Chapter 3
The Harrows knew how to give a ball.
That was the first thing Verity thought when they arrived, standing in the entrance hall while a footman took her wrap and another announced their names. It remained true an hour later when she had surveyed the full spectacle from her position near the second pillar.
The chandeliers, a dozen of them, blazed like organized constellations above the crowd. The flowers banked along every available surface in arrangements so excessive they had long since crossed from impressive into something almost absurd, which was its own kind of achievement.
The orchestra, tucked into the upper gallery, played with confident ease. The supper laid in the eastern wing was said to be extraordinary.
The rooms were full to the edges with people who had dressed magnificently and were performing the enjoyment of magnificence with the practiced fluency of a class that had been doing exactly this since before they could reliably manage their own stockings.
"Lord Pemberton is staring at you again," Cressida said, from the gilt chair beside her. She had her fan open and her expression arranged into pleasant neutrality.
Verity did not look up from the dancers.
"He's been staring since the Denmore supper. I think he's working up to something."
"He worked up to it in February. You declined."
"He doesn't appear to have registered this."
"Men of that type rarely do." Cressida turned a page of her programme, though she had not consulted it once. "I notice Lord Fen hasn't approached you, either. Or Mr. Castleton. Or—" She paused. "Fourteen, if I'm being complete about it."
"You needn't be complete about it."
"Three Seasons will narrow the field." Cressida said it lightly, the way she said most things that she knew would sting if delivered directly. "They've decided you're either unattainable or peculiar, and most of them lack the backbone for either."
"I am not peculiar."
"You correct botanical errors in bookshops."
"The book was wrong."
"You also informed Lord Fendwick, at Lady Aldersham's dinner, that his theory of crop rotation was thirty years behind the current literature."
"It was. He seemed interested."
"He was not interested." Cressida turned to look at her with the fond exasperation of long acquaintance.
"He told his mother, who told mine, who wrote me a letter that took up three pages and two postscripts.
I am still receiving letters about Lord Fendwick's feelings on the matter of his crop rotation.
" She paused. "He was not grateful, Verity.
He was not interested. He was, by all accounts, affronted. "
"Then he should read more."
"Yes, well." But Cressida's expression was fond, and Verity knew the difference between the fond version and the other.
Cressida was the only person who had never once suggested that Verity might do better to be quieter.
She had never once implied that Verity's opinions on crop rotation or orchids or the enclosure acts or anything else were the reason she had not yet accepted a proposal.
That counted for considerably more than Verity generally found the vocabulary to express.
"I do not mind," Verity said. About the narrowed field. About the fourteen. She said it with enough conviction that it was almost true, and Cressida let it stand.
The set ended. A new one formed. Across the room, two matrons drifted past the pillar, deep in conversation and not quite far enough away.
"—they say he's come to London for the first time in years. Five years at least, since the whole—"
"—well, one can hardly blame him for hiding, after what they say he—"
"—no proof of course, nobody has ever managed to—"
"—Ravencourt. The duke from Devon. Trevelyan, I believe—"
Verity went unintentionally still. It was not a dramatic stillness; she did not move, stiffen, or do anything that would have been visible from across the room.
It was an internal thing, a pause in the usual forward motion of her thoughts, the way a hand stops before touching something of which it is uncertain.
"—murdered her, they say. Or as good as. Drove her to it, which amounts to the same—"
"—the child, poor little creature, left without a mother at two years old—"
"—and now he's come to London, of all the—"
The voices moved away, absorbed back into the roar of the room. Verity set her programme carefully on her knee.
"Ravencourt," she said.
"I've heard the name," Cressida said with a measured tone. "The duke. His wife died some years ago, and the circumstances were never satisfactorily explained. There were rumors at the time. There have been rumors since." She looked at Verity sidelong. "You've gone rather still."
"People say all manner of things at events like this. They said Lord Wychwood had poisoned his spaniel over a disputed inheritance, and it turned out the spaniel had simply gone to live with a cousin in Shropshire."
"A spaniel and a duchess are not precisely equivalent situations."
"The principle is the same. Rumor and fact are distinct categories, and in this city, they are treated as interchangeable with alarming regularity.
" She said it firmly, because she had seen enough careless gossip do enough damage to know that the currency of whispers was worth very little against the actual ledger of a person's character. And yet.
There was the chill at the base of her throat that she could not entirely argue away. She had met bad men. She knew that certain things could be arranged, managed, and covered over with enough money and a long enough title. She was not naive, and she had never found much use in pretending to be.
"Naturally," Cressida said, in the tone of a woman who was reserving her judgment.
Verity was still turning the thoughts over—the rumors, the chill, the irritating inconvenience of not knowing what was true—when the subject was displaced entirely by a more immediate one: Lord Benedict Fitzwilliam materialized from the direction of the card room, slightly windswept for a man who had nominally been indoors for the past half hour, and crossed the room toward them with a directness and speed that bordered on, but never tipped over into, impropriety.
"Lady Verity." He bowed. The bow was practiced and charming.
Somehow that made it more, rather than less, genuine.
There was something honest about a man who performed his charm without pretending he was not performing it.
"Lady Cressida." A different register entirely.
Still charming, but quieter beneath it. "I hope you're both finding the evening tolerable.
Samuel does tend to overdo the floral arrangements. "
"Your brother is an excellent host," Verity said. "He has outdone himself considerably."
"He always does. Outdoing himself is Samuel's primary occupation, and he pursues it with genuine dedication." Benedict turned to Cressida then. Here was the interesting thing: he turned to Cressida with the specific attention of a man who had been waiting to do so.
He acted as if he had approached with that turn already in mind, and was now executing a plan he had been carrying since he walked in the door.
Verity had to work hard not to smirk at her friend.
"I wonder," he said, with a casualness so careful it was almost its own tell, "whether you might do me the very great honor of a dance.
I believe we've danced before. It must have been some time ago.
The Hartwell rout, perhaps? The winter before last? "
"Last Tuesday," Cressida said pleasantly. "At Lady Finchmore's."
Not a flicker of embarrassment crossed his face. He had the face of a man who had decided long ago that embarrassment was optional.
"Of course. I misspoke entirely. The point, regardless, stands." He offered his hand, open and unhurried. "I find myself in the fortunate position of having a set about to begin and no partner secured, and I should be very glad of your company, if you're willing."
Cressida looked at his hand.
This was what Verity noted: the pause. Not long. A fraction of a second. Barely perceptible. The kind of thing you would miss entirely if you were not in the habit of watching Cressida closely, and Verity was very much in the habit of watching Cressida closely.
She had watched Cressida for seven years. She had seen her receive a proposal from a viscount with one hand and decline it with the other while simultaneously managing a conversation about Flemish portraiture with a third party, without once losing the thread of any of it.
She had seen her handle two simultaneous admirers at a single supper party with serene equanimity. She had seen her face down a runaway horse on the Serpentine path without turning a hair.
Cressida did not pause for men. It was simply not a thing she did.
And yet, here was the pause. Brief, contained, invisible to anyone who was not looking directly at it.
Cressida looked at Benedict Harrow's hand.
Then she came back and said, with perfect composure, "Very well," and took his hand, and said it as though it were the simplest and most unremarkable thing in the world.
Verity kept her expression pleasant. She kept her thoughts to herself until they had disappeared into the forming set, and then she thought them with considerable interest and even more satisfaction.
She filed it carefully under things to revisit with Cressida later, when they were in a carriage, and there was no escape, and turned back to the room.
Left alone, she had a few moments before Lord Percival Drayton materialized beside her with the reliability of a very particular category of bad weather.
He came from the left, settling himself into Cressida's vacated chair without invitation. He was in his mid-forties, well-dressed, distinguished in the way of a man whose distinction had once been earned and had since hardened into its own self-referential structure.