Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The house was dark but for a thin line of candlelight beneath her own door, and Amelia stood in the corridor a moment before entering, still catching her breath from the walk, and still entirely unsure how she meant to explain any of this to anyone, let alone to Mary.
She needn't have worried about catching her unprepared.
Her younger sister was curled in the window seat in her room, exactly as she always was on nights Amelia came home late, knees drawn up beneath her nightgown, one of their mother's shawls wrapped round her shoulders, a book open and unread in her lap.
She looked up the moment the door creaked.
"There you are!"
Mary set her book aside so quickly that it nearly slid from her lap.
Amelia paused in the doorway. "You are still awake."
"Of course I am still awake. You were not supposed to be home yet."
Mary shifted across the window seat, making room for her, her soft brown hair already loosened from its evening arrangement and falling over one shoulder. She looked entirely too pleased to see Amelia, which Amelia suspected had less to do with concern and considerably more to do with curiosity.
"I have been waiting for you for nearly two hours."
"That sounds very dramatic."
"It was very dramatic." Mary patted the space beside her. "Come here. I want to know everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything. Who was there? Was Lady Fenwick wearing the blue silk?
Did the Fairmonts have the new musicians?
Was the supper any good? Did you dance? How many times did you refuse to dance?
And why," she added, narrowing her eyes with sudden suspicion, "are you home before the ball has even finished? "
Amelia laughed despite herself and crossed the room.
"Good evening to you too."
"You are avoiding the question."
"I was sent home."
Amelia sat beside her, drawing her skirts neatly around her knees.
Mary looked at her expectantly.
"Well? Was it dreadful?"
"The ball?"
"Yes."
"It was perfectly pleasant."
Mary groaned.
"That is the least interesting answer you could possibly have given me."
"It was."
"You did not enjoy yourself?"
"I did. I argued with the Duke of Ravensmere."
Mary's eyebrows rose slowly, delight spreading across her face by degrees. "The Duke of Ravensmere. Sebastian Percy. The one Lady Fenwick called the most eligible recluse in London not a fortnight ago, entirely to Mama's despair that he never attends anything."
"That would be the one, yes."
"And you argued with him."
"He was standing with his friends, quite loudly, informing anyone within earshot that women's natural sensibilities render them unsuited to rigorous scholarship.
I happened to be within earshot." Amelia pulled her knees up, unconsciously mirroring Mary's, and began unpinning her hair with more force than the task required, buying herself a moment to arrange the story into something she could bear to tell aloud.
"I could hardly be expected to simply walk past such lazy reasoning and pretend I hadn't heard it. "
"You could have. Most people would have." Mary's mouth was already twitching toward a grin she wasn't bothering to suppress. "You, on the other hand, apparently could not, which does not surprise me in the slightest, and is precisely why I love you best of anyone in this family."
"You love me best because I once let you copy my French exercises."
"That too. Go on. What did he say?"
"He asked my name. I told him a man who believes women incapable of intellectual achievement has not earned the right to know it.
" Amelia said it lightly, the way she'd rehearsed on the stairs, aiming for the sort of amused detachment that made the whole evening sound like an anecdote rather than the thing it had actually felt like standing in that ballroom with a dozen eyes suddenly fixed on her.
Mary stared at her. Then she laughed.
"Amelia!"
"What?"
"You actually said that?"
"I did. It was entirely justified."
"To the Duke of Ravensmere?"
"Yes."
Mary covered her mouth, though it did very little to hide her delight.
"Oh, I wish I had been there."
"You would have enjoyed it far too much."
"I am enjoying it now."
Amelia set a pin down with rather more care than the first several had received. "He was arrogant beyond anything I have encountered, Mary. Utterly convinced of his own correctness, and completely unable to bear being told otherwise by anyone, let alone a woman he had never been introduced to."
"That sounds dreadful." Mary was watching her far too closely for someone who was meant to be reacting to a dreadful story. "Truly. What an insufferable man."
"He was."
"Mm." Mary tilted her head, the same assessing tilt their mother used when totaling household accounts that didn't quite balance. "And that is the whole of it? You argued, he was insufferable, you came home?"
"That is the whole of it."
"Amelia." Mary said her name the exact way she'd said it since they were children, the tone that meant I know you are lying and I am giving you one polite opportunity to stop before I say so directly.
"You have been picking at the same loose thread on your sleeve since you sat down, and you have gone a color I have only ever seen you go around Mr. Ashworth's youngest son, which I distinctly recall you claiming meant absolutely nothing either. "
"That did mean nothing. Mr. Ashworth's son has the conversational range of a hat stand."
"You are changing the subject."
"I am not changing the subject. There is no subject to change. Papa sent me home because half the ballroom had begun discussing me rather more than was comfortable, so I came home. And now I am sitting here being interrogated by my own sister at an hour when any reasonable person would be asleep."
She studied Amelia a moment longer, and something in her expression shifted, curiosity giving way to a more careful attention. "He did unsettle you."
Amelia set down the brush she had picked up without any memory of doing so.
"He did not. He was simply arrogant. Insufferable.
He argued with me as though losing were a personal affront, and I have no doubt he is, at this very moment, composing some elaborate justification for why he was correct after all, when he plainly was not. "
"That is a great many words about a man you claim not to be thinking of."
"I did not claim that."
Amelia rose from the window seat before Mary could press further. "I am tired, Mary. I would like to go to bed."
Mary studied her a moment longer, and Amelia could see the exact instant she decided not to push it, sisterly affection winning out over curiosity the way it generally did between them.
"Very well. Keep your secrets, if you must." She rose too, gathering her shawl, pausing at the door with a smile that was fond rather than triumphant.
"Though for what it's worth, dearest, I have never once seen you this flustered over a man you claim to find merely insufferable.
I do hope London survives whatever this turns out to be. "
"There is nothing for London to survive. I shall likely never see the man again."
"Of course not." Mary's smile only widened. "Good night, Amelia. Sleep well, I daresay you will not."
The door clicked shut, and Amelia sat alone at her dressing table, working the last of the pins free with hands that were not nearly as steady as she would have liked, and found that no amount of telling herself the evening was finished, filed away, done with, did anything at all to quiet the memory still sitting stubbornly behind her ribs: a carriage lamp swinging overhead, his gaze tracing the line of her jaw, the reckless half second in which some foolish, ungovernable part of her had wanted, quite desperately, for him to lean in.
"You are in an unusually fine mood for a man who spent the last evening being publicly dismantled by a woman half the ballroom is still discussing."
Sebastian did not look up from his correspondence, though he felt Tristan drop into the chair opposite his desk with the lack of ceremony he reserved for houses he considered nearly as much his own as Ravensmere House itself.
"I am in my usual mood. You are simply determined to find something remarkable in it. "
"I am determined to hear about the woman in purple, which is a considerably more interesting occupation.
" Tristan helped himself to the decanter on the sideboard.
"Nathaniel says he has already had three separate matrons inquire after her family this morning, which is a remarkable feat for a woman none of them can name. "
"I have no notion who she is."
"You spent a good part of the eveningarguing with her."
"I spent a good part of the evening being interrupted by an aggravating girl who apparently enjoys arguing more than she enjoys being agreeable, which I assure you is not the same accomplishment.
" Sebastian set down his pen and reached for the next letter, though he found, irritably, that he had read the same line of his steward's report three times without absorbing a word of it.
"She was tiresome. Opinionated well past the point of good manners.
I have already given her considerably more thought than she merits. "
The fire in her eyes when she refused to give her name.
That is what merits the thought, if he were being honest about it.
He did not say it aloud. He was not entirely certain he wished to examine it even privately, and yet found himself doing so regardless, the memory arriving uninvited and entirely too vivid as the carriage lamp swinging above her, her breath catching, the half second in which neither of them had moved to close the gap between them, and the considerably longer moment in which he had wanted to, with an intensity that had nothing at all to do with the argument.