Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
“Silverford didn’t come,” Helena said, not quite to anyone, into the mouth of her champagne glass.
“A great many people didn’t come,” Annabelle said. “It is a large city.”
“True.” She sipped. “And yet you have been watching the same corner of the entrance for the past quarter hour.”
Annabelle picked up her own glass and did not answer that.
Their box at Vauxhall looked out over the Grand Cross Walk, and from the railing she could see the lantern-lit crowd moving in both directions: dark coats and pale gowns, the odd cloak catching the light, the distant orchestra sending its melody from the rotunda in a long, bright thread.
Lady Rosenhall sat at the back of the box, back straight, hands folded in her lap, her gaze moving from the promenade to the opposite boxes and back.
The entrance was to the north. Annabelle turned toward the orchestra.
“He is not obligated to attend every event,” she said.
“He is not obligated to attend any event,” Helena said pleasantly. “Which he demonstrates with great consistency. I was only noting an observation.” She paused. “You have also looked at the south walk twice since we sat down.”
Annabelle cursed her own weakness in her mind. “I was watching the crowd.” This, she delivered with a haughty pomp.
But her friend saw through it completely, even arching a brow in challenge.
“Oh, come now, you do not take me for a fool, even after knowing me for so long, do you? You were watching a specific crowd, in a specific direction.” Helena’s tone was the conversational kind, of course.
“I mention it only in a spirit of friendship.”
“Your friendship is trying my nerves,” Annabelle said.
Helena smiled and said nothing more about it.
Two boxes along, a woman in a yellow gown laughed behind her fan.
The soprano from the rotunda had moved into something slow and doleful, which the warm evening did not require.
The air smelled of lamp-smoke and the supper being laid in the box immediately to their right, which smelled considerably better than the music sounded.
“Lady Annabelle.”
The voice came from the promenade beside their box, and she turned to find a gentleman at the rail.
He was of middling height, brown-haired, with features that were pleasant and regular — the kind of face one would need to describe carefully to find again in a crowded room.
His coat was well-cut; his cravat was impeccable.
“Lord Chesham.” She offered her hand over the railing.
He bowed over it and did not hurry the gesture. “I had hoped I might find you here this evening.” He straightened. “I took the liberty of leaving my card at Fairmont House earlier this week.”
“I received it.” She caught Lady Rosenhall’s approving expression in her peripheral vision and indicated the empty chair at the far end of the box. “Will you join us?”
He came round and was seated.
“The weather has been remarkably cooperative,” he said.
“Suspiciously so,” Annabelle agreed. “I begin to think it is performing.”
“For whom?”
“For all of this.” She gestured toward the lit walks, the crowded boxes, the distant soprano making her feelings known from the rotunda. “It would be embarrassing to have arranged several hundred lanterns in a thunderstorm.”
“The soprano would not appreciate it.”
“The soprano does not appear to be appreciating much this evening.”
He laughed easily, openly, with no apparent investment in maintaining restraint, and though she had not especially planned that reaction, she found that she enjoyed it a bit.
They moved easily enough to the Academy debate he had attended that week, a dispute over the classification of some Roman antiquities, which he had opinions about and gave them without belaboring them.
“A dispute over the Hadrian collection,” he said. “Whether certain pieces ought to be classified as domestic or ceremonial. The provenance was contested enough that some fellows argued for a third category altogether.”
“What did you think?”
“That the domestic argument was stronger. The household context seemed fairly clear.”
“Dio Cassius would disagree with you,” she said.
He looked at her, interest gleaming in his eyes. “Would he.”
“His account of Hadrianic household practice is rather explicit on the ritual function of those objects. The household context doesn’t settle the question, it complicates it…Though I suspect the domestic argument is also convenient for anyone hoping to move the pieces into a private collection.”
Lord Chesham was quiet for a moment. “That point was not raised at the debate.”
“Perhaps you should have raised it.”
He laughed again, and this time she had planned it, which she filed away as a small, pleasant fact.
When it was time to walk, he offered his arm at the gate of the box, and she took it, and Helena fell in behind them at a considered distance.
“Your estate is in Shropshire, you said,” Annabelle offered, as they joined the promenade.
“It is. We have been improving the southern pasture for three years.” He sounded genuinely pleased about this. “I find I think about drainage a great deal more than I expected to at this stage of my life.”
“Most men of your acquaintance probably don’t think about it at all.”
“You’re right,” he said. “Which may be the worse situation.”
At the far end of the path where it curved toward the supper boxes, he stopped to read the placard for the evening’s fireworks program.
She stood beside him and read it with him, and he asked which of the listed displays she was most curious about, and she answered him, and he agreed with her choice, and she had the faint, ungrateful thought that agreement was not the same thing as argument.
That there was a species of conversation she had grown quietly accustomed to: pointed, unresolved, circling back on itself in ways that required her attention past the end of a sentence, and that this was not it.
She noted this and chose not to examine it further, because examining it had a destination she was not prepared to arrive at beside a supper box at Vauxhall with a viscount at her elbow.
She looked at the lanterns strung through the elms above the path and said nothing about any of this. She ate her supper. She watched the fireworks. The evening concluded in every respect as pleasantly as it had begun.
Lord Chesham called the next morning at half past eleven.
Annabelle was in the parlor with a book open in her lap when the footman announced him. She set it aside and rose with rather more composure than the occasion required. Lord Chesham came in carrying a small nosegay of white asters, which he gave to her with a brief bow.
“I hope this is not an inconvenient hour,” he said.
“Not at all.” She set the flowers on the side table.
Helena was on the settee with her embroidery, looking at neither of them with the fixed attention of someone looking at both.
He was wearing a blue coat today, which suited him better than the grey of last evening.
“What have you been reading this season?” he asked.
“Montaigne,” she said. “The essays. Cotton’s translation, mostly, though I return to the French when I can manage it.”
He leaned forward slightly. “I confess I haven’t read him.”
“Most people haven’t.”
“What does he write about?”
“Himself, chiefly.” She paused. “How little a man knows of his own thinking while he is inside it. He turns a subject over and over until it becomes something else entirely.” She looked at him. “It is either very useful or very alarming, depending on the day.”
“And which is it today?”
“Today I found it useful,” she said. “Yesterday I found it alarming.”
He smiled at that. “I should very much like to read him,” he said. “On your account of it.”
She was about to answer when Newton appeared in the doorway. He conducted a brief assessment of the room, decided Lord Chesham was the more interesting development, and walked directly to his chair.
Chesham looked down at him. Newton looked up at him. Lord Chesham extended one finger toward the cat’s nose. Newton considered this, found it insufficient, and went to sit under the window instead.
“An aloof cat,” Lord Chesham said, withdrawing his hand without embarrassment.
“He belongs to my sister-in-law,” Annabelle said. “He is staying with me for the season and has strong opinions about the arrangement.”
“Has he formed an opinion about me?”
“He sat down,” Annabelle said. “That is generally a neutral verdict.”
Lord Chesham laughed, and she found herself laughing with him.
The footman reappeared in the doorway. “Lord James Barrow, my lady. And His Grace, the Duke of Silverford.”
Helena’s needle stilled, and Annabelle rose, trying not to think too much about how quickly she’d done it.
James came through first, leather case in both fists.
He stopped when he saw the man in the chair opposite, his entire small body going rigid.
His eyes went to him, then to Annabelle, then back.
He held where he was, head slightly forward, in the way a cat holds itself when it has encountered something new and has not yet decided what category to put it in.
Dominic came in behind him. His eyes swept the room: the tea things, Lord Chesham, the asters on the side table, and then he gave a short nod.
“Lady Annabelle.”
“Your Grace.” She turned. “Lord Chesham, may I present His Grace, the Duke of Silverford, and Lord James Barrow, his ward.”
Lord Chesham stood and bowed toward Dominic with a pleasant, unguarded smile. “Your Grace. I don’t believe we have been introduced. Albrey Whitmore, Viscount Chesham.”
Dominic looked at him. “Chesham.” The title came out level, without warmth or variation, and it was a point to Lord Chesham’s character that his expression did not change.
Instead, the other man bent slightly toward James with the same smile. “How do you do, my lord?”
James looked at his shoes, then at Annabelle. “Can we start?” he said, blatantly ignoring Lord Chesham’s attempt at an introduction.
“In a moment.” She gave him a nod.
He accepted it and went to the window seat, where Newton had installed himself in the morning light and was studying Lord Chesham with the frank, unhurried scrutiny.
Lord Chesham turned back to her, gracious in his ability not to take offense at the snobbery. “I did not realize you were occupied with lessons this morning.”
“Lord James comes to me three mornings a week,” she said. “I have been teaching him the piano.”
Lord Chesham’s eyebrows lifted, and his head tilted. He glanced once at James on the window seat and then back. “The piano. Is that so?” A brief pause ensued in which he glanced briefly in Dominic’s direction. “You are exceedingly generous with your time, Lady Annabelle.”
Annabelle heard the speculation in his voice, but she made a point to ignore it with a serene smile. “I enjoy it.”
“I have no doubt.” He smiled; it was warm, and it was entirely meant.
“I had heard you were accomplished, but I confess I had not imagined…well. It speaks very highly of you.” He looked at her directly.
“I must tell you, I hope very much to hear you play at some point, if you would permit it. By all accounts, it would be more than worth the hearing.”
“You are kind.”
“I am serious,” he said.
Dominic had not moved from the doorway. He stood with his hat in both hands, eyes at no fixed point in the room. His coat was the dark one, the one he wore in the mornings when he came on foot. Annabelle was not looking at him directly, which was its own species of awareness.
“Well.” Lord Chesham collected his hat from the table. “I have no wish to delay the lesson.” He bowed to her. “Lady Annabelle.” A shorter bow toward Helena, who received it with a smile. Then he turned toward Dominic and gave a brief, civil nod. “Your Grace. A pleasure.”
Dominic smiled grimly in response, with an almost reluctant dip of his chin. “Likewise.” He replied.
Lord Chesham’s mouth curved, unperturbed, and he was shown out by the footman.
The front door closed, and Dominic looked at James. “Be ready at noon,” he said.
“Yes,” James said, without looking up from Newton.
“My apologies for the interruption.” He addressed this to a point approximately at the location of Annabelle’s shoulder.
“Not at all,” she said, clearing her throat subtly, trying not to squirm under his attention.
But he simply inclined his head once, settled his hat, and left. In the silence, Newton considered the closed door, then looked back at James.
James got down from the window seat, picked up his case, and came to stand at Annabelle’s elbow. He was quiet for the precise length of time it takes a person to form a thought they have already decided to share.
“He doesn’t like him,” he said.
Annabelle looked at him. “Who?”
“The other man.” James looked at the door Dominic had gone through, then at her. “Uncle had the displeased face’. Mrs. Greer says he does it every time and always says nothing about it.”
Helena had set her embroidery flat on her knee.
Annabelle said nothing, because there was nothing she could think of to say that would be useful to either of them.
“Can we do the scales now?” James said.
“Yes,” she said with a smile.