Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
“This arrived this morning,” Dominic said and set the note on the table.
Miles picked it up, read it, and set it flat again. He looked at the fire. Outside the window, a coal merchant’s horse went past at a slow walk, and the sound of it faded.
“He wants to know how the Season is progressing,” Miles said.
“He wants to know whether she’s met anyone worth the effort.” Dominic watched the decanter rather than his friend. “He’s happy in Shropshire. His wife is well. The estate is in good order. He met a baronet’s son with a tolerable income and asks if anyone better has turned up by June.”
Miles was quiet long enough that the fire settled with a soft crack.
“He left her in my care,” Dominic said.
“He left you to assist. Lady Rosenhall is her chaperone.”
“He wrote to me.” He set two fingers on the arm of his chair. “Not Lady Rosenhall. Me. His best friend. He trusts me to look out for her.”
“And?”
“And I have been doing the opposite.” He looked at the note. “Chesham. Fenwick. Pemberton. Every man who approached her this season, I found a reason.”
“They all had their problems.”
“Some of them had their problems. The rest I disliked on no grounds I could defend.” He left that alone for a moment. Outside, a second cart went past, and the window glass shivered faintly. “I need to write back tonight.”
Miles studied him with the expression Dominic had once thought of as friendly and now found simply exhausting. “What will you say?”
“That the Season is progressing. That she is well and in good spirits.” He folded the note and put it in his inside pocket.
“Harcroft is hosting this evening. I intend to attend and behave like a man with no stake in the matter. Hartwell has expressed interest—he’s solvent, she seemed to find him agreeable—I intend to leave them to it. ”
Miles crossed one knee over the other. He did not say anything.
“What?” Dominic asked.
“Nothing at all,” Miles said pleasantly. “I admire a well-stated intention. I find them highly enjoyable just before they are abandoned.”
Dominic got to his feet. “It ends tonight.”
“Of course it does.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.” Miles set his glass down.
He tilted his head slightly and looked at Dominic.
“I have been trying to speak some sense into you. And failed. Either way, here it is: she’s more than your obligation towards Lucien.
More than that. I can see it. I hope you will too.
Before it’s too late.” He picked up his hat from the chair arm beside him.
“Harcroft’s at nine. I’ll see you there. ”
He went out.
Dominic stood in the empty room with Lucien’s note in his pocket and said nothing to no one, which was the honest position he was in.
The carriage set them down before Harcroft House at a quarter past eight, and the door opened into warmth and candlelight and the sound of an already-crowded room.
Annabelle was aware, from the moment she stepped through the entrance, of the way attention moved. She had learned to manage it this season: she looked interested rather than aware, which was useful and also mostly genuine, as she was generally always looking at something.
She was looking at the Flemish oil above the mantle and thinking it was either genuine or an excellent imitation, and she was not thinking about the man forty feet to her right.
She did not need to look at him to know he was there. She had known it when the doorman’s eyes moved over her shoulder.
“There,” Helena said at her left ear. “I told you about the gown.”
“You tell me about every gown.”
“Yes, and I am right.”
Lady Rosenhall arrived at Annabelle’s other elbow and said something about the flower arrangements, and Annabelle made an appropriate observation, and they went further into the room.
Her first two conversations of the evening were pleasant and unmemorable in equal measure. The third was Lord Hartwell.
She had received his card at two separate events without a conversation to go with it. He approached her at the refreshments table with a measured confidence she found more agreeable than aggressive, and introduced himself without flourish.
“I believe we were introduced briefly at the Davenport card party,” he said. “I had the better of that exchange, as you were occupied with someone far more interesting.”
She looked at him. “You are either honest or strategically self-deprecating.”
“I have found them to be largely the same approach.” He offered a glass from the tray at his elbow. “I understand you have opinions about colonial trade. My sister speaks highly of a volume you recommended at Lady Fenwick’s.”
“Your sister exaggerates the recommendation. I said it was worth half an afternoon if one was inclined toward argument.” She took the glass. “Do you read?”
“I do. Primarily for the reliable pleasure of discovering I was wrong about something.” His eyes were direct but unhurried. “I spent two years in the East India trade and have since found I held very few correct opinions about it at the time.”
“That is a more honest admission than most men make on introduction.”
“I am told I improve upon acquaintance,” he said. “Whether that is recommendation or warning, I haven’t decided.”
Annabelle laughed; it came out easily, which she had not expected. “You’ve read Smith,” she said.
“Thoroughly, and with diminishing confidence in my own positions.” He turned his glass in his hand. “Book Three held me up for a fortnight. The argument about the natural order of capital investment — I found it convincing at first and have since grown uneasy.”
“The agricultural preference.”
“Yes. He calls any deviation from it irrational, and I accepted that for some time before I wondered whether I should have.”
“You should not have.” She looked at the room.
“He builds a model of how capital ought naturally to progress — agriculture, then manufactures, then foreign trade — and then measures every nation against it. When they don’t conform, he calls it irrational preference.
But a model is not a standard unless someone has validated it independently of the model. ”
Hartwell stopped and looked at her. “He validated it with itself.”
“He did.”
He laughed again, this sound completely devoid of social decorum. “You’re entirely correct,” he said. “God. I’ve been using that framework in arguments with my partners for six months.” He looked at his glass with the expression of a man making a quiet revision. “That’s inconvenient.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No you’re not.” He was smiling.
“No,” she agreed, her own lips stretching in agreement. “I’m not.”
He let the quiet sit without filling it, which she noticed. Most men filled it.
“There’s something else,” he said. “If you’ve heard anything already, I’d rather you heard it from me directly.
” He looked at the room. “Three ships in fourteen months. Consignment losses. The circumstances were unclear when they occurred and remain so in part — my partners managed the investigation, which I have since concluded was a mistake on my part to allow.”
She looked at him. “Why tell me?”
“Because you’ll hear it eventually with a great deal of interpretation attached to it.” He met her gaze without difficulty. “And because I find I have no interest in being anything other than straightforward with you.”
She considered this. “That’s a creditable answer.”
“It’s a true one. Whether it’s creditable is a separate question.” He answered, and she nodded in acquiescence. When he excused himself, she stood with her glass and named what she felt without ambiguity: warmth, appreciation, respect.
But there was not a single additional thing. And in that moment, she looked up, her eyes searching without her express consent.
Dominic was on the far side of the room, in conversation with two men she didn’t know, but his eyes were already on hers before she’d completed the turn, and the moment their gazes met, he looked back to his companions without a change in expression.
She set her glass on the nearest tray.
Dominic spent twenty minutes in conversation with his host. He spent a further ten minutes discussing a matter of property with a man he met in the east room. He returned to the main drawing room and took up a position at the far wall near the door, because a man had to stand somewhere.
“You’ve been watching Hartwell for the last quarter hour,” Miles said beside him.
“I’ve been watching the room.” He replied, the lie no smoother than all his other ones, and Miles obviously did not believe this one either.
“You have been watching one specific man in the room with the expression you get before you request a second opinion on a contract.” Miles pointed out, and Dominic turned to glare at his friend.
Now was simply not the time to antagonize him; he didn’t think
But Miles only smiled. “She looked well,” Miles said.
Oh, she had looked more than well. The gown was a different blue than anything he had seen her wear before, cut lower at the neckline and fitted in a way that had made him set down his glass the moment she came through the door and not pick it up again for two full minutes. He was not going to say any of that.
“He reads. She found the conversation engaging.”
“Hm.” Miles looked into his glass. “You and your excuses, Silverford. I dare say she’s doing a fine job of screening her marriage candidates all by herself.”
Dominic’s jaw clenched, and he looked toward the piano at the far end of the room, blatantly refusing to answer.
Instead, he watched Lord Harcroft move through his guests with the expansive energy of a host who had drunk enough to feel his own generosity. He watched the man cast about and settle his attention on Annabelle.
“Lady Annabelle. Hartwell tells me your talent at the pianoforte is considerable.”
Annabelle’s expression did not shift, but her hand moved slightly at her side. “I would not wish to take the place of a more accomplished—”