Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
“Your spear,” Helena said, “is going to cause an incident.”
Annabelle adjusted her grip on the thing. It was decorative, gilt-painted wood with a blunted end, which had seemed considerably more manageable in the mirror of her bedchamber than it was proving to be in a room containing two hundred people and a full orchestra.
“It is part of the costume,” she said.
“It is part of the costume that is currently within six inches of Lord Brentwood’s wig.” Helena stepped sideways, pulling Annabelle with her. “I am quite certain Athena was wise enough to put the spear down at parties.”
Annabelle propped it against the nearest pillar and let it stay there.
The Greyton masquerade was one of the season’s more anticipated events, and the house was dressed for it: every chandelier lit, the floors cleared for dancing, and the assembled company arrayed in the creative and occasionally baffling interpretations of classical antiquity that such evenings reliably produced.
There were three Cleopatras she could identify, all wearing the same shade of gold, and a man in a toga of unclear allegiance who had nodded to her on the way in.
Annabelle wore grey and silver, a draped sash over her gown, an owl in silver filigree pinned at her shoulder, and an olive wreath above her half-mask. Helena had called it very striking; Lady Rosenhall had called it unusual.
Both, Annabelle suspected, were correct.
“Your owl is crooked,” Helena said.
Annabelle straightened the pin. Across the room, the dancers were forming for the next set.
“There,” Helena said with a subtle nod to the side, and Annabelle followed her gaze.
Dominic was at the far side of the room with Lord Keldwick.
Even masked, even dressed as someone else, she knew him in the first second.
The vine leaves were threaded through his fair hair: gold and green, easily worn, as though he had put them on as an afterthought and found they suited him without trying.
Deep burgundy fabric draped across one shoulder over his evening coat.
Half-mask, dark. He had a glass in one hand and was saying something to his friend.
“Dionysus,” Helena whispered.
“I see that.” She was looking him up and down as she drawled out the obvious.
Helena pressed. “Very complementary to your costume, one might say.”
Annabelle arched her brow at her friend. “What are you talking about? Athena and Dionysus, complementary? Since when? Just because they’re both Olympian gods?”
“Besides the obvious, yes,” Helena rolled her eyes. “What I meant was—”
She was cut off by Lord Keldwick, who had crossed the room, along with Dominic. They both bowed at them.
“Lady Annabelle.” Lord Keldwick bowed. “Miss Thrupton.” A second bow, marginally deeper, and he looked between Annabelle and Dominic with a pleased smirk. “Well,” he said.
“Don’t,” Dominic said.
“I haven’t said a word.”
“You were preparing several.”
Keldwick’s eyes studied Annabelle’s costume diligently, then Dominic’s, then Annabelle’s again.
“I was only going to observe,” he said, “that the obvious pairing is Hades and Persephone. The dark lord and the stolen bride…one understands the appeal, there’s a whole tradition behind it.
” He gestured between them. “But Athena and Dionysus, now that is a more fascinating combination. Intellect and intoxication. Wisdom and pleasure. Discipline and complete, absolute—”
“Miss Thrupton.” Dominic interrupted, turning to Helena. “I hope the evening finds you well.”
Helena, who had been listening with her whole face, said, “Extremely well, Your Grace.”
“I’m very glad.” He inclined his head to Annabelle, meeting her eyes through the mask for a single beat, and said, “Lady Annabelle. Enjoy your evening.”
Then he moved away, taking Keldwick with him by the arm, and Annabelle noticed that his knuckle turned white as he gripped his friend.
Keldwick looked back over his shoulder with an apologetic expression.
Annabelle watched them go.
“Discipline and complete, absolute—” Helena murmured, in the tone of a scholar pursuing a missing text.
“Helena.” She warned without quite raising her tone.
Her friend did not look in the least reprimanded. “I am simply noting that the sentence was never finished.”
“Note it quietly.” She said, even as her heart pounded in her chest.
She was trying her best not to turn her head and let her eyes track the Duke of Silverford around the room.
The first set was a country dance, and Lady Annabelle danced it with a man in a Roman toga whose name Dominic did not know and had no interest in knowing.
He watched from the window and established that she laughed twice during the second figure and that neither laugh reached her eyes.
This was not information he had any useful purpose for.
“You’re watching her,” Miles muttered in a sing-song manner at his elbow.
“I am watching the room.”
“You are watching a fixed point in the room that has been occupied by Lady Annabelle for the past quarter-hour.” Miles accepted a glass from a passing footman. “The toga has said something she finds charming. She’s giving him the pleasant smile.”
Dominic did not ask which smile.
He had spent the early part of the evening moving through the room in the way he always moved through rooms: easily, without urgency, conversant with the social arithmetic of a masquerade.
Lady Cartwright had been directly in his path near the supper room and had made her interest evident with elegant economy. He had been charming in return. He had meant to remain charming for longer than four minutes.
Then he had looked across the room and found Annabelle mid-conversation with the toga, and that had been the end of the charm.
Miss Drew had stationed herself at his side near the orchestra. She was dressed as Aphrodite, and said several things that he supposed were worth attending to, and he had conducted five minutes of pleasant conversation while thinking about something else entirely.
He had excused himself before she finished whatever she was saying.
“You attempted to flirt with three separate women,” Miles observed, “and looked as though you were working through an accounting problem throughout.”
“I was not—”
“Dominic.”
He looked at him.
“You have been watching her for over half an hour,” Miles said without the usual angle of amusement, nor with caution.
“I am not telling you anything you don’t already know.
I am telling you that other people in this room are capable of observation, and the longer you stand here watching her dance with other men and looking as though you’d like to remove them from the premises, conclusions will be drawn. ”
“I am doing this for Lucien’s sake,” he said for what felt like the hundredth time.
“Yes. And Lucien’s sister is looking for a husband,” Miles said. “That is the arrangement. That is the whole of what this is.” He glanced at Dominic’s face and looked away again. “As long as you know that.”
“I know that.”
“Good.” Miles lifted his glass. “Then you won’t mind that the toga has just asked for another dance.”
Dominic looked.
Indeed, Annabelle was placing her hand in Toga’s hand, her chin level, her expression composed and warm.
He watched the second set begin.
It was the fourth figure when it happened. The dance brought them to the far end of the set, a turn, and the man in the toga placed his hand at the small of her back in the way the figure permitted. Then the figure moved on.
But Toga’s hand did not.
Annabelle’s chin came up a fraction. She adjusted her frame, putting an inch of distance in without breaking the steps.
The hand pressed lower, sliding further down—
Bastard.
Dominic set his glass on the ledge behind him and crossed the floor.
He came up at the man’s shoulder as the figure brought them together at the near end of the set, fell into step without disturbance, and said, quietly, at the man’s ear: “Take your hand off her.”
The man startled. He was younger than Dominic had expected, in the mid-twenties, behind a mask that had apparently given him ideas his sober judgment would not have endorsed.
“I beg your—”
“Now,” Dominic said, evenly, in a low tone. “And if it goes there again, I will detach it from the rest of you at a joint I haven’t decided on yet.”
The man removed his hand. He looked at Dominic: at his height, at his mask, at whatever he found in the set of his jaw, and made a rapid calculation that arrived at the correct answer. Quickly mumbling about a pressing errand elsewhere before the next figure began, he turned and was gone.
Annabelle turned and found Dominic in his place.
“You did not need to do that,” she said.
“He was being inappropriate with you.”
“I was handling it.” She insisted, and he audibly scoffed at her.
“You did not have to. In fact, you must never need to handle such a situation ever again.” He held out his own hand as the orchestra struck the first bars of the waltz that followed.
It was not precisely a request, and she looked at it and then at him with the expression she wore when she was deciding whether the argument was worth the energy.
She took his hand.
The waltz settled them face to face, with his hand at her waist and hers in his, the distance between them smaller than any distance they had maintained in a room full of other people without an immediate disagreement to justify it.
“You made a scene,” she said, trying not to let that scoff from earlier raise her hackles.
“I made a quiet, private statement that no one overheard. That is not a scene.”
“You threatened a man on a dance floor.”
“I gave him information. Whether he finds it threatening is his own concern.” He moved her through the opening turn, and she followed the step with the ease of someone for whom music was a native language, and he kept his hand where the dance required it and his attention where it had been all evening.
“No man touches you like that. Not while I’m in the room. ”
“You are not my keeper.”
“I am aware of that.”
“You are not my brother.”
“And of that.”
“Then on what—”
“Lucien is not here,” he said. “You are his sister, in his absence, at an event I am also attending. That is basis enough.” He turned her through the next figure, and her back arched very slightly with the movement. “If you’d prefer I stand at the other end of the room in future—”
“You’d still be watching,” she said.
“I’d be watching the room.”
“You’d be watching me and we both know it.” She said it with her eyes on his face, without coyness, the way she said most things — directly, because she saw no productive advantage in saying them any other way — and then appeared faintly annoyed to have said it.
He held her gaze. “What were you going to say just now? When you stopped.”
She looked past his shoulder at the room. “We’re dancing,” she said.
“So we are.”
He let it stand.
The second half of the waltz passed, and he was aware of her hand in his and the warmth at her waist and the olive wreath at her crown that had stayed level throughout.
Annabelle did everything with that quality of composed intention. Even dancing, even wearing a goddess’s costume at a masquerade, even looking at him as though she was always three thoughts ahead of whatever she was willing to say.
The music ended.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the host called from the far end of the ballroom, his voice carrying easily over the fading chatter, “Miss Alton has kindly consented to play for us this evening.”
A ripple of appreciative murmurs moved through the room as guests began to settle. Dominic and Annabelle moved away from the dance floor.
“Do be quiet now,” someone whispered with a soft laugh. “We are to have music.”
The footmen eased back; conversation dwindled.
“Your Grace?” Annabelle gently whispered just as Dominic began to weave through the crowd—
The piano began.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
It was gentle and unhurried, in a major key, a melody designed to carry a room pleasantly. Well-played, well-chosen, asking nothing of its audience.
It asked something of Dominic.
He did not know the piece. That was the first thing his mind produced, as though it mattered. Then, two bars in, the phrase turned, a particular interval, a pause, a resolution—
It was not the same as anything she had played.
It was only the shape. The way the melody moved through the room, the space it left between the notes, the cadence at the end of each phrase, with the quiet inevitability of something deeply known.
He had heard her play every day he could remember. He had heard it in the music room at the end of the east corridor, mornings, before the house woke. He had sat beside her on the bench, and she had shown him where to put his hands.
The piano. The blood on the keys. His father’s breathing. The awful sound, and then the silence.
Dominic’s heart was going wrong. He breathed in through his nose, controlled, one breath. The room was warm and full, and the music was continuing.
None of this was going to be visible if he moved now.
So he walked toward the far doors, not caring if anyone called after him.