Chapter 10 #2
“I told you not to prepare a script. You should still dress. Mrs. Alderton’s musicale is not the sort of event one attends in a walking dress.”
She stood. He stood. He returned the parasol. Their fingers brushed during the exchange, the lightest graze of skin against skin, his bare hand against the cotton of her glove. The contact lasted less than a second. She pulled back quickly. He let her.
They walked back along the Serpentine in a silence that had changed shape since the morning, thicker, occupied by thoughts neither of them voiced.
* * *
Mrs. Alderton’s musicale was held in a drawing room too small for its ambitions. Forty guests crowded between gilded chairs, the air heavy with candle smoke. A soprano from the Italian opera sang Handel with impressive force and questionable pitch.
Louisa sat near the back, her hands folded in her lap. The soprano finished. Applause rippled through the room. Guests rose, migrated toward the refreshments. Louisa stood. She smoothed her skirts. She looked for Oliver across the room.
He stood near the far wall, speaking with Lord Alderton and an elderly gentleman whose name she could not recall. His posture was relaxed, his smile easy. He caught her eye across the crowd and raised his glass a fraction of an inch, a private toast, invisible to anyone not watching for it.
She looked away. Her pulse beat against the pearl at her throat.
“Miss Fairchild.”
Frederick Langley appeared beside her with two glasses of wine, offering one with the practiced ease of someone who had never once wondered whether his company was wanted.
“Lord Langley. Thank you.” She accepted the glass. The wine was warm from the crowded room.
“I was hoping to find you this evening.” He smiled.
The candlelight caught the sharp line of his jaw, the careful arrangement of his cravat.
He was handsome. He had always been handsome.
“I understand you attended the Royal Academy exhibition. Several people mentioned your remarks about the Dido painting.”
“Is that so?”
“Lady Fitzwilliam among them. She described you as ‘the most refreshing voice in that gallery.’” He sipped his wine. “I confess, I have been meaning to ask you about it. What was it about the painting that troubled you?”
Louisa opened her mouth. The old reflex surged, the urge to soften, to deflect, to offer a modest disclaimer and retreat into pleasantries.
She thought of Oliver on the bench. Trust that you are interesting enough.
“The composition troubled me,” she said. “The painter treated Dido as decoration rather than a protagonist. She founded a city through cleverness, not beauty, and the canvas reduced her to a woman pointing at a horizon.”
Frederick’s eyebrows rose. “That is rather a bold assessment.”
“Perhaps. But… It is still lovely. The technique was accomplished. I simply felt the artist misunderstood his subject.”
He regarded her for a long moment. She held his gaze. She did not fill the silence with an apology.
He lifted a brow. “I looked at that painting for twenty minutes and did not see what you saw in thirty seconds. You have a remarkable eye, Miss Fairchild.”
“I have opinions. Whether they are remarkable is debatable, I suppose.”
He laughed. It was a warm sound, genuine, surprised. He shifted his weight, turning his body toward her in a way that excluded the rest of the room.
“Tell me about this botanist I have heard rumors of. Mrs. Chalcott said you spent quite some time in conversation with a gentleman at Hyde Park this afternoon.”
“Mr. Hargrove. He studies ferns.”
“Ferns.” Frederick’s eyes crinkled. “You have hidden depths, Miss Fairchild. I have known you for years, and I am only now discovering that you hold strong opinions about Renaissance painting and maintain friendships with botanists.”
The soprano returned to her position near the pianoforte. Frederick did not look toward the stage.
“Are… are you reading anything at present?” he asked.
“Burney. Camilla.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “My sister admires Burney enormously. She is forever pressing novels upon me. I confess I rarely have time for fiction.”
He tilted his wine glass between his fingers when she did not respond. “What is it about her that appeals to you?”
She spoke without even thinking of it. “The honesty. Burney writes women who make one small mistake and carry the weight of it through every chapter that follows. She understands that ruin does not arrive in grand moments. Sometimes it arrives through a single word chosen poorly at dinner.”
Frederick’s brow lifted. “You are full of surprises, Miss Fairchild. I feel as though I have been introduced to someone entirely new.”
The words pleased her, in the way that sunlight through a window pleased even when the glass was cold. He was looking at her. He was asking questions. He was standing close enough that she could smell the starch in his cravat.
“I have always been this person,” she said. “You are simply asking for the first time.”
Frederick paused. She watched the words settle into his expression. For a moment, his composure slipped, and she glimpsed the faintest edge of discomfort, a man confronted with a correction he had not expected from her.
Then he recovered. “Well,” he said, his smile reassembling itself. “I shall have to ask more often. It seems I have been missing quite the performance.”
The word sat between them. Performance. As though the thoughts she had carried for years, the hours spent over lending catalogues and lesson plans, amounted to an evening’s entertainment he had been fortunate enough to catch.
She smiled. She did not correct him.
Eleanor caught her eye from across the room and raised both eyebrows so high they vanished beneath her hair.
When Frederick finally excused himself to greet his host, Louisa stood alone with her empty wine glass and a breathless, dizzy feeling she had never associated with this man before. He had listened. He had asked questions. He had looked at her as though she were worth the attention.
She turned to find Oliver.
He stood where he had been all evening, near the far wall, his glass half-raised, his eyes already on her.
Had been on her, she realized. Had been on her the entire time Frederick stood at her side, tracking the conversation he could not hear, reading the success in the lift of her chin and the steadiness of her voice.
She smiled at him. She could not help it. The triumph was too large and too new to contain, and he was the only person in the room who understood what it meant.
He raised his glass. The private toast again, meant for no one but her.
She raised her empty glass in return. Their eyes held for a beat too long. The crowd moved between them, bodies shifting, the soprano launching into an encore that nobody had requested. Louisa lost sight of him behind a woman’s feathered headdress.
When the crowd cleared, he was gone.
She lowered her glass. The warmth from his smile lingered beneath her ribs, steady, entirely unrelated to Frederick Langley’s compliments or the botanist in Hyde Park.