisa arranged her expression into something approximating interest, and Lady Ashby, mollified, continued speaking with fresh vigor.
She had progressed from roads to bridges with astonishing efficiency, the culverts giving way to some lengthy grievance about a stone arch near the village that had apparently been a source of contention between two families for the better part of thirty years, when Louisa grew aware of someone approaching from across the room.
She did not need to look up to know who it was.
There was something oddly reassuring in it now, some quiet certainty she had begun recognizing before she’d ever consciously seen him, a shift in the air of a crowded room that told her precisely which direction to expect him from.
“Duchess. Ladies.”
She turned.
“Forgive the interruption, but Lord Winterbourne insists I bring you to settle a small dispute regarding the punch.”
Louisa blinked. “The punch, Your Grace?”
“A matter of considerable delicacy.”
She nearly laughed, catching herself just in time. Lady Ashby, however, looked genuinely alarmed, one hand pressed to her chest.
“Good heavens. Has someone tampered with it?”
Julian did not so much as blink, his composure entirely unshaken. “Nothing so serious, I assure you. Merely a difference of opinion regarding the amount of citrus.”
“Well,” Lady Ashby declared, “that must certainly be settled.”
“Without delay,” Julian agreed, and offered Louisa his arm with a solemnity that almost undid her on the spot.
Louisa waited until they had turned the corner to the adjoining gallery, well out of Lady Ashby’s hearing, before surrendering to laughter, one hand pressed against a cool marble pillar to steady herself.
“Citrus?”
Julian looked almost offended. “It was the first thing that occurred to me. I had perhaps three seconds to invent a crisis before I reached you.”
“You could have at least chosen something plausible, Your Grace.”
“Lady Ashby believed every word.”
“Lady Ashby also believes that every road in England eventually leads to ruin, and that the fate of three counties rests on a single stone bridge near her village. I would not put too much faith in her judgment as a measure of plausibility.”
His laugh was quiet but unmistakable, a low sound that seemed to catch her somewhere just beneath the ribs. “You looked as though another five minutes would have finished you entirely. I confess I had begun to fear for your composure.”
Louisa looked at him. “Was I so obvious?”
“Only to someone looking.” The words escaped him so easily that she doubted he realized he had said them.
Her smile faded just a little. Because he had been looking.
She turned the thought over as they made their way back toward the ballroom proper, Julian offering some further observation about Lord Winterbourne's taste in orchestral arrangements that she only half registered, her mind still caught on the small, unguarded honesty of what he’d said.
Three-quarters of an hour later, having danced once with young Mr. Wycliffe and endured a further ten minutes of his mother’s opinions on the proper cultivation of hothouse peaches, she spotted Julian across the room.
He was standing near the card room doorway with three gentlemen whose conversation had somehow escalated into a spirited disagreement over tenant boundary lines, one of them gesturing with considerable emphasis at a pocket map he had apparently produced for the specific purpose of settling the argument.
He caught sight of her over the shoulder of the nearest gentleman, a plea in his eyes. He mouthed the words, “Help me.”
She recognized the look at once and felt her mouth twitch, because it must have been the same look she had worn not an hour ago, trapped beneath Lady Ashby’s relentless enthusiasm for drainage.
She crossed the room without hurry, arranging her expression into something suitably urgent, and laid a light hand on Julian’s sleeve. “Your Grace.”
Every head turned.
“I have developed a raging need to be with my husband; I feel a headache coming on.” She placed a finger on her temple and gave her best theatrical look of anguish.
“Of course.” Julian turned to the gentlemen with an expression of profound regret, his relief almost comically immediate.
“You will forgive me. A wife's summons cannot be ignored.”
They escaped together, and once safely out of earshot, Louisa hid her smile behind her fan.
Julian glanced sideways at her, his expression warm and grateful. “There is no headache or dying desire to be with me, I take it.”
“None whatsoever. I invented it, much as you invented your punch crisis.” Louisa allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. “I thought it only fair, given how you rescued me not an hour ago.”
“I suspected as much.”
“You looked considerably more trapped than I did with Lady Ashby, if I am being honest.”
“I was,” Julian admitted. “Thank you.”
Lady Fairmont sighted her and crossed over hurriedly, and somehow guided Louisa to a corner near the musicians and, having secured a thoroughly captive audience, launched into an exhaustive account of the relative merits of French lace over Brussels.
Louisa had, by her own estimation, nodded no fewer than fourteen times.
The orchestra struck the opening notes of the next dance.
Around them, conversations dissolved almost at once as gentlemen crossed the ballroom in search of partners, gloved hands extended, skirts rustling as ladies accepted and moved toward the center of the room.
Lady Fairmont, however, seemed entirely oblivious.
Louisa glanced almost wistfully toward the dancers beginning to assemble.
Surely…
But no, Lady Fairmont showed no inclination whatsoever to release her.
“You must agree,” the older woman continued earnestly, “that a lady’s choice of lace reveals a great deal about her character.”
“It undoubtedly—”
“There you are.”
The familiar voice slipped so neatly into the conversation that for a heartbeat, Louisa thought she had imagined it.
Julian stood beside them, one hand behind his back, looking every inch the composed duke Society expected him to be.
“Your Grace,” Lady Fairmont greeted brightly.