Chapter 16
“You have been to Naples, Lady Lily?” Lord Wilfrey set down his wine glass and turned to her with focused attention.
The candlelight from the dining table’s silver candelabra softened his features, and his eyes held a warmth she had not seen since their waltz at the Fenwick ball, the one that had ended with a scandal sheet and a world turned upside down.
“I have.” Lily smoothed her napkin across her lap. She wore the burgundy velvet tonight, the one with the bare shoulders, and the fabric caught the light each time she moved. “My aunt and I spent three weeks there. The bay at sunset is unlike anything I have ever seen.”
“I have read extensively about the geological formations along the coast. The volcanic activity in the region has created a landscape that is, I believe, unparalleled in Europe.” Wilfrey leaned forward.
“Did you visit Herculaneum? I understand the excavations there are less advanced than at Pompeii, but the preservation of organic materials is extraordinary.”
“We did. The wooden structures were remarkable. I had not expected wood to survive under volcanic ash.”
“It is the pyroclastic flow that accounts for it. The rapid burial at extreme temperatures carbonized the materials before they could decompose.” He paused, and something eager flickered behind his composed exterior.
“I have a theory about the harbor structures that I have been developing for some time. The angle of the boat sheds suggests a different prevailing wind pattern than what the historical accounts describe.”
Lily tilted her head. The gesture came naturally now, the slight incline that Hugo had taught her, the one that signaled interest without desperation.
“That is a fascinating observation, my lord. What led you to that conclusion?”
Wilfrey launched into an explanation involving wind angles and archaeological diagrams, and Lily listened with careful attention while being genuinely interested in roughly half of what he was saying and strategically interested in the other half.
When he confused Pliny the Elder with Pliny the Younger in his account of the eruption, she caught the error the way one catches a fly.
She smiled. “Pliny’s account is one of the significant documents of the ancient world. I could listen to you discuss it all evening, Lord Wilfrey.”
Wilfrey straightened in his chair. The tips of his ears colored, and the eagerness in his expression deepened into something that looked, for the first time, like genuine pleasure in her company.
She felt Hugo’s gaze before she saw it.
He sat six chairs away, on the opposite side of the table, flanked by Lady Hale and Mrs. Thorne. He was engaged in conversation with Lady Hale, his body angled toward her, his expression carrying the warm attentiveness of a perfect host.
But his eyes told a different story.
They found Lily across the silver and crystal and candlelight with a frequency that could not be accidental, quick glances that lasted a heartbeat each, cataloging the tilt of her head, the curve of her smile, the way the burgundy velvet framed the bare line of her shoulders.
Each glance landed on her skin like a fingertip.
She returned her attention to Wilfrey. “Tell me more about your Mediterranean expedition, Lord Wilfrey. Have you settled on an itinerary?”
Wilfrey’s face lit. He leaned closer, closer than he had at any previous conversation, and his words tumbled out with unguarded eagerness.
“Naples first, then south along the coast to Paestum. The temples there are, by all accounts, better preserved than anything in Athens. And then by sea to Sicily if the weather permits.” His eyes remained fixed on her face.
“I have dreamed of this journey for years, Lady Lily. It means a great deal to discuss it with someone who understands the pull of such places.”
The scent of his cologne reached her, clean and faintly herbal, nothing at all like sandalwood.
She pushed that thought aside.
Further down the table, Lady Stapleton sat beside Edward, her posture elegant, her conversation pitched at a volume calculated to carry without appearing to project.
Miss Beatrice Stapleton occupied the seat beside Wilfrey’s chair, her napkin untouched, her attention divided between the plate in front of her and the conversation her target was having with another woman.
Lily caught Miss Stapleton watching her. The younger woman’s expression was pleasant, composed, and entirely unreadable. She offered Lily a small smile and returned to her soup.
The fish course arrived, and Wilfrey turned to the subject of moths.
“The Oleander Hawkmoth, in particular, is a specimen I have been pursuing for three seasons.” He set down his fork with the reverence of a man about to discuss something sacred. “I spotted one in a garden in Kent last September and spent the better part of an afternoon chasing it with a net.”
“Did you catch it?”
“It eluded me. I returned the following weekend with improved netting. It eluded me again.”
Lily tilted her head. “Perhaps it simply preferred its freedom, my lord.”
“A romantic interpretation. I prefer to attribute it to wind patterns. I have since changed my technique.”
“You changed your netting technique for a single moth?”
“For science, Lady Lily. The moth was incidental.”
She fought a smile.
The moth was not incidental. The moth was everything. Lord Wilfrey had spent two weekends and an engineering overhaul chasing an insect through a garden in Kent, and he saw nothing unusual about this.
By the cheese course, he had moved on to a story about correcting a Parisian museum curator who had mislabeled a butterfly display.
“I sent him a letter afterward with illustrations.” Wilfrey sipped his wine. “He has not responded.”
Lily laughed. The sound escaped before she could catch it, bright and genuine, because the image of Lord Wilfrey sending corrective illustrations to a French museum was so perfectly, irredeemably Wilfrey that she could not help herself.
She let the laughter reach her eyes and did not suppress it. Wilfrey straightened in his chair, and the tips of his ears colored with pleasure.
Wilfrey was a good man. He was intelligent, well-read, and genuinely passionate about the subjects that interested him. He was… Companionable. Safe.
But both words fell flat in her mind.
Hugo’s gaze found her again. This time, when their eyes met across the table, he did not look away. The candlelight played across the angles of his face, and the amber of his eyes held something that was neither charm nor amusement.
It was hunger. Quiet and controlled and banked like a fire that had been burning too long to extinguish.
Lily looked down at her plate. Her pulse kicked against her throat.
After dinner, the party moved into the drawing room. The room was large and warm, paneled in deep oak, with fires burning in twin hearths and the curtains drawn against the June evening.
Brandy and port circulated among the gentlemen. Tea and cordials appeared for the ladies. The conversation fractured into smaller clusters, and the atmosphere loosened with the pleasant, languid ease of a country house settling into its evening rhythms.
Lily stood near the pianoforte, accepting a cup of tea from a footman, when Hugo materialized beside her.
She turned to look at him and found him avoiding her gaze. He lifted a glass of brandy from the tray and surveyed the room with an easy confidence. His shoulder was close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from his sleeve.
“You were magnificent tonight.” His voice came low, pitched beneath the hum of conversation, meant for her ears alone. “Wilfrey could not take his eyes off you.”
“I applied what you taught me.”
“You exceeded what I taught you.” He raised the brandy to his lips and took a slow sip. “An excellent pupil. You ought to receive a reward for being such a good girl.”
The words landed like a match struck against flint.
Heat flared through her chest, down her stomach, into the base of her spine.
Her fingers tightened around the teacup.
Her breath caught in her throat, and for one terrible second, the drawing room with its oak panels and its well-bred guests dissolved into nothing but the low rasp of his voice and the heat it left behind.
She turned to respond, to deliver the sharp, cutting retort that would put distance between them and restore the equilibrium she needed to survive the next three days in this house.
He was already gone. He had crossed the room and was shaking Lord Pemberton’s hand and laughing at something Lord Edmund said. The space beside her was empty, and the warmth where his shoulder had been was fading.
Lily stood by the pianoforte with a teacup trembling in her hands and the echo of those words burning through her like wildfire.
She drank her tea. She smiled at the guests who approached her.
She said the right things in the right tone with the right posture and the right amount of warmth, and none of them could have guessed that every nerve in her body was still vibrating from a sentence a man had whispered to her and walked away from as if it had cost him nothing.
She excused herself early and climbed the stairs to her room with her composure intact and her hands shaking inside her gloves.
The following morning, Lily found Aunt Margaret in the gallery.
“This one looks constipated,” Margaret observed, gesturing toward a portrait of a man in an Elizabethan ruff and doublet. “And this one appears to have been painted mid-sneeze. The Beaumont family has a remarkable talent for choosing unflattering moments to sit for portraits.”
“Aunt Margaret, that is the second Duke of Thornwaite.”
“Then the second Duke of Thornwaite should have hired a better artist.” Margaret moved to the next painting; her opera glasses raised despite being indoors, and examined a landscape of the estate with her critical eye.
They walked through the gallery in companionable silence. The morning light streamed through the tall windows, and the house was quiet, most of the guests still at breakfast or preparing for the day’s activities.
Hugo had organized a group ride for the gentlemen and a garden tour for the ladies.
“You did well last night,” Aunt Margaret said. She did not turn from the landscape. “Lord Wilfrey was attentive.”
“He was.”
“And the Duke was watching you the entire time.”
Lily’s step faltered. “He was being a good host. Ensuring his guests were comfortable.”
Margaret lowered the glasses and turned to her niece. In the morning light, the lines around her eyes were deeper, and something grave had settled into her features. Margaret had weathered enough storms to recognize one gathering.
“Lily, I adore you. You know this. I took you across Europe not only because your parents were struggling financially, but because I also believed that a young woman who had seen the world would be better equipped to navigate it. And you have navigated it beautifully. You have managed this engagement, this scandal, this impossible situation with more grace and intelligence than most women twice your age could muster.”
“But?”
“But you are standing in a man’s house, wearing a gown he selected for you, performing a role he designed for you, and looking at him across a dinner table as though he holds the answer to a question you have not yet allowed yourself to ask.
” Margaret’s voice was gentle. “That is not control, darling. That is the moment before control slips through your fingers.”
Lily opened her mouth to argue. The words that formed were the same words she had been repeating to herself for weeks.
It is an arrangement. He is helping me secure Wilfrey. I do not have feelings for the Duke. I am in control.
She closed her mouth.
Margaret watched her with the steady, loving patience of a woman who had no intention of saying I told you so, but who had already written the speech in her head.
“Everything is under control, Aunt Margaret.”
“My darling girl.” Margaret tucked Lily’s arm through hers and guided her toward the next painting. “In my experience, when a woman tells herself that everything is under control, it means the thing she is trying to control has already won. She simply has not admitted it yet.”
With that, Lily wondered when, exactly, control had slipped through her fingers, and whether she had ever held it in the first place.