Chapter 3 #2
The appearance of substance, maintained long past the point where the substance it had originally referred to could be meaningfully checked. He smelled of expensive tobacco and something faintly sweet beneath it that she could never quite identify and had long since given up trying.
"Lady Verity." He said it with the warmth of a man greeting something he already considers his. "I had begun to wonder if you were avoiding me."
"I have been occupied," Verity said.
"You have not danced once all evening."
"I have been occupied with not dancing."
He laughed. It was a laugh she found profoundly irritating. Not because it was cruel or harsh but because it was appreciative in the particular way of a man who has decided that a woman being sharp means she is flirting.
It was the laugh of a man who believed, at a fundamental and irrevocable level, that cleverness in women was a form of coquetry and that all coquetry was, at bottom, invitation.
"You're wonderful," he said, delivering it as a verdict rather than a compliment, the pronouncement of a man issuing a finding rather than offering an opinion.
"You’re still so wonderfully witty. I've been saying it all Season, to anyone who will listen. Ask Aldworth, I said it at White's just last week."
"You're very kind."
"I'm very patient," he said, with some satisfaction.
"Which is a different thing entirely, and I flatter myself it is a rarer one.
" He shifted in his chair, his sleeve very nearly touching hers, and she shifted fractionally.
He either did not notice or chose not to.
"You have turned down some very fine offers this Season alone, Lady Verity.
Very fine men, well-connected, well-regarded.
Most young women in their third Season, well, most sensible young women, would have grown rather more pragmatic by now. "
"Most young women are encouraged from birth to be pragmatic," Verity said. "I was encouraged to be a credit to my family, which is a somewhat broader instruction and leaves more latitude for interpretation."
"It does." He smiled. "And you have interpreted it very liberally.
I give you that." He leaned back, comfortable in the chair, entirely at ease in a way she found more disagreeable the longer it continued.
"But they come around eventually, you know.
The clever ones especially. They're the ones who understand, in the end, what actually matters.
What lasts." His voice had the smooth, unmoved quality of a man explaining something obvious to someone who hasn't quite caught up yet.
"It isn't an insult, my dear. It is simply—" He spread one hand in a small gesture of expansive, patient reasonableness. "How things go."
She looked at her programme. She looked at her hands.
She conducted a brief and silent inventory of all the things she could say, and there were several, sharp, specific, and entirely accurate …
and then set them all aside, because some men sharpen when challenged, and she had no desire to spend the remainder of the evening managing the consequences of a conversation she had not wanted to begin.
"I find I need some air," she said, and stood.
She threaded through the crowd with the purposeful pace of a woman who knows where she is going, even though she did not yet know exactly where that was, only that it was away from Percival Drayton. Past a duchess in emeralds.
Around a cluster of military men comparing notes on something with great enthusiasm. Through an archway and into a corridor that ran along the back of the house and opened, through a set of glass-paned doors, onto the garden terrace.
The night air was cold, immediate, and extraordinarily welcome.
It smelled of damp stone and the green, faintly muddy scent of garden beds after recent rain, and above it, the thin metallic quality of the sky that meant more weather was coming.
She stood at the stone balustrade, breathed, and felt the bright, clenched noise of the ballroom behind her settle into something more manageable.
Voices. Footsteps on the terrace from the east end, two women, one of them speaking in the particular carrying tone of a person who has never felt the need to modulate, and then a laugh she recognized as belonging to Miss Drayton, Percival's younger sister, who had formed a low opinion of Verity in previous years and had shown no inclination since to revise it.
If she found Verity standing alone on the terrace after leaving her brother's vicinity, the interpretation would be swift and inconvenient.
Verity moved. She went back along the terrace wall without thinking about it too carefully, hand trailing the stone, and found a door. Smaller, less formal, set into the wall where the terrace met the garden wing of the house. The latch gave. She slipped through, pulling it quietly behind her.
She was in a conservatory.
Or something between a conservatory and a garden room. The ceiling was high and mostly glass; the walls on two sides were glass as well.
The whole space was thick with the warm, close, particular smell of packed earth and growing things: potted palms arranged in clusters, banks of aspidistra along the walls, ferns in hanging baskets that brushed her shoulder as she moved in farther.
Through the glass ceiling, the sky was visible, heavy and purple-grey, the last faint light of the evening flattened into something between bruise and ember along the horizon.
She exhaled. The knot in her chest, tightening since Drayton sat down beside her, eased, without her asking it to, the way it always did in rooms with plants in them.
She did not entirely understand why this worked.
Why the smell of soil and the specific green quiet of growing things produced in her something that nothing else quite managed, but she had stopped needing to understand it. It worked. That was sufficient.
She was standing among the palms, one hand resting on a broad frond, letting her eyes adjust to the low light, when a voice came from the far end of the room.
"What are you doing here?"
Low. Controlled. The voice of a man who is accustomed to a room being empty when he enters it and is not entirely pleased to discover otherwise.
"And what," it continued, with a precision that suggested the question was absolutely literal and expected a literal answer, "do you want?"
Her heart stopped.
She knew that voice. Not with the uncertain recognition of something half-remembered. She knew it completely, immediately. Her body recognized it faster than her thoughts did.
She turned.
In the shadow near the tall windows at the far end of the room, a shape resolved itself into a man. Dark coat. Dark hair. Standing with the particular stillness of a person who has been standing in one place for some time and has grown into it.
His expression, as it came clear, was not warm.
She opened her mouth. She closed it. She looked at the severe features and the dark eyes she had spent the better part of a week not thinking about and felt the dizzying quality of a world that has just arranged itself into an unexpected shape.
Then the thunder came, directly overhead, so close the glass ceiling sang with it. The rain came down all at once, hard and total, like something that had been waiting just long enough.