Chapter 20
“Blue certainly is your color.”
Louisa set down her embroidery when the voice drifted toward her. She had been expecting this call. He came on Tuesdays and Fridays, and today was Friday, and the clock on the mantelpiece had struck three only minutes before his card arrived on the salver.
“I wear blue often,” she muttered. “You have never remarked upon it before.”
“I suppose I have not.” He stepped inside. He did not sit down. He stood near the fireplace and turned his hat by the brim, rotating it in slow quarter-turns as though testing the stitching. “How have you been?”
“Well. And you?”
“Quite well.”
The clock ticked. Outside, a cart rattled past in the street, and a boy shouted after it. Louisa picked up the embroidery again. She set it down. She picked it up once more and held the needle without stitching.
“The weather has been warm,” she offered.
“Very warm. Unusually so for June.”
“I noticed.”
“As did I.”
Silence followed his words. Oliver turned his hat another quarter. His gaze moved from the mantelpiece to the curtains to the painting above the sideboard and back to the mantelpiece, landing everywhere except on her.
She looked at him silently. He had kissed her.
She had walked home afterward. She had sat on the edge of her bed. She had pressed her fingers against her lips and felt the impression of his mouth still there, stubborn as a bruise, and for twenty minutes she had not moved.
Now he was standing in her drawing room discussing the weather.
“I called to tell you that Lady Fitzwilliam’s card party is Thursday,” he said. “Frederick is expected to attend.”
“I see.”
“It would be… advantageous for you to be there. He has been seeking your company more frequently, and an evening of cards allows for sustained conversation without the formality of dancing.”
His voice lacked all the warmth she had gotten so used to. So fond of. He might have been reading estate correspondence aloud the way it sounded now.
“Oliver.”
He looked at her.
“Thank you,” she said. “I shall attend.”
“Good.” He placed his hat on his head. “I should let you return to your embroidery.”
“You have been here four minutes.”
“I have a prior engagement.” He bowed. He crossed the room. At the door he paused, his hand on the frame, and she watched his shoulders tighten beneath his coat before he turned back. “The blue truly does suit you.”
He left. She heard his boots on the stairs, the front door opening and closing, the clip of his horse on the cobbles. She sat with the embroidery in her lap and the needle between her fingers and the ghost of his mouth still pressed against hers, three days old and showing no sign of fading.
* * *
Lady Fitzwilliam’s card party filled every chair in the house. Louisa arrived with her mother and found Frederick already stationed beside the door. His face lit up with that dashing smile when he saw her.
“Miss Fairchild.” He was at her side before she had surrendered her shawl to the footman. “I had hoped you would come. Allow me to find you a seat near the window. The room is rather close tonight.”
He guided her through the crowd with his hand hovering at her elbow. He drew out her chair. He fetched her a glass of ratafia without being asked and placed it at her right hand with the air of someone who had been planning the gesture since luncheon.
“You seem quiet this evening,” he said, settling into the chair beside hers. “I hope nothing has troubled you.”
She attempted a smile. “Not at all. I am simply thinking.”
Frederick’s expression softened. “You are always so composed, Miss Louisa. I confess it is one of the qualities I most admire in you. There is a modesty about you that is rare in this Season. So many young ladies thrust themselves forward. You do not.”
He mistook her confusion for reserve. He interpreted the distraction clouding her face as propriety, as feminine restraint, as proof of exactly the kind of woman he wished to marry. Louisa opened her mouth to correct him and found she did not know what correction to offer.
“That is kind of you to say,” she managed.
Across the room, Oliver arrived late. He entered through the far door, spoke briefly to Lady Fitzwilliam, and accepted a glass of wine from a passing footman.
His gaze moved across the assembled guests, passed over Louisa and Frederick at the card table, and continued onward without stopping.
He crossed to Lord Dalton and began a conversation about racing that carried easily above the murmur of the room.
He did not look at her again. Not while Frederick dealt the cards. Not while Mrs. Alderton claimed the first trick. Not while Louisa played the wrong suit twice in succession and drew a mild rebuke from Lord Barrett, who took his whist very seriously.
Frederick noticed none of this. He was watching Louisa with quiet pleasure, reading her silences as grace, her distraction as modesty, her inability to meet his eyes as shyness. He leaned close between hands.
“Tell me, miss Louisa, are you happy to be back in the city? Or do you rather miss the countryside?”
“The country,” she said. “I have always preferred the country.”
“As do I. There is a view from the south terrace at Langley Park that I believe you would appreciate. On clear mornings you can see the church spire in the next village…”
She lost track of his voice and turned her head sideways when she noticed a movement.
Oliver was leaving. She saw him set his glass on the tray of a passing footman, bow to Lady Fitzwilliam, and move toward the door.
At the threshold, his gaze found hers at last, brief and unguarded, before he turned and disappeared into the corridor.
Frederick touched her wrist. “Shall I fetch you more ratafia?”
“Please.”
He rose. Louisa sat at the card table with her untouched glass and her losing hand and the fading impression of Oliver’s face in the doorway. For the next week, Louisa waited in vain for Oliver to appear.
He did not. She waited until the following Saturday, when the Whitmore ball arrived.
Louisa dressed with more care than usual. Choosing a blue dress, pinned her curls to her head with more care, and ensured that her cheeks were a lovely shade of pink. She twirled in front of the mirror far too long before finally making her way to the carriage.
Of course, Frederick awaited her as she arrived, and Louisa smiled, more out of habit than anything else.
Frederick claimed the cotillion, the first waltz, and the quadrille. Three dances. Eleanor, standing at Louisa’s shoulder when the card was filled, said nothing, though her brows were lifted.
“Shall we?” Frederick extended his hand as the cotillion struck up.
They moved through the figures. He was a competent dancer, his steps clean, his timing reliable. Between the turns, he spoke.
“I have been thinking about what I should like my life to look like in five years.” He guided her through the promenade. “Not merely the estate, not merely position. I mean the substance of it. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“What are your hopes, Louisa? For marriage. For the years that follow.”
He had never asked her this before. He had spoken about his own plans, about Langley Park and the tenants and the south terrace. He had not, until this moment, asked what she wanted.
“I should like children,” she said. “A household that feels alive. Space to read, to walk, to think.” The words came slowly, tested against the air. “I should like to be useful. Not decorative. I should like to be seen as a partner, not merely a companion.”
Frederick nodded. “A sensible wish. I have always valued sensibility in a wife.”
He turned her through the figure. His hand was steady at her waist. His smile was warm.
He was offering her, in the crowded noise of the Whitmore ballroom, an opening into the life she had imagined for two years: the house, the children, the quiet respectability she had longed for since her first Season.
She should have been happy.
“And what would you expect of a wife?” she asked. “In that life.”
“Expect?” He looked amused. “I should expect nothing unreasonable. The management of the household, naturally. Hosting when required. The usual obligations of a country wife.” He smiled again. “You would not find it burdensome. You are exceptionally capable.”
Her smile stiffened at the word. Capable.
He admired her capability, her composure, her sensibility.
He admired the useful parts of her, the parts that ran households and balanced accounts and smiled at dinner guests.
He did not know about the parts that stayed up late reading novels, or forged her father’s signature at sixteen, or laughed so hard at Oliver’s jokes that she forgot to breathe.
The music shifted. She looked over Frederick’s shoulder and scanned the ballroom.
Oliver stood at the far wall beside a marble column.
He was watching her dance. His glass was untouched in his hand, his body angled away from the crowd, his attention fixed on the floor where she and Frederick moved through the figures.
When their eyes met, neither of them looked away.
The ballroom noise faded to a hum, and for three full seconds the only real distance in the room was the thirty feet between his column and her place in Frederick’s arms.
He broke first. He turned to Sir William Hatch and spoke a word she could not hear, and his face resumed the easy, charming mask she had learned to recognize as armor.
“Louisa?” Frederick’s voice, patient. “You seem distracted.”
“Forgive me. The room is warm.”
“Shall I fetch you a glass of lemonade after the set?”
“That would be kind.”
The cotillion ended. Frederick led her to the edge of the floor and went to find lemonade.
Louisa stood alone near the pillar where Oliver had been.
A faint trace of sandalwood hung in the air beside the marble, or she imagined it did.
She held her dance card and looked at the names penciled inside it.
Frederick returned seconds later with the lemonade. It was warm.