Chapter 3
ONE YEAR LATER
“Tell me, Your Grace, is it true that you keep the cattle indoors through your winters? For warmth?”
The circle of lords laughed on cue, glasses catching the chandelier light.
Magnus turned his own glass by the stem and let them have their moment.
“We do,” he said. “Though I’ve found that a well-bred beast improves any room it’s put in, present company being the exception.”
His friend Leo, who stood at his shoulder, made a sound into his champagne that he quickly muffled with a cough.
Lord Crenshaw did not laugh with the others.
He was a narrow man with a soft chin and a way of looking down a nose that had never been broken.
He waited for the laughter to fade before he spoke again.
“One does wonder, though. All these Scots come south of late, hats in hand, seeking English wives and English money. A man never quite knows where a Scot’s loyalties lie, history being what it is. ”
The word settled on Magnus the way cold water settled—all at once and everywhere.
Loyalties. History.
He held very still and let the old thing pass through him and out again, and when he answered, his voice did not waver.
“Aye, history’s a cruel keeper of accounts.” He looked at Crenshaw over the rim of his glass. “Speaking of which, how does yer faither find the air in Calais these days? I’m told the creditors rarely follow a man across the Channel, so long as he doesnae mind never comin’ home.”
The silence that dropped over the circle was worth the whole miserable evening.
Crenshaw’s soft chin turned the color of tallow. Someone coughed. Someone else discovered a pressing need to watch the dancing.
“Well.” Leo’s hand closed around Magnus’s arm. “On that triumphant note. Gentlemen, always a pleasure.” He steered him away, through the crush and toward the wall. “You cannot simply say things like that.”
“He started the reckoning. I only balanced it.”
“You buried the man in front of six witnesses, and half of them are in his mother’s debt.” Leo exhaled. “God, but that was satisfying to watch.”
They did not reach the wall. A knot of debutantes had already caught their scent, mothers steering daughters into their path with the precision of cavalry. Within moments, Magnus found himself ringed by fans, feathers, and curious eyes.
Leo bloomed at once. He bowed, he flattered, and he had two of the girls laughing before he had finished his second sentence. Magnus stood among them as one stood among a pen of clever dogs, waiting.
“Your Grace, is it true,” ventured a girl in yellow, “that Scotsmen wear nothing at all beneath the—oh, I cannot even say it.” She dissolved into giggles behind her fan.
“Do you truly speak Gaelic?” asked another. “Say something savage. Go on.”
“I heard your castles have no roofs,” said a third, delighted. “However do you keep the rain off, Your Grace?”
“We stand under the nearest Englishman,” Magnus replied. “They’re forever rainin’ opinions.”
The girl in yellow blinked, uncertain whether she had been complimented.
Magnus set his untouched glass on a passing tray, inclined his head the precise degree that courtesy demanded and no further, and walked out of the circle before any of them could form another question.
Leo caught up to him near the card room.
“You know,” he said, matching his stride, “there is a theory, popular among people who wish to be received in society, that one should not insult the lords and the ladies in the same quarter of an hour. Reputation is a garden, Magnus. You are salting yours.”
“It’s a garden of hothouse flowers grown to be looked at and nothing else. Every word in that room is a lie wearin’ a better word’s coat.” Magnus dragged a hand down his face. “I hate this city. I hate the smell of it, the sound of it, every powdered soul crammed into it.”
“That’s odd.” Leo plucked two fresh glasses from a tray and pressed one into Magnus’s hand. “Because you did not hate it last year. Not the night of that masked business at the maze. You came back to our lodgings that night lit up like a struck match and pleased about it.”
Magnus said nothing.
“The little fox, as you called her.” Leo watched him over his glass. “You never found her.”
“I looked.” The words came out flat, worn smooth from a year of use.
“The house wouldnae give up its guest list. The old woman who sent the invitation couldnae recall half the names, and the half she recalled led nowhere. A masked lass in a house full of masked lasses, and nae a thread to pull.” Magnus turned the glass without drinking.
“She could be married by now. In London, in Cornwall, dead of a fever for all I ken. A year’s a long while to chase a voice in a hedge. ”
“Or,” Leo countered, “she is unmarried, and bored, and somewhere in London this very Season, and you are being needlessly funereal about it.” He tilted his head toward the ballroom. “She could be in that room.”
Magnus rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “There are matters that need me attention a great deal more than a lass in a fox mask.”
“Ah, those matters.” Leo’s voice dropped, the humor gone out of it. “The ones you crossed a border to be near. The names in that little book you think I’ve never seen.”
“Leave it.”
Leo studied him. “I only mean to say that a man can hunt his father’s ghost and still let himself want one living thing. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Magnus set the second glass down as untouched as the first.
Across the room, a woman laughed too loudly, a hundred candles burned to illuminate people saying nothing to one another, and the weight of why he was truly here pressed down on him like a hand between his shoulders.
“I’m going,” he said. “Stay. Charm yer debutantes. I’ve had me fill of this city for one night.”
He turned toward the far doors and the cool dark of the corridor beyond, where at least a man could hear himself think.
“Straighten your spine, Rosaline. You are standing like a governess. And Beatrice, that is not a smile; that is a threat. You look as though you mean to bite the next man who approaches.”
“I do mean to.” Beatrice bared her teeth a fraction wider. “It saves so much time.”
“We are too close to the door.” Samuel’s gaze swept across the room and found it wanting, as it found everything wanting.
“No one of consequence lingers near a door. We shall never be seen here.” He took each sister by an elbow and repositioned them like furniture.
“There. Now, smile as though you are enjoying yourselves, which God knows one of you might manage.”
Rosaline tried. She lifted the corners of her mouth and felt the shape of it sit wrong on her face.
The ballroom pressed in on every side, hot with too many bodies, loud with a music she could not hear over the roar of so many voices.
Beneath her gloves, her palms had grown damp.
She counted the panes in the tall windows for something to hold on to.
“You might try speaking when a gentleman addresses you,” Samuel said to her, his voice low. “A single word. Two, if you are feeling reckless. This is your third Season, Rosaline. People have begun to notice a girl who cannot open her mouth.”
“Perhaps if the gentlemen were worth answering—” Beatrice began.
“Perhaps if you held your tongue for the length of one waltz.” Samuel straightened his cuffs. “I see Lady Hartsfield. I mean to remind her of our connection. Stay here. Both of you. Do not move, do not slouch, and for the love of heaven, do not say anything memorable.”
He disappeared into the crowd before either of them could reply.
Rosaline let out a breath.
Beatrice slipped a hand into hers and squeezed once.
“He is a horror,” she murmured. “You know that, don’t you? However much he says it in a reasonable voice.”
Before Rosaline could answer, a trio of young ladies drifted near, their silks whispering, their smiles the sharp kind she had learned to dread.
“Lady Rosaline.” The eldest of them dipped into a curtsy that was all mockery. “We wondered whether you had lost your voice entirely, or whether you were simply saving it for someone important. And your sister, of course. So refreshingly blunt.”
“Refreshing is a kind word for it,” said the second behind her fan. “I would have said unmarriageable.”
“How fortunate, then,” Beatrice said, sweet as poison, “that no one asked either of you to marry her. Do run along. I believe there is a mirror in the next room dying for your attention.”
The eldest girl’s face pinched. She opened her mouth to say something worse, and that was the moment Samuel reappeared, having heard the last of it, his color high.
“Ladies, forgive my sister.” He said it to them, not to Beatrice, and then bowed, actually bowed. Rosaline watched him choose strangers over his own blood without a flicker. “She is high-spirited and speaks before she thinks. It shan’t happen again. Please, enjoy your evening.”
He waited until the girls had swept off, satisfied, before he grabbed Rosaline by the arm and drew both sisters into the shallow alcove beside a pillar. His grip was not gentle. He leaned close to Rosaline’s ear, and his voice, when it came, was low enough that only she could hear it.
“Understand me. You will accept a suitable man this Season. You will do it before the summer, or you will take Beatrice down with you and Ivy after her, because no decent family will touch a house with a spinster rotting at its center.” His breath was warm and terrible against her cheek.
“I will not let you ruin us, Rosaline. I will not. Now, go and be pleasant to someone before I lose what patience I have left.”
He released her and stepped back, straightening his coat, a pleasant smile arranging itself on his face.
Rosaline made herself cross the floor. She made herself stop at the edge of a cluster of gentlemen and wait for a gap in their conversation.
“It is a dreadful crush tonight, is it not?” Her voice came out smaller than she meant. “One can hardly find room to stand.”
The nearest lord glanced down at her as though a chair had spoken. “Quite,” he said, and turned back to his friends. “As I was saying, the gray took the third fence like it wasn’t there—”
She stood a moment in the space where a reply would have gone, then made herself move to the next group, the next chance.
“I understand the soprano trained in Milan.” She addressed it to a young man with a bored, handsome face. “They say the second aria was written especially for her, which perhaps explains why she—” The sentence buckled halfway. “Why it… Why the range of it sat so.”
“Mm.” His eyes had already drifted over her shoulder to someone worth finding. “Do excuse me.”
He was gone before she could speak again.
Behind her, close enough to touch, two fans lifted, and behind them two women laughed, low and private. Rosaline could not have sworn the laughter was at her expense. Her body was certain of it anyway.
The heat rose first. Then the noise of the room began to fold in on itself, every voice rising into a single roar. The edges of her surroundings softened and blurred. Her lungs would not fill.
She pressed a hand to her chest and felt her heart slamming as though she had been running, though she had not moved, and the more she willed the breath to come, the higher and thinner it climbed.
Air. She needed air, and a door, and the absence of every eye in the room.
She turned and pushed through the crowd, murmuring apologies she could not hear, aiming for the tall doors at the far end and the dark beyond them. The corridor opened cool and blessedly empty, and she went down it half blind, one hand to the wall, dragging in a breath that would not come whole.
She rounded a corner and walked straight into a wall of a man.
He was solid as a door, and her shoulder struck his chest. A pair of hands came up to steady her by the arms before she could stumble back.
“Forgive me.” The words tumbled out. “I did not see. I am sorry, I only need—forgive me.”
“Easy.” The hands did not let go at once. “Ye’re white as the wall, lass. Are ye all right?”
Rosaline went still.
She knew that voice. She knew the roll of it, the burr under the words, the low weight of it. She had heard it in a hedge, in the dark, a year ago, and ever since her whole life had revolved around burying the memory of it. And now here it was in the corridor, holding her by the arms.
Slowly, she lifted her face to his. He was looking down at her already. She watched recognition flash in his eyes, watched them narrow, then watched the corner of his mouth lift.
“Well.” The smirk broke slowly across his face. “Where are ye runnin’ off to, little fox?”