Chapter 12
“Three invitations in one morning, Louisa. Three.”
Eleanor held the cards between her fingers, fanning them like a winning hand at whist. The morning room at the Fairchild townhouse was bright with June sunlight, dust motes turning lazy circles in the air above the tea tray.
“I can count, Eleanor.”
“Can you? Because your face suggests you have received three summons to appear before a magistrate rather than three invitations to some of the most coveted events of the Season.” Eleanor turned the first card over.
“Lady Tyndale’s garden luncheon. Last Season, she seated you behind a potted fern at her musicale because there was no room at the principal tables.
” She turned the second. “Mrs. Waverly’s card party.
She once told your mother that the Fairchild girls were perfectly pleasant, which we both know is the cruelest compliment in the English language.
” The third. “And Lady Acker. Lady Acker, Louisa. She invites forty people to her summer ball. Forty. The Prince Regent himself was turned away three years ago because the guest list was full.”
“That is not true.”
“The point stands. You are being courted by every hostess in London, and you are sitting there buttering toast as though nothing has changed.”
Louisa set down her knife. The butter had gone soft in the warmth. She wiped her fingers on the napkin in her lap.
“It has not changed,” she said. “Not really. They are not inviting me. They are inviting the woman the Duke of Ashford appears to favor.”
Eleanor lowered the cards. Her dark eyes sharpened.
“And if that is the case? If the invitations have arrived because Oliver Sinclair danced with you at the Thornbury ball and walked with you at Hartfield and stood beside you at three consecutive gatherings in full view of half the ton? What of it? You are here. You received them. Your name is on those cards, not his.”
“My name is merely on those cards because his is attached to it.”
“Your name,” Eleanor said firmly, “is on those cards because you have spent the last fortnight being witty, confident, and thoroughly charming in the company of people who were too foolish to notice you before. Oliver may have opened the door, but you walked through it. Do not give him all the credit.”
Louisa looked at the invitations spread across the table beside the marmalade.
Thick cream paper. Copperplate script. The kind of stationery she had spent years receiving only in smaller quantities, addressed with less enthusiasm, tucked between bills from the milliner and letters from elderly relations in the country.
She picked up Lady Acker’s card. The paper was heavy between her fingers. Embossed. A gold crest pressed into the corner.
“I shall need a new gown,” she said.
Eleanor’s smile was triumphant. “Now you are being sensible.”
Time seemed to fly like an eagle, and before Louisa was truly ready, Tuesday had arrived, and she found herself at Lady Tyndale’s luncheon.
The garden was magnificent: climbing roses cascaded over a series of arched trellises, and round tables dressed in white linen stood at intervals across the manicured lawn.
A string quartet played beneath a canvas awning.
Footmen carried silver trays of champagne.
Lady Tyndale greeted Louisa at the gate as though they were old friends.
“Miss Fairchild! How delightful. I was so pleased you could attend. We are quite informal today, as you can see. Do make yourself comfortable.”
The greeting lasted twenty seconds. It was the longest conversation Lady Tyndale had ever held with her. Louisa thanked her, accepted a glass of champagne she did not want, and moved through the garden with the practiced smile she had been perfecting since her first Season.
She knew why Lady Tyndale was pleased. She could feel it in the eyes that tracked her progress across the lawn, in the way groups opened to include her, in the slight, assessing tilt of heads when she joined a conversation.
They were not looking at Louisa Fairchild.
They were looking at the woman who had captured the Duke of Ashford’s interest, and they were trying to understand how.
Frederick found her near the rose trellises.
“Miss Fairchild.” He appeared from behind a hedge of lavender with the easy confidence of someone who expected to be welcome wherever he arrived. “I hoped I would find you here.”
“Lord Langley.” She curtsied. “Have you been searching?”
“I would not call it searching.” His smile deepened. “Merely a persistent interest in the guest list.”
He fell into step beside her. They walked along the gravel path that wound through Lady Tyndale’s garden, past banks of foxgloves and delphiniums whose purple spires stood tall against the bright sky.
“I attended the most fascinating lecture last evening,” Frederick said.
“At the Royal Society. Professor Buckland on the geological formations of the Lake District. Quite extraordinary. He has been examining the slate deposits near Borrowdale and has developed a theory about the stratification patterns that challenges nearly everything we thought we understood about the region’s mineral composition. ”
“Stratification patterns?” Louisa repeated. She heard Oliver’s voice in her head, steady as a metronome. Build the next question on what they have just told you.
“Indeed. The layers of Skiddaw slate sit beneath the volcanic series in a sequence that Buckland believes predates any previously recorded formation in England. He brought samples. Actual fragments of rock, passed around the lecture hall. I held a piece that may have been two hundred million years old.” Frederick’s stride quickened with his enthusiasm.
A low branch caught at Louisa’s bonnet and she ducked beneath it.
He did not notice. “The implications for our understanding of the Lake District’s origins are considerable.
If Buckland is correct, the entire volcanic history of the region must be reconsidered. ”
“What drew you to the lecture?” she asked. Ask questions that require more than a yes or no answer.
“I have long been interested in natural philosophy. My father kept a collection of minerals at Langley Park. Quartz, feldspar, a rather fine specimen of galena he acquired in Cornwall.” He turned to her with the gratified expression of a man discovering a willing audience.
“Have you ever held a piece of galena, Miss Fairchild? The weight of it is remarkable. One would not expect a stone of that size to feel so heavy in the hand.”
“I have not. Does the weight come from the lead content?”
His eyebrows rose. “You know about the lead content?”
“Only from reading. I recall a mention in one of my father’s almanacs.
” She did not add that the almanac had been wedged between a volume of Restoration comedy and a veterinary guide, read during the years when her education had been whatever she could reach from the library shelves.
Follow his answers. Let him feel the conversation is a bridge.
“How remarkable. Most women would not have the faintest idea what galena contains.” He said it warmly, as though he were praising a child who had managed long division.
“Buckland spoke for nearly two hours. Two hours, Miss Fairchild, and I could have listened for two more. He described the way the limestone fractures along the bedding planes, the manner in which water has carved channels through rock that was laid down before any creature walked the earth. It makes one feel rather insignificant.”
“Or rather connected,” she said. “To be standing on ground that old.”
Frederick paused. He looked at her as though she had said something he had not expected, and for a moment she thought he might ask what she meant. Instead he smiled and continued walking.
“I intend to visit the Lake District this autumn. Buckland has offered to guide a small party to the Borrowdale deposits. I should like to see the formations for myself.” He clasped his hands behind his back.
“My mother thinks it a peculiar hobby for a gentleman. She would prefer I took up hunting.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“That hunting requires one to wake before dawn and associate with dogs. Geology merely requires a hammer and sturdy boots.”
She laughed, but she was aware, beneath the ease of the conversation, of the architecture holding it up.
Every question she asked had been placed like a rung on a ladder, each one built from his last answer, each one designed to keep him climbing.
She was not talking. She was conducting.
Guiding him through his own enthusiasm with the quiet precision Oliver had drilled into her on a bench beside the Serpentine.
Frederick had not asked her a single question.
He had not noticed.
“I have given some thought to the country this autumn,” she offered. “There is a cottage near Farnham that my mother has considered. Quieter. More affordable.”
She had not meant to say the last word. It slipped out, bare and honest, and she felt the heat rise in her cheeks.
Frederick’s expression shifted. A flicker of discomfort crossed his features, there and gone, the look of someone who preferred not to acknowledge that some families counted their pennies.
“The countryside is lovely in autumn,” he said. “I am sure you will find it restorative.”
He had not heard her. Not truly. He had heard the word affordable and stepped around it the way one stepped around a puddle on a pavement. Politely. Completely.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I believe I see Mrs. Waverly near the fountain. I promised her I would say hello.”
She stood. She crossed the lawn. She did not look back, though she was aware of Frederick’s gaze following her until another guest claimed his attention.
Mrs. Waverly was not near the fountain. But the two ladies on the bench were.
Louisa heard them before she reached the gravel path that ran behind the fountain.