Chapter Ten #2
Cillian stood against the wall.
She saw him as she left the floor after the third set, near a pillar at the far end of the room, holding a glass from which he appeared not to have drunk.
His posture had the careful stillness of a man who had placed himself at the greatest possible distance from enjoyment and meant to remain there.
He was in evening dress, and the sight of him unsettled her.
She had grown accustomed to dark daytime coats and sober waistcoats.
Formal black altered him—or perhaps it only revealed what his habitual restraint concealed.
He looked taller, broader, more distinctly present; less like a man trying to disappear into the margins of a room and more like the earl he so often seemed determined not to be.
He looked handsome.
The thought formed before she could prevent it, and once formed, it led at once to other thoughts, and those thoughts to feelings, and those feelings to the crumbling edge she had been pretending not to approach.
Teddy stood beside him, at ease as ever, speaking with the persistence of a man who considered silence an invitation.
Molly saw him say something. Cillian shook his head.
Teddy glanced towards the dancing, half coaxing, half challenging.
Cillian’s jaw tightened. Teddy said something else, and the jaw tightened further.
She could not hear them, but she could read enough.
Cillian Swifton’s face, for all his efforts at reserve, was becoming legible to her in ways that ought to have alarmed her.
She could see refusal and desire moving beneath the surface: the man who wished to step forward and the man who had spent years teaching himself to remain apart.
For one reckless instant, she wanted to cross the room, take his hand, and draw him into the dance by force.
Which, of course, she could not do.
Not in the Assembly Rooms. Not before half of Bath. Not when he was an earl, and she was a young woman in a borrowed yellow gown, with no family beside her and too many people ready to mistake warmth for invitation.
So, Molly did the only thing propriety permitted.
She smiled at him from across the room, bright and unmistakable, then turned back towards the next set as though she had not just asked him, without a word, whether he meant to remain forever at the wall.
She danced the fourth set with the merchant’s son again, and the fifth with a naval lieutenant whose manner was perfectly civil and whose attentions, though not improper, were a little too attentive to be comfortable.
It was nothing she could have objected to.
Nothing anyone else would have noticed. Yet Molly felt, with a sudden and inconvenient clarity, that her body had begun forming preferences without consulting her judgment.
During a turn, she glanced towards Cillian.
He was watching.
His eyes were not on the lieutenant’s face but on the place where the man’s hand had rested during the figure, correct by every rule and yet, judging by Cillian’s expression, not at all acceptable to him. For one compressed moment, their gazes met across the moving room.
It was not jealousy.
Jealousy required a claim, and Cillian had made none.
But it was near enough to send heat up her throat before the turn carried her away.
When she looked back, he had shifted his position by the wall and was studying the windows with the particular indifference of a man who had been caught caring and objected to the evidence.
After the set, she found him near the window, his untouched glass already set upon the sill.
“Why do you not dance?” she asked, a little breathless from the floor.
“I have forgotten how.”
“Nobody forgets how to dance.” She set her own glass on the sill beside his. “One only decides not to remember.”
“Perhaps.”
He was looking at her, not at the glasses.
“You stand here because it is safer than joining the room,” she said. “But you did not come to the Assembly Rooms only to examine the plasterwork.”
“No?”
“No.” Her courage was still bright from the dancing, and perhaps a little reckless from his watching. “You came for some reason of your own, and now you are pretending otherwise.”
His gaze did not move from her face. “You are in danger of saying too much.”
“I often am.”
“That does not oblige me to encourage it.”
“No. But you might answer me.”
For a moment, he said nothing. The music shifted behind them, the room turning and murmuring, the candles trembling in their sconces.
“At present,” he said at last, “I am not a good partner.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is the only answer I can give in a room full of people.”
The restraint of it quieted her more effectively than any rebuke could have done.
There was something in his face—want, caution, and a severity directed chiefly at himself—that made her suddenly aware of where they stood, how public the room was, and how little the world forgave a woman for permitting a man to speak too plainly.
She looked down at the sill, where their glasses stood almost touching.
“When you are ready,” she said, more softly, “you may ask me.”
His fingers tightened around the stem of his glass.
“For a dance?”
“For whatever you mean to ask properly.”
The words were lighter than the feeling beneath them, and safer for being so. She gave him no time to answer. With a small, quick smile, she turned back towards the floor and accepted the hand of the elderly gentleman who had compared her to his granddaughter.
She danced the next set with the same brightness she had brought to the others.
But the promise remained between them, small and gleaming as a coin placed quietly upon a table.
Cillian stayed by the wall and watched her.
Molly felt his gaze as she moved through the figures—not improper, not possessive, but intent enough that she was conscious of it as one is conscious of warmth at one’s back. She danced harder for it, though whether in defiance or invitation she did not care to decide.
The music was playing. The room was warm. She was alive and free and wearing a borrowed yellow gown in a city that had begun to feel like hers, and somewhere on the far side of the room a man who had forgotten how to feel was looking at her as if the forgetting had begun to fail.
Then, coming out of a turn, she looked up.
The gallery above the ballroom ran along the upper level, dimmer than the rooms below, its rail lined with observers, elderly chaperones, and those who preferred watching to exertion. Candlelight rose in broken gleams, leaving faces half-lit and indistinct.
One of those faces she knew.
Not by name. But by stillness.
The cut of the shoulders. The economy of movement. The absence of those small shifts by which ordinary people betray fatigue, boredom, or interest. He did not lean on the rail. He did not look about the room. He stood with patient attention fixed upon the dancers, and upon her.
The man from the milliner’s shop.
Recognition struck her like cold water.
He did not look away when she saw him. For three long seconds, he held her gaze, steady and unhurried. Then he turned and moved along the gallery, disappearing into the shadowed end of the room.
The music continued. The dancers turned. Her partner said something she did not hear.
Molly’s feet kept moving.
Her smile remained in place. Her hands found the proper hands; her steps followed the proper figures. Anyone watching would have seen only a young woman dancing with the same spirit she had shown all evening.
But the warmth had gone out of the room. Her heart beat so hard she could feel it in her throat, and the man’s face remained before her even when the dance turned her away.
She kept dancing, not from joy now, but from defiance.
This was the life she had chosen, however fragilely, and whatever he had come to observe, he would not see her falter before half of Bath.
She did not tell Cillian. Not then. If she told him, the evening would change.
The fear would become real in the mouths of other people.
Dorothea would sharpen. Cillian would act.
And Molly, who had spent the evening being bright and free and almost happy, could not bear to surrender it while the music was still playing.
So, she danced again. She laughed, talked, accepted partners, and permitted the room to believe her exactly what she appeared: warm, animated, and entirely herself.
When the ball ended, and the candles burned low, she returned to Mrs Bramble’s with Dorothea, whose staying there had by now become an arrangement requiring little discussion, talking more than necessary because talk, as ever, kept fear at a manageable distance.
In her room, alone, with the door locked and the borrowed yellow gown hung carefully upon the wardrobe door, she sat on the edge of the mattress and pressed her hands together until the fingers hurt.
Only then did her breathing turn ragged.
He was watching her.
Whoever he was, whoever had sent him, he had found her again. The life she had fled was not gone. It had followed her into Bath. It had stood in the gallery while she danced, patient and purposeful, and it would not stop merely because she wished it gone.
She bowed her head and waited for the fear to settle into something she could carry.
At last, it steadied.
It did not leave her.
But she could carry it. She would carry it.
Because the alternative was to stop dancing, and Molly Granger had never yet learned how to do that.