Chapter 6
Chapter Six
“You are helping Lucien’s sister find a husband?” Miles cocked an eyebrow.
Dominic’s friend had been back from the continent for three weeks. Which was long enough to have fully reconstituted his capacity for inconvenient observation.
He and Miles had grown up ten months and three houses apart, and across thirty-two years of friendship, Dominic had developed a reliable sense of when Miles was about to say something accurate. He had that sense now.
“Yes,” Dominic said.
“In exchange for piano lessons for your ward?”
“Correct.”
“From Lucien’s sister.”
Dominic looked at him across the table.
Miles raised one hand in mild peace. “I’m making sure I have the picture before I say something you’ll resent.” He settled into his chair casually. “And this was whose idea, exactly?”
“Mine.” Dominic turned his glass once. “James is fond of her. He won’t settle with a new teacher easily. She is next door, she was looking for a match without progress, and Lucien is not here. It was the practical solution to two problems.”
“So that’s why you have taken on a social calendar.”
“I was already attending events.”
“Not as anyone’s guardian.” Miles lifted his glass. “How many of her suitors have you found acceptable?”
Dominic said nothing, and Miles smiled. “I thought so.” He drank. “What is she like?”
Dominic turned his glass. The question was straightforward enough, and he had already prepared an answer, ever since the first evening at Lucien’s ball; a tidy summary that covered the essential points without inviting further inquiry.
Yet what came instead was the image of the way she tilted her head when she was deciding whether to say what she was thinking, the candlelight at the Linwood soiree catching the line of her jaw when she laughed at something her friend said…
And the fact that he had been watching from across the room when it happened, and had not immediately looked away.
But these were things he was not meant to be thinking of, so Dominic shrugged. “She is like Lucien’s sister.”
Miles scoffed, shaking his head with a smug look on his face. “You keep saying that. What else?”
Dominic looked toward the fire. “Well…I suppose she’s…capable? Rather too forthright for her own good. At least, she’s good with the boy.” He set his glass down. “She will make someone a decent wife.”
“Someone,” Miles repeated, pleasantly. “No name attached to that yet.”
“Not yet.” He was not going to fall for his friend’s goading.
But Miles seemed to already be having the time of his life.
“I knew her a little before I went abroad. Two of Lucien’s events.
She was the kind of woman who said what she thought and watched the room rearrange itself afterward.
Most of the men in those rooms had no idea what to do with her.
” He looked back at Dominic. “And you are watching over this with complete equanimity. No personal interest in the matter.”
“I am doing Lucien a courtesy.”
“Of course.” Miles tilted his head. “It is only that watching over, handling, attending; these things have a tendency to become something other than what they started as, and the person at the center of it is someone you find yourself watching at close range over an extended stretch of time…”
“The arrangement is clear, Miles. Stop insinuating whatever you’re trying to insinuate.”
“Most arrangements are, until they aren’t.” Miles stood and pulled his gloves from the arm of the chair. “She is singular, old friend. The kind of lady who leaves a mark.”
Dominic watched the fire and tried not to think about the way she had squared up to him in the corridor at Silverford House, with James shaking behind her. Or what she had said to the boy in under two minutes that he had not managed in a month.
Or the fact that he had revisited that exchange three times on the ride back from the Linwood soiree.
He was doing this for Lucien. It was a practical arrangement between neighbors. It would last a season, and at the end of it, she would be married, and the whole thing would resolve itself without incident, because he intended it to.
“I am doing this for Lucien,” he said. “Nothing more.”
“Of course you are.” Miles settled his coat. “The Greyton masquerade is next week.”
“I know.”
Miles’s smile turned near devilish. “She’ll be there,” he pointed out, as though Dominic were incompetent to remember that.
He returned his friend’s smug look with his flat one and replied, “She is invited everywhere.”
“Hm, I do look forward to the evening,” Miles said, with the settled interest of a man who has already decided he will be entertained regardless of what anyone else intends. “It should be very instructive.”
“Go away, Miles.”
Miles went, with laughter on his tongue. Dominic did not know whether or not he was looking forward to seeing Annabelle again…
And he was not quite in the mood to think too deeply about why that bothered him so.
“Did you find it changed?” Lord Penmore asked. They were in the third figure of the country dance, the steps familiar enough to leave room for conversation. “Travelling. When you came back.”
Annabelle was dancing with Lord Penmore for the second time.
The first time was by accident—he was next in the set, and she had not arranged it—and the second time was by choice, which she did not regret.
He was forty and easy in his manner, the kind of man who asked genuine questions and waited for their answers, and he had been to Florence, which meant they had something to talk about beyond the weather, and whose daughter had been presented that week.
“Not in the way people expect,” she said, as the figure brought them together. “People expect you to return transformed. I came back the same, but I knew it more clearly.”
“Knew what?”
“What I wanted.” She moved through the turn. “And how far it was from what was available.”
He considered this. “That sounds rather melancholy, my lady.”
“‘I’d call it practical, my lord.” She smiled. “I’ve made my peace with it.”
He laughed easily, and the music took them apart and back.
When the second dance ended, Lord Penmore returned her to Lady Rosenhall’s side with the pleasant ease of a man who has had a good evening and is not compelled to manufacture further significance from it.
He expressed hope of speaking again before the season ended.
She said she hoped so too, and meant it.
It was in turning away that she saw Dominic, to the left near the second window, surveying the room.
She had felt his attention twice during the second dance, on the turn, and once during a long figure where the steps required concentration. Each time she had looked toward him, he had been looking elsewhere.
And he appeared at her elbow before she reached the halfway point of the room.
“Penmore,” he said, his eyes tracking the other man as he made his way around the room.
Annabelle found that she was quite interested in his assessment. “Mm. He was in the set.”
“Both sets.” Dominic pointed out, and it made her brows fly high on her forehead before she caught herself.
“He asked.” She kept her expression even as she watched him out of the corner of her eyes. “He is good company.”
Dominic cleared his throat once. “He is a viscount with limited income and a well-established preference for a wealthy bride. I suppose he would do his best to make for good company.”
At those words, Annabelle turned her gaze on him, eyes wider than she’d expected. “You investigated him.”
“I know of him. And even if I were to have investigated him, would that not be me fulfilling my own end of our arrangement?” He looked toward the room.
Annabelle blinked at his reasoning. “That would be you going quite too far, Your Grace.” She replied.
Then, he continued, “On your previous assessments, I would have you know that he asks everyone.” Dominic turned his glass.
“Lady Cavendish, before her family concluded a different arrangement last month. Miss Vane the season before that. He moves his attention with considerable efficiency, and it always lands on the same kind of woman.”
She waited, her brow already twitching as she guessed where he could possibly be going with this.
“Well,” he cleared his throat, but obviously did not back down, “the kind of woman with a brother worth knowing…and a name that smooths certain paths. I can be very certain that he is not after your dowry or, at least, not only that.”
Annabelle cocked her brow. “Oh? And what other reason is there, pray tell?”
Dominic eyed her for a full second before he opened his mouth.
“He is after what you open for him. The rooms you are admitted to, the introductions that follow, the particular quality of being seen beside a sister of a duke. Particularly the Duke of Fairmont.” He set his glass down.
“In a year, he will have what he came to London for. You will have a husband who was genuinely pleasant to you the entire time, and the slow, faint awareness that you were the third woman on his list.”
Now, Annabelle stopped and turned to face him. They had drifted to a quieter stretch near the far wall during this exchange, out of the room’s main current. It was not quite private, but it was out of range of anyone with the inclination to listen.
“You have found a flaw in every man I have spoken to this entire season. Lord Caverley’s estranged father. Lord Hartfield’s broken engagement. Lord Selway’s inadequate town house. And now Lord Penmore’s finances.” She looked at him steadily. “By your standards, there is no acceptable man alive.”
The Duke cleared his throat, but he shamelessly did not relent despite her directly calling him out. “There are…acceptable men.” He agreed, “I have simply not yet identified the right ones.”
Annabelle narrowed her eyes at him. “On what basis? You have disqualified everyone who has approached me.”
“And I am not doing this for sport, either, Lady Annabelle,” he said, turning his glass once.
“You told me what you wanted: a decent man, honest character, someone who treats people well when nothing is to be gained from it. That is a clear standard. And I am telling you that a man in Lord Penmore’s situation is careful about everything he does and says, because he cannot afford otherwise.
That kind of care is very easy to mistake for honesty. ”
“You think I can’t tell the difference,” she said.
“I think most people can’t.”
“Did Lucien not tell you what kind of house I grew up in?” She looked toward the middle distance. Her voice stayed even, without grievance in it.
He bristled. “What do you mean?”
“My father valued order above everything. My uncle was worse; he valued obedience,” she answered.
“You learn early what it costs to want things openly, and you learn to keep what matters to yourself. Approval was not given freely. It was withheld, or granted, and you learned to read every room before you spoke in it.” She turned back to him.
“So when you tell me Lord Penmore is careful, I know exactly what that looks like. I know what it looks like at close range, over years. It does not look like him.”
He turned his glass in his hand again. “Penmore is not wrong for you in character,” he said. “He is wrong for you in circumstance.” He set the glass down on the ledge. “I’ll look properly before the Greyton masquerade and tell you who is worth your time.”
She had offered him something true about herself, and he had listened and had given her nothing in return. But she found, standing here now, that she did not want to press him for it. Not tonight.
“Thank you,” she said instead. “For this evening.”
He simply looked at her, and his eyes were very blue and entirely still, and the back of her neck went warm in a way she could not account for and did not particularly welcome.
“Good night, Lady Annabelle,” he said, inclined his head, and walked away.
Annabelle turned toward the nearest window and gave her head one small, deliberate shake, as though she could dislodge the sensation by force of will. She could not, quite.
She pressed her fingertips briefly to the cool glass and kept her eyes on the street below until Helena appeared at her elbow, and by then she had decided, firmly, that it was simply the heat of the room.