Chapter Two #2
“It ceased to be private when the lady asked you to open the door and you declined.” Harwood stepped into the conservatory without haste, and the ease of his approach drained the confidence from the other man by degrees.
“You have until the end of this sentence to remove your hand from her wrist. After that, we shall continue before everyone in the ballroom, and I give you my word that you will care far less for their account of the evening than for mine.”
Sir Peregrine released her.
“There,” he said, too loudly. “No harm done. You see? The lady is quite unharmed.”
“The lady may say for herself whether she is unharmed. She has no need of you to report it on her behalf.”
Harwood turned his attention to Victoria, the question already in his face before he spoke.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” She drew her wrist against her body and hated the small movement for giving her away. “Only handled. It is a distinction Sir Peregrine was never taught.”
“He will learn it,” Harwood said mildly. “People learn quickly, in my experience, when the lesson is arranged with sufficient care.”
Sir Peregrine might yet have salvaged some scrap of the evening: a bow, a jest, an exit that left a little of his dignity standing. He was assembling one when the servant’s door opened again, and two guests entered in search of the very quiet Victoria had wanted.
They stopped dead.
Their gazes took in the room at once: the widow holding her wrist against her body, the drunken baronet standing half a pace too near, and the Earl of Harwood between them with the stillness of a man interrupted in the midst of some deliberate act.
There was no arrangement of those three facts that a ballroom would interpret kindly.
“Lady Hemsworth,” one of them said faintly.
By then, it was much too late.
Sir Peregrine, who possessed a rare genius for choosing the worst available course, seized upon the witnesses like a drowning man upon a rope.
“A misunderstanding,” he announced towards the doorway. “The lady was overcome. I came to her aid, and Harwood chose to interfere. All entirely proper, I assure you.”
“Say one further word,” Harwood told him, still without raising his voice, “and I shall give these good people the true account instead. It does you no credit and me a very great deal, and I should enjoy delivering it more than you can imagine.”
But the harm no longer required Sir Peregrine’s assistance. It had everything it needed already: two witnesses, a closed door, a moonlit room, and a widow foolish enough to have wanted three minutes alone.
Harwood turned to the pair at the door. “Lady Hemsworth came here for air and was followed. I removed the man who followed her. You are welcome to repeat precisely that, and nothing beyond it, with my compliments.”
They murmured something indistinct and withdrew. From their faces, Victoria understood that a great deal beyond it would be repeated before the clocks struck one. His standing between her and the story had only made a better story of it.
“You should not have come in,” she said when the door had closed behind them.
“I know the arithmetic,” Harwood replied. “I considered it on my way across the room. A bruised name set against a bruised wrist, and I chose. You are welcome to disagree. You are the one wearing the wrist.”
“I am wearing both now,” Victoria said drily. “That is the flaw in such bargains, my lord. They always prove cheaper for the man who strikes them.”
He accepted the blow without flinching and inclined his head as though she had scored a fair hit he meant to remember.
“Then I am in your debt for the difference,” he said. “I shall find some way to settle it.”
“Men who speak of settling debts to women they met at a carriage window make me nervous, Lord Harwood.”
“You may remain nervous. It is better company than trust, and it keeps sharper hours.”
“You have not even told me your name.”
“Harwood. Elias Fernwood. You will hear it spoken in a great many ways before the week is out, most of them unkind. I would rather you heard it once, plainly, from me.”
“And why should it matter to you how I have it?”
“It should not,” he said evenly. “And yet here I stand, telling you.”
She had no notion what he meant by any of it, and no opportunity to press him. Amelia appeared at the gallery door, white about the mouth, and the evening tipped from disaster into aftermath.
By midnight, the story had travelled the length of the ballroom three separate times, and each circuit had improved upon the last. In the first telling, Victoria had entered the conservatory for air.
By the third, she had arranged to meet a baronet in the dark and been discovered there.
In none of the versions did the Earl of Harwood appear as anything but a man who had arrived too late upon a scene no respectable woman would have entered at all.
“They are saying such things,” Amelia whispered, gripping Victoria’s hand behind the shelter of a pillar. “Vile things, and half of them from people who saw nothing.”
“The half who saw nothing always tell it best,” Victoria said. “Where is my cloak?”
“You mean to leave in the midst of it? They will say you fled.”
“They will say whatever they have already decided to say. I would rather not stand here and watch their mouths form the words. Find my cloak, dearest, and find my daughter. They may keep the rest of the evening. It was never mine to begin with.”
“I am coming with you to the carriage,” Amelia said fiercely. “I will not have you walk out alone while the whole room watches to see whether you break.”
“Then walk beside me and look as though nothing in the world has happened. It is the only revenge left to us tonight, and I mean to take it slowly.”
Lady Agatha found her by the cloakroom, where Victoria stood waiting with the remnants of her composure held together by will alone.
“Well,” the old woman said, unhurried. “You have gone and done it now, with no one to thank for it but yourself.”
“I stepped into an empty room, and a drunkard followed me. If that is ruin, then half the women in that ballroom are ruined, and the other half merely luckier.”
“It does not signify in the least what happened. It signifies what is said. And what is said is that Sir Peregrine compromised you, or you compromised him. The only question remaining is which of you will consent to make the matter respectable.”
“There is nothing to make respectable. Nothing happened.”
“Happened.” Lady Agatha repeated the word as though it belonged to a child.
“You have lived among us long enough to know that what happened has nothing to do with the matter. A thing becomes true in a drawing room the moment two people agree that they have seen it, and two people have agreed. You made it very easy for them.”
“And what, precisely, do you expect me to do with this intriguing, if highly inaccurate, version of events?”
“He is willing.” The old woman drew on her gloves finger by finger, wholly unhurried.
“He told Roland so less than a quarter of an hour ago. Marry Sir Peregrine quietly, and the talk will be dead within a fortnight. Refuse him, and it will follow you. Then it will follow the child. A mother trailing scandal is a mother the courts examine very closely when the question of who shall keep the child comes to be asked.”
There it was at last: the blade beneath the velvet, the thing towards which the whole long evening had been moving without once troubling to name it.
“You arranged this,” Victoria murmured, very low.
“I arranged nothing. I have merely declined to save you from it, which is a different sin and a far smaller one.” Lady Agatha smiled, satisfied as a cat before a saucer.
“Marry Sir Peregrine, my dear. It is the only door still open to you. I should go through it tonight, before some helpful soul thinks to close that one as well.”
“I have already buried one husband your family chose for me,” Victoria said softly. “I will not be handed a second across the wreckage of my own name. You may tell Sir Peregrine to keep his betrothal, and you may keep your concern beside it.”
“We shall see how brave you are in a week, when the invitations cease and the child begins to ask why.”
She swept away towards her carriage, leaving Victoria alone at the ragged edge of the evening, the scent of orange trees still clinging to her hair, while the whole of London, in a hundred low and busy voices, set about deciding who she was.