Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
"Your Grace, how wonderful that you came after all."
"The Duchess of Fairmont is too gracious a hostess to disappoint," Sebastian said, which was not an answer, and bowed over Lady Wren's gloved hand with the exact, practiced degree of warmth that meant nothing at all.
Beside her, her daughter dipped into a curtsy so deep it bordered on genuflection, fan fluttering, eyes bright with the hunger he had learned to recognize by the third season of his dukedom and had never once learned to enjoy.
Here we begin. He straightened, already calculating the shortest, polite route across the ballroom. He was already exhausted by an evening that had yet to even properly start.
"Miss Wren was just remarking how much she admires the music this evening," Lady Wren said, steering her daughter forward by the elbow with the subtlety of a woman docking a ship. "Weren't you, dear?"
"Oh, tremendously," said Miss Wren, who Sebastian suspected would have been hard-pressed to name the composer of the piece currently being played.
"How gratifying." He inclined his head, retreating a half step, and finding the retreat immediately blocked by the arrival of the Honorable Miss Aldridge, resplendent in yellow, who had apparently been lying in wait behind a potted fern for precisely this opportunity.
"Your Grace, I do not believe we have been introduced this season."
"A regrettable oversight," he drawled, in the flat, courteous tone he reserved for statements he did not mean.
Hebowed again, and began once more the slow, smiling extraction that every ballroom in London had taught him to perform without appearing to flee openly.
This was the entire architecture of the Season laid bare in miniature: mothers positioning daughters like pieces on a board, daughters performing an interest in whatever subject they believed might snag a duke's attention, and the duke in question standing very still while it happened to him, smiling, saying nothing but inanities.
He found Tristan Cavendish, Duke of Ashcombe, unsurprisingly, holding court near the card room with a glass in each hand and an audience of three young ladies who had clearly forgotten why they'd approached him in the first place.
"There he is." Tristan handed off both glasses to a passing footman without looking, extracting himself from his admirers with the ease of a man who had been doing this since before either of them could grow a proper beard.
"Sebastian. You look precisely as delighted to be here as I predicted you would. "
"You predicted correctly."
"I usually do, where you're concerned. Ten years of practice.
" Tristan fell into step beside him, sandy hair already coming loose from whatever order his valet had imposed on it, green eyes scanning the room with the lazy, cataloguing attention of a man who had long since stopped being impressed by anything in these gatherings.
"How many mothers have cornered you so far? "
"Four."
"Only four? You are losing your touch, or the room is thinner than usual.
" He grinned, sidestepping a footman with a tray.
"Nathaniel's already been trapped by Lady Featherstone for a full quarter hour discussing the corn prices, which I confess I find deeply satisfying, given how he mocked me for the whole of March over the Ellison business. "
"You deserved the mocking."
"I deserved nothing of the sort. Come, before someone else remembers you exist."
They found Nathaniel Ashcroft, Duke of Kingsleigh, extricating himself from Lady Featherstone with visible relief, his cravat almosttoo perfectly knotted for a man who had spent the last quarter hour being lectured on agricultural yields, grey eyes flicking toward them with something close to gratitude.
Julian Hawthorne, Duke of Dunhaven, was already waiting near the far window, half in shadow, watching the dancing with the faint, distant look of a man doing sums in his head that had nothing to do with the ballroom.
"You made it," Julian said, when they reached him, and there was real warmth under his dry tone. The warmth of a man greeting friends he had known since he was twelve years old and still occasionally could not quite believe he'd kept. "I told Nathaniel you'd claim a headache."
"I considered it."
"He did," Tristan confirmed. "I received a note this morning threatening precisely that.
I informed him that a duke who has attended exactly one social function in a fortnight cannot plausibly claim chronic illness without every matchmaking mother in London descending on Ravensmere House with beef tea. "
"I would have accepted the beef tea over this."
"You say that," Nathaniel said, joining them at last, smoothing his cravat back into submission, "and yet here you are, three minutes into the evening, already looking for the nearest wall to stand against. Some things do not change."
"Some things," Tristan agreed, "are not meant to. Case in point, Sebastian. Already, Lady Aldridge is composing the next scandal sheet in her head."
"Given his reputation," Nathaniel said, grey eyes flicking over Sebastian with dry amusement, "I imagine she has a great deal of material to work with."
"A reputation I have never once denied earning."
"No," Julian said, with dry amusement, "though I notice you've grown considerably more discreet about it since the Season began. Careful, Sebastian. People will start believing the scholarship is the whole of you, and then where will the Circle's reputation be?"
"In ruins, presumably, the moment anyone discovers what actually happens at our meetings."
"Our meetings," Tristan said gravely, "are a rigorous academic pursuit."
"Our meetings," Nathaniel corrected, "have not featured a genuine text in eighteen months, unless one counts the wager Tristan lost to Julian over which of Lord Ashby's twin nieces would marry first."
"That required considerable scholarship. I researched extensively."
"You spent a fortnight at their family's hunting lodge."
"In the name of research." Tristan spread his hands, entirely unrepentant, and the four of them laughed; this was the only thing London had never managed to take from them.
This. Sebastian let himself feel it, briefly, the rare ease of being known without having to perform anything for the privilege. It was the only tolerable part of any evening like this one.
He was fond of women, fond enough that half the room's whispered rumors about him carried at least a grain of truth, but he had never once mistaken that fondness for anything requiring a ring, and the four of them, alone, near this window, were the only people in London who had never once asked him to explain the difference.
They had all weathered Eton together, and Cambridge after it, and the deaths of three fathers between them, and it took no effort at all to fall back into the old shorthand, the arguments picked up mid-sentence as though they had never set them down.
"...You cannot possibly believe that."
"I believe precisely what I said."
Tristan looked at him over the rim of his glass.
"That women are incapable of recognizing a rogue when they see one?"
Sebastian took the drink a passing footman offered, and glanced toward the other side of the ballroom.
"Yes." he took a hearty swig from his drink. "I have yet to see one who proved me wrong, which is precisely why I have so little patience for the argument you're all about to make."
"There is no argument yet," Nathaniel said. "You have simply announced you intend to win one."
"I have already won it. My paper on the subject was published in March.
" Sebastian allowed himself the smallest, most insufferable smile.
"Universities are built on discipline and tradition, gentlemen.
Centuries of it. A woman's natural sensibilities were never designed for that kind of rigor, whatever her intelligence otherwise. "
Nathaniel laughed.
"At last, a scholarly conclusion with which I agree."
Tristan looked offended.
"I have no idea what you mean."
"You sent three flowers to Lady Wexford last Season," Nathaniel reminded him.
"Two."
"Three."
"One was from the gardener."
"That does not improve the situation."
Julian, who had been leaning against the wall with his arms folded, finally looked up.
"You also told Lady Penrose that you had never seen her before."
"I hadn't."
"You had danced with her twice."
"I had forgotten."
"You remembered her name."
"That is different."
Nathaniel gave a quiet laugh.
"How?"
"Names are easier to remember than faces."
Tristan turned to Sebastian.
"You see what I endure?"
"I am beginning to understand why."
"From the man who once spent an entire supper discussing Tacitus with Lady Ashbourne while she was attempting to flirt with him."
Sebastian's brows rose.
"She asked me about Rome."
"She asked you to kiss her."
"She did not."
"Sebastian," Julian said mildly, "she most certainly did."
Sebastian looked at him.
Julian shrugged.
"I was there."
Nathaniel's mouth twitched.
"You were all there."
"An unfortunate coincidence."
Tristan laughed.
"You are impossible."
"I am selective."
"Selective," Tristan repeated. "That is an elegant word for a man who has rejected half the unmarried ladies in London."
"I have rejected no one."
"No?" Nathaniel asked. "Then what would you call it?"
"Disinterest."
"Repeated disinterest," Tristan said.
"Consistent disinterest."
Julian's expression softened with amusement.
"Which, in your case, may be worse."
Sebastian took a measured sip of his drink.
"You gentlemen make it sound as though I am personally responsible for every disappointed young lady in London."
"No," Tristan said. "Only the ones you have spoken to."
"That narrows it considerably."
They laughed.
Sebastian allowed himself the smallest smile.