Chapter 9
On the way in, Alice had counted three things.
She had counted seven women in the receiving line who had looked at her with a particular careful neutrality.
They had read the gossip about her in the last three days and did not wish to be caught remembering it.
She had counted four gentlemen who had looked at her as though she had recently become more interesting than she had ever been.
And she had counted, without looking once, the Duke of Langton, who was standing by the second window with a glass in his hand and a face like a winter morning, and who had, she was certain, watched her arrive.
She did not look at him. She had decided, in the carriage, that she would not look at him for at least ten minutes. She had decided it as a small private discipline. She had also decided, in case the first discipline failed, that she would not smile at him for at least fifteen minutes.
“Alice.” Daphne’s voice was very small at her elbow.
Daphne always shrank in ballrooms because she did not enjoy being looked at.
Though she enjoyed looking. Tonight, however, the looking had presented her with a particular problem because Isaac was here.
Alice had seen him from the carriage. Daphne had seen him from the carriage, too. Neither of them had mentioned it.
“You will have to talk to him, you know,” Alice said quietly.
“I will not.”
“You will. He is to be your husband.”
“He is not yet my husband.”
“He will be by Michaelmas. You cannot avoid him until Michaelmas, Daphne. It is not polite. I refuse to spend the entire walk pretending he is not over there.”
Daphne flushed pink. She did, of course, look toward the corner of the room where Isaac was standing with his father’s friends, looking as though he would rather be in any of the world’s libraries—as always.
He saw her look. He looked away. Then, with the very poor discipline of a young man in love, he looked back.
“There,” Alice murmured. “Now you are blushing, and so is he. Go and stand near him.”
“Alice—”
“Daphne.”
“He has not asked me to dance.”
“He will. Go and stand near him, so he can ask.”
“You will be alone.”
“I will not be alone for very long, I do not think.” Alice did not look at the window. She did not allow herself to. “Go.”
Daphne went.
Alice was left alone for perhaps two minutes. Her mother had been waylaid by Lady Sefton on the subject of a niece. Her father was nowhere in sight which meant he was in the dining room.
She had stationed herself near the door to the small room where the matrons did their gossiping because it was a position from which one could be seen by everyone in the room without appearing to be looking at any of them.
It was an excellent position. It was also exactly the position that would force the Duke of Langton to cross the entire length of the ballroom to reach her.
“Lady Alice.” The voice came near her ear, low and raspy.
Her body recognized it before her mind did. Her body recognized it in the small soft hairs at the back of her neck which stood up. Her body recognized it before she had thought to turn, and she did not turn. She did not turn for two further breaths because she had been waiting for him to find her.
“Your Grace.”
“You look very well this evening.”
“Thank you.”
“I have been watching you for nine minutes.”
“That is a great compliment, Your Grace, considering the circumstances.”
“I have been counting.”
“Of course, you have.”
“Have I caused offense, Lady Alice?”
“I cannot imagine why you should think that.”
“There was a letter.”
She nodded. “Indeed.”
“It was not a friendly letter.”
“It was not an unfriendly one.”
“You make the distinction.”
“I do.”
She turned then. She turned because she could not, in fairness, conduct an entire conversation with her shoulder, and she turned because she had given herself ten minutes, and ten minutes had passed, and she turned because she was, in the parts of herself she would not for any inducement have admitted to, wildly curious to see what Cassian Arnolds looked like in a coat that was not black.
He was in dark blue. He looked, she registered with a quiet and treacherous warmth at the back of her throat, very well in dark blue.
In fact, he looked like a man who had been deliberately dressed by a sister who did not wish him to be at all comfortable in his own clothes and who had achieved her goal.
The color did something to his eyes which were already gray and which had, in the candlelight, turned a particular shade of slate that Alice did not have any business noticing. The black of his hair against the blue was also a thing she had no business noticing, and she noticed it anyway.
She tore her gaze from his face and turned it, with great care, to his cravat. “Your Grace,” she said, “you have not called on me.”
“I am aware.”
“You have not sent flowers.”
“I am aware of that as well.”
“You have not, in three days, given the smallest indication that you remember I exist.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“I remember that you exist.” He said it with his eyes on hers and his face entirely composed.
Alice felt the warmth at the back of her throat slide down and settle somewhere unhelpful. She lifted her fan, snapped it open, and used it, with great determination, to fan her own face.
“Your dance card, Lady Alice.”
“My dance card?”
“You have one, I assume.”
She had one. It hung from a thin silk ribbon at her wrist. She unhooked it and held it out because there was a procedure for this, and the procedure required her to surrender the card and him to inscribe his name in one of the slots.
She had always considered the procedure very civilized, but now, she considered it barbaric because Cassian’s gloved fingers brushed hers when he took the card, and she had to remember, immediately and forcibly, how to breathe.
He did not write his name in one of the slots. He wrote his name in all of them. Or at least he planned to, he had already gotten to the tenth one. She gently touched his hand.
“Your Grace.”
“Yes, Lady Alice.”
“You have written your name in all of them.”
“Almost. Are you stopping me from claiming the last one?”
“That is not—”
“It is not, no.”
“There are eleven slots.”
“There are.”
“It is not done, Your Grace.”
“It is not done as a rule,” he agreed. “It is done occasionally by men whose betrotheds have written them very pointed letters.”
“My letter was not pointed.”
“Your letter was sharpened on both sides, Lady Alice.” He re-fastened the card at her wrist himself which was a thing he had no business doing since she had hands and was perfectly capable of using them.
But he did it anyway with two fingers under the silk ribbon and his thumb against the inside of her wrist for half a heartbeat too long.
“There. Shall we dance the first dance?”
The musicians were tuning their instruments.
Alice’s wrist was on fire where his thumb had been. “Yes, Your Grace.”
He offered her his arm, she took it, and they went to the dance floor.
They were not, she discovered as they took their places, the only couple who had drawn attention this evening. They were, however, the couple who had attracted the most attention.
She could feel the attention of the room moving with them.
She could feel her mother somewhere, watching with a particular trembling pride.
She could feel the eyes of Lady Sefton, who had nodded so neutrally at the door and who was now committing to memory the precise length of time Cassian’s hand rested against her back.
The musicians struck up a waltz.
The waltz was still new enough at Almack’s to be daring.
It required the gentleman to place his right hand on the lady’s waist and the lady to place her left hand on the gentleman’s shoulder.
More than anything else, it required that the lady and gentleman look at one another for the duration of the dance because to look anywhere else was to be terribly clumsy about it.
Alice looked at his cravat.
“Eyes on me, Lady Alice.”
She glanced up. She glanced down. She glanced up again. “Your Grace, I cannot—”
“Eyes on me.” He did not raise his voice.
He did not need to. He had a way of saying a thing as though it had already been settled, and she felt the saying of it at the base of her spine.
“We are to look as though we have been waiting for this dance for two years. We will not achieve that effect if you keep staring at my neckcloth.”
“I am not staring at your neckcloth, Your Grace. I am trying not to.”
He laughed.
It was a small thing. It was almost nothing. It was the briefest exhalation through the nose, and his shoulders moved with it just once, yet every nerve in her body registered that the Duke of Langton had laughed at something she had said. She might never in her life recover from it.
“Look at me, Alice.” He had dropped her title.
She looked at him.
It was a mistake. She had known it would be a mistake.
She had known from the carriage, from the front steps, from the moment she had decided she would write him the letter that what she was doing was going to require her to look at him and that looking at him was the part she had not adequately prepared for.
He was looking down at her. He was not smiling.
His face had gotten, since she had last seen it two nights ago at his dining table, no softer, and he was looking at her with a particular attention that was not the attention he had given any other person in any other ballroom in the two years that she had known him.
She could feel it like a hand at her throat.
“Better,” he said softly.
“Your Grace—”
“You are doing well. Keep looking.”
They turned. He guided her through the figure easily, the way a man who had been taught to dance well at the age of twelve guided everything. Her own feet knew the figure perfectly which left her with nothing whatsoever to think about which was a catastrophe.
“You are very quiet, Lady Alice.”
“Am I?”
“You are usually less so.”
“You usually deserve it.”
“I am sure I deserve it now. Tell me what you are thinking.”
“I am not thinking, Your Grace.”
“Then think of something and tell it to me, or else the room is going to begin to suspect that we have nothing to say to one another.”
She drew a breath. The breath caught somewhere in her chest. He felt it. She saw him feel it. She saw the small twitch at the corner of his mouth, the small darkening behind his eyes. He had felt it, and he was pleased about it, and that was, she decided, intolerable.
“Your Grace,” she said carefully, “you are very pleased with yourself.”
“I am not.”
“You are. You are looking at me as though I am a horse you have just bought at Tattersall’s.”
“That,” he said, “is a very expensive comparison, Lady Alice.”
“You shall pay it, Your Grace, if you keep looking at me like that in front of three hundred people.”
“I shall look at you exactly as I please.” His hand on her waist tightened briefly.
“And you shall look at me. And in twenty minutes, when this dance and the next have ended, you shall make a small excuse to your mother, and you shall go through the door at the left of the orchestra into the small terrace beyond it, and you shall wait for me there for exactly four minutes, and then I shall come and find you.”
She did not stop dancing.
It was perhaps the strangest accomplishment of her life that she did not stop dancing. Her feet kept moving. Her hand moved with his. Her expression, she was almost certain, did not change.
“Your Grace.”
“Yes, My Lady.”
“Four minutes?”
“Four minutes.”
“And what is to happen in those four minutes?”
“You shall stand on the terrace, look out at the garden, admire the moon if there is one, and not think about me at all.”
“And in the fifth?”
He did not smile. He did not, she realized, smile through any of it.
“In the fifth,” he said, “we shall find out.”