Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
“From where I sit, the arrangement is proceeding very pleasantly. He comes, he plays, he eats two biscuits, he discusses Newton’s character, he leaves.
That part you barely mention.” Helena was saying as they sat in Annabelle’s room, tilting her head.
“But the other part, where the Duke arrives at the door, says as little as possible, and then exits …that is the part you think about rather more.”
“I think about whether the whole situation is working,” Annabelle said.
“And is it?”
“James is better.” She crossed from the window and sat down.
“Mrs. Greer told Miss Hartley, who told me that he’s been sleeping well lately.
He ate his supper two nights ago without any encouragement.
He’s speaking more at home, apparently. He told me about it himself, which is its own improvement.
” She paused. “He said the melody helps. That the loud parts go somewhere else when he plays.”
Helena was quiet for a moment. “You sound like a very good teacher,” she said, and the weight was fully on the last two words.
“James is a very good student.”
“He also told my mother last week that Newton is the second-best animal he’s met. She asked what the first was. He said a dog he saw in the park on Thursday, and then described it for four minutes.” Helena smiled. “She was charmed. She did not tell him so, obviously, but I saw her face.”
Annabelle looked down at Newton, who had migrated from Helena’s feet to the edge of the cushion and was eyeing the floor in contemplation.
“So…” Helena pressed.
“So?” Annabelle asked.
“About the Duke, Anna.”
Annabelle sighed and recounted the most recent lesson to her friend. After she was done, Helena studied her for a moment.
“I’m not advising you,” Helena said. “I have no advice. I am simply observing, as a person who has watched you these past weeks, that you look at the Duke of Silverford as though you are trying to locate the place where the damage starts. And that this is not how you look at Lord Penmore, or Lord Caverley, or any of your potential suitors.” She picked up her book.
“Lady Rosenhall will be back from morning calls at noon, which gives us twenty minutes to have this conversation honestly.”
Annabelle straightened her back. “He’s grieving something,” she said, finally.
“And he’s very good at not showing it. Everything about the piano—the excuse he gives to James, the way he leaves whenever someone plays at an event—it isn’t stubbornness.
It isn’t even coldness, exactly.” She looked toward the window.
“It’s old. That’s what makes it different. ”
Helena did not fill the silence.
“And the arrangement is the arrangement,” Annabelle said, with the resolution of someone who has been telling themselves something that has not fully taken. “I have no business reaching beyond it.”
“No,” Helena agreed pleasantly. She turned a page. “Of course not.”
The Mallory soiree ran late, as Lady Mallory’s entertainments always did. By ten o’clock, the rooms were warm and full, the supper table crowded with things no one was eating, and two hundred guests performed the evening’s required mathematics with varying commitment.
Annabelle had danced once already and was standing with Helena and Lady Rosenhall near the east wall when Lord Ashby presented himself.
Viscount Ashby was thirty-two and fair-haired, with the easy bearing of a man who had never found himself unwelcome anywhere. He bowed with the direct confidence of someone who had considered the request and concluded it was worth making.
“Lady Annabelle. Might I have the next dance?”
“You might, my lord.”
He was good company. He asked after her opinion of a debate recently published in the Edinburgh Review, and when she gave it, he listened and disagreed on two points and said why, and she found she enjoyed the disagreement considerably more than she would have enjoyed agreement.
“You’ve read Wollstonecraft,” he said, when the figure brought them back together.
“Several times.”
“And?”
“And I think she was right about most of it and the rest of the world has simply not caught up.”
He laughed; a real sound not polished with social effort, and said, “I should like to argue that point with you further.”
“You are welcome to try,” she said.
She said yes to the second dance as well.
Afterward, Lord Ashby returned her to Lady Rosenhall’s side and bowed over her hand.
“I hope to see you at the Greyton masquerade, my lady.”
“I expect we shall be there,” she said.
He took his leave with the uncomplicated ease of a man who had had a pleasant evening and required nothing further from it.
Lady Rosenhall watched him go. “There is a steadiness to that young man,” she said, beneath her breath. “I find it reassuring.”
“He dances very well,” Helena offered.
“He has a good mind,” Annabelle said, which was true, and which was the thing she had noticed first, and in fact the only thing she’d truly noticed.
Dominic appeared at her shoulder before she had finished the thought.
“You danced twice,” he said.
She looked at him, at his neutral expression. His friend—the Marquess Keldwick, behind him—had adopted a rather amused expression.
“He asked,” she said. “He’s good company.”
“He is,” Dominic said.
She blinked. It was not the opening she had expected.
“He is decent, and pleasant, and well-disposed toward you,” Dominic continued. “He has also danced twice with Lady Holwell in two consecutive seasons, twice with Miss Lyle in the one before that, and both times for the same reasons.”
“You know him?”
“I know his situation. He is a viscount of modest income with a taste for comfort, and no evident desire to change his circumstances through his own efforts. He requires a match with social weight.” He glanced toward where Ashby had gone.
“He’ll be kind to you. He will always be kind to you.
And in three years, the conversation will run out. ”
She watched him. “You dislike every man who speaks to me.”
“No.” He said it without heat, without the analytical apparatus he usually deployed. One word, flat and direct, delivered without looking away. “Only the fools.”
She stared at him. He held her gaze and said nothing further, and she was suddenly aware of the warmth coming off him at this negligible distance, the blue of his eyes catching the candlelight, the way his mouth was set in that flat, unreadable line that she was beginning to know too well.
Her fingers tightened once around her fan. The heat kindling in her chest as the focus of that stare spread outward until it reached the tips of her gloved fingers, all the way to the small of her back.
“Then Ashby is a fool?” she said.
“No. He is a reasonable man who will provide a comfortable life for whoever he marries, and who will feel, quietly, that something is missing, and will be too decent to say so.” He set his glass down on the ledge behind him.
“A decent man without fire is not a fool. He is the wrong man for someone who has fire.”
“You assume a great deal about what I require.”
“I make observations about what you are.” He looked at her. “Which is not a woman who will be content in a pleasant, comfortable marriage to a man who runs out of things to say before the weather does.”
She almost laughed. She did not. “You are genuinely aggravating.”
“I have been told.”
“You said it was not a compliment when I told you I was forthright.”
“It isn’t one now, either.” The corner of his mouth moved, a small, controlled thing, there and gone.
Lord Keldwick murmured something about finding Collingsworth on the opposite side of the room and removed himself with great discretion.
The room’s noise continued around them: glasses, voices, the scrape of chairs from the supper room. Lady Rosenhall had found an acquaintance and was deep in conversation. Helena was watching Annabelle with the carefully neutral expression she wore when she was being very interested.
Annabelle turned back to Dominic. “Your Grace,” she began gently. “About James…”
He raised an eyebrow, stiffening. “Yes?”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” she said, lowering her voice. “I mean it.” She looked at the floor between them, then back up. “I only wish you could tell him something true. Even a small piece of it. He won’t press for more than you give. He never does.”
Dominic had his glass in his hand. His thumb pressed once against its base. He was looking at a point past her shoulder, and his jaw had the set it got when he was holding something at a distance, and she had learned enough by now to know the difference between that and indifference.
“I understand why you’re fond of him,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“What you’re asking isn’t that simple.” His voice was level, devoid of ice.
She had learned to make that distinction with him. He was not dismissing her right then. He was simply telling her the truth, and the truth had a cost she could see in the line of his jaw and not hear in the words.
She held his gaze. “I’m not asking for an explanation. I only want him to have something true. He won’t press for more than you give. He never does…That’s all,” she said.
He turned his glass once in his hand and looked at her then, and since he did not look away, neither did she, and the noise of the room continued around them as though it were happening at a considerable remove.
The moment might have stretched past usefulness and into something unexplored, but Lord Keldwick reappeared from nowhere with Collingsworth and a question about Tuesday’s vote in the Lords, and Dominic straightened, and the conversation became something else.
Annabelle moved back toward Helena, who had been talking to Lady Rosenhall about absolutely nothing with great animation.
And Dominic turned back to Lord Keldwick and Collingsworth.