Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
“You’ve been staring at the same page for forty minutes,” Miles said, dropping into the chair opposite casually. “Either Burke’s prose has grown considerably more testing since I last read him, or there is something the matter.”
Dominic turned the page. “Nothing is the matter.”
“You turned the page before you’d finished it.”
“I finished it.”
“Then tell me the argument of the last paragraph.”
Nothing came. He closed the book and set it face down on the side table.
The fire in the east room of White’s had been burning since well before he arrived, and the steady, low crackle of it was the only sound between them beyond the murmur of other men’s conversations drifting from the card rooms.
Miles reached across and filled his own glass without ceremony.
“You arrived before eight,” he said. “No cards. No conversation. In this chair, which I know from experience to be the one you choose when you would prefer to be left alone.” He lifted the glass briefly. “And yet here I am, talking to you.”
“Here you are.”
“Your face is off.” He said it without inflection, not unkindly.
“The arrangement of it. You have the same look you had the night Rowbury called you a cheat at hazard, and you spent the following hour telling everyone you were perfectly fine while your cravat was doing something extraordinary at the collar.” He settled back as a man settling in for the duration.
“You were not perfectly fine then, either.”
“That was three years ago.”
“You have a consistent face.” Miles swirled his glass. “Is it the boy?”
It used to be, Dominic thought with a tinge of annoyance.
“James is fine.” He said aloud, however.
“The estate?”
“Also fine.”
Miles went quiet. The fire shifted, a settling of coals, dispersing the smell of beeswax and old wood and the accumulated tobacco of other men’s evenings around the room. He waited in the way he had always waited: no pressure, no performance of it, just present.
“Miles,” Dominic said once, and the word came out flat.
“I’m not asking,” Miles pointed out smugly. “I’m observing.”
Dominic could feel himself nearing the point where he could crack a molar between his jaw with the frequency with which he was clenching his teeth. “Then observe quietly.”
But he raised his glass to that, deciding in that moment that keeping his cool was going to do him far more good than any emotional reactions ever would. Especially for a partner such as Miles.
A footman came through with a fresh decanter and departed again without introduction. This time, Dominic left his glass where it was.
“You know,” Miles said at last, conversationally, “the last time you sat in that chair in this condition, you went to Bellamy’s to watch a horse race at midnight and the horse lost, and the time before that you commissioned a portrait of no one and cancelled it before it was half done.
You have a history of impractical responses to agitation.
” He picked up his own glass. “I note this purely in the spirit of personal curiosity.”
Dominic knew that it was his personal affliction to be so acquainted with Miles and reminded himself to temper his irritation before it spiraled out of control. “Personal curiosity is another word for meddling.”
“It is. But I have found it keeps the conversation alive.” Miles tilted his head, considering.
“You are sober in a place designed to make that difficult. You have not spoken to anyone except me. The brandy you ordered has gone warm. And you have been reading your philosophy upside down.” He held the look.
“If it isn’t James and isn’t the estate, it’s a woman. It always is.”
Dominic looked at the fire, and did not need to say anything because he knew his friend could read it on his face.
“None of my concern,” Miles mimicked Dominic’s tone. “I merely note the pattern.” He stretched one leg out and crossed it over the other. “I have eyes, Silverford. And you have been dropping that boy off next door three mornings a week for the better part of a month.”
“James’s lessons are not contingent on what I do or do not feel.”
“Correct.” He drank. “And yet…”
A neighboring table erupted into laughter. One of the card rooms had produced a winner, by the sound of it.
Dominic looked at the fire until it settled.
“I feel obliged to remind you that I was at the masquerade,” Miles said.
“I was standing a good deal closer to that waltz than I needed to be.” He set his glass down.
“I watched you cross a dance floor for her. I watched you take her hand. I also noticed when you were no longer in the room. And when she came back through the far door, some minutes after, from the direction you had gone.”
Dominic said nothing even though his grip tightened briefly around the glass in his hand.
“I’ve said nothing about this for a week,” Miles said. “I’m saying it now because I think you need to hear it again.” He paused. “James also mentioned Lady Annabelle’s name four times in the course of a three-minute conversation when I last saw him.”
Dominic looked at him. “And what exactly are you driving at now? What is it I need to hear again?”
At that, Miles’ lips spread in a smile that told Dominic that he’d walked right into his friend’s trap. “Well, it is rather a simple statement, really. Lady Annabelle Stanton. I suppose those words should suffice, should they not?”
Dominic got to his feet, buttoned his coat, and said his goodnights without further ado. Through it all, his friend was laughing at him, and he contemplated ignoring the man for a few weeks until this fiasco with Annabelle died down.
Outside, the street was clear after a summer downpour, the cobbles still wet under the lamps.
And, after a brief contemplation, Dominic sent the carriage home without him and walked.
Walking had served, as a rule, when his mind ran in directions he did not want. Cold and movement together had a useful quality: they forced the immediate to the surface and kept it there. He had relied on this since he was old enough to leave the house on his own.
Tonight, they were not serving.
The difficulty, and he was honest enough at this hour to use that word, was not just the kiss.
He had managed worse than a kiss and the subsequent retreat of the woman involved, and the rational response was civil brevity and time and the ordinary conduct of a man who had done nothing that warranted preoccupation.
He had those resources available to him.
He had been applying them, with occasional lapses that he did not intend to catalog.
The difficulty was also Annabelle’s observation.
She had been there at each event, noting each exit, adding each to a tally she had apparently kept quietly and decided, at some point on a cold balcony, was significant enough to say aloud.
He had moved through those rooms for the better part of two months under the assumption that departures made in good order went unremarked.
He had been wrong about this entirely.
And the more he considered it, the worse it was, because he had not known she was. She had been that attentive to him, for that long, without making anything of it. Without performing it. Without expecting anything back from it.
He could not name another person, living, who had looked at him that closely without wanting something in return for the attention.
She had not said it to wound him. She had said it because it was accurate, and she withheld almost nothing that was accurate, and she had not looked away from his face while she said it.
She had not followed him onto that balcony to make a point.
She had gone out because his face had been, as she put it, wrong, and she had found that worth acting on, and she had not looked away from any of it.
He did not know what to do with a woman who looked at him like that.
Twenty minutes later, he turned down Chandos Street. He had been here before, and he knew the way.
Madame Laurent kept its front door unremarkable by design: black paint, an ordinary knocker, a terrace that gave nothing away to passersby. The footman who admitted him had seen him once before, perhaps eight or nine months ago, and took his hat without comment.
The downstairs parlor was warm, with lamplight and firelight in the right proportions, the kind of arrangement that was clearly not accidental. Three women were already in the room; a fourth came through the far door as he entered.
The woman who had just come through was tall, with hair the color of pale amber under the lamp, and green eyes when she turned them his way.
Not dark hair. Not blue eyes. Good. Nothing like her.
Madame Laurent appeared at his elbow, quiet-footed and experienced in the greeting of men who did not want conversation.
“Your Grace. It has been some time.”
“It has.” He was looking at the fair-haired woman.
“Shall I—”
“No. Thank you.”
The woman had already crossed the room. She gave her name plainly, without embellishment: Eleanor. She looked at him with an even, professional regard and did not reach for conversation.
He followed her upstairs.
Her room was at the back of the house, second floor: a fire in the grate, a decanter on the sideboard, a lamp on the mantelpiece. She poured without being asked and set the glass beside him.
He stood there for a moment with his hands at his sides, looking at the room, which was quiet and warm and entirely ordinary, and told himself this was going to work.
She settled on the arm of the chair near the fire and watched him not drink the wine. “You’ve been here before,” she said. “Not to see me.”
“Three months ago. Perhaps four.”
“Long stretch.”
“I’ve been occupied.”
“With?” She said it without impertinence.
“Many things,” he said and picked up the glass.
“A woman?”
He drank. “An arrangement,” he said again.
She accepted this and rose from the chair’s arm, unhurried. In better light, her eyes were the color of shallow water over gravel. Her hair, loose now, was warm amber at the ends and darker near the root, nothing like dark brown, nothing like the loose loops under a gold-leafed wreath.
“The arrangement is here, or somewhere else?”
“Somewhere else,” he said. “And irrelevant.” He set the glass down. “My apologies. That was not directed at you.”
“It rarely is,” she said. She crossed toward him. “Most men who come at this hour with that face have left the relevant thing at home.” She stopped in front of him and looked up at him without performance. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“I’ve no intention of talking about it.”
“Good,” she said. “Then we won’t.” She put her hands on his chest.
Her palms settled flat against his lapels, warm and assured, the hands of someone who understood exactly what she was doing—
And his mind went somewhere else entirely, without his consent, without any apparent intention, and with no prospect of coming back.
Hair with an absurd wreath of gold leaves pinned in it, half undone by then, one stem bent at the wrong angle. The half inch of distance that had disappeared because she had given it. Her breath warm on his jaw. The complete and involuntary way she had answered him when he had given her the choice.
She had chosen. He had not considered that enough, and he was considering it now, at the wrong time and in the wrong room entirely.
Eleanor’s hands were warm and certain and present and entirely wrong. He stood there for two or three full seconds, waiting for the room to reassert itself. It did not.
He covered her hands with his and lifted them away, gently.
“Stop,” he said.
She stepped back without alarm. She was not new to requests that changed; it was on her face plainly, the professional composure of someone who had long stopped being surprised by it. She waited.
“My apologies,” he said. He went to the sideboard, drank the wine in a single go, and set the glass down. “You’ve done nothing amiss.”
“Shall I—”
“No.” He found his wallet. He counted her full fee and placed it on the sideboard. Then he counted the same amount again and set it beside the first. “For the inconvenience.”
She looked at the money, then at him, her gaze fleeting through a cycle of emotions, most of them muddied with knowing that he did not want to understand.
She only nodded.
He collected his hat from the chair by the door and said his goodnight.
The air outside hit him cold and clean, and he walked home.
The night had gone considerably chillier, or he had; it was difficult to determine which.
As he turned through the gates of Silverford House, he looked at the house next door without meaning to and then turned away.
The windows of Fairmont House were dark. Every last one.
The night butler took his coat and gloves and was handing them to a footman when he cleared his throat once.
“A note arrived this afternoon, Your Grace. Lord Keldwick left it himself. He said it was for your personal attention.”
He took the folded card and went upstairs. He opened it at his writing desk, under the lamp. Miles’s hand was his usual: slanted, rapid, constitutionally incapable of restraint.
Forgot to mention at the club. A name for you: Albrey Whitmore, Viscount Chesham.
He left his card at Fairmont House this afternoon; I confirmed it at Mrs. Laing’s supper.
I will not explain further. He has been asking after Lady Annabelle since the masquerade.
Well-connected, good income. Unremarkable on all fronts, but unoffensive enough.
I thought you would want to know. Or possibly you’d have preferred not to. Either way.
— M
Dominic read it twice.
He set it face down on the desk. The lamp was burning low, and he did not turn it up.
He sat in the dark and the quiet, the fire in the grate down to a slow red burn, the street below entirely still, the house above entirely still, and the note under his hand face-down so that he did not need to read it a third time.
Unremarkable, Miles had written. But inoffensive.
He had spent the evening failing to stop thinking about a woman he was under every obligation not to pursue.
He had gone to a brothel for the first time in the better part of a year, and it had been no use, and the reason it had been no use was not complicated: it was the simplest and most inconvenient thing imaginable. And he had come home to this.
He turned the note back over.
He has been asking after Lady Annabelle since the masquerade.
And he set it down again.
But he could not sleep.