Chapter 4
“Nothing to say for yerself? That’s nae the clever little fox I remember.”
Rosaline’s face went hot to the roots of her hair.
It was him. It was truly him, the voice from the hedge made flesh and standing a foot from her in a lamplit corridor. Without the black mask across his eyes, she could see the whole of what the dark had only hinted at a year ago.
Copper-brown hair pushed back from a broad brow.
A jaw cut square beneath the beard. And the eyes, green as she remembered and worse for being fully visible now, fixed on her with a warmth that made the corridor feel airless in an entirely different way.
He was even handsomer without the mask, which struck her as deeply unfair.
Then the rest of it caught up with her.
He remembered. He remembered the maze, the clue, the kiss she had spent a year pretending was a fever dream. And he was here, in this house, three walls from the ballroom where her brother stood telling Lady Hartsfield about their connections.
One word from this man in the wrong ear, and the story would be everywhere by morning—Lady Rosaline kissed a masked stranger in a garden.
Beatrice would be ruined by association, and Ivy would be tainted before she was even out.
“You must excuse me.” She drew herself up and made to step around him. “You have mistaken me for someone else.”
“Have I?” He shifted, unhurried, and the sheer size of him closed off the path as neatly as the hedge once had. “Runnin’ again. Ye do it so well, I’m almost convinced it’s me ye’re runnin’ from and no one else.”
“I am not running. I am leaving, which any lady is entitled to do without being penned into a corner by a—” She caught herself.
“By a?” His mouth curved. “Go on. Ye were doin’ so well.”
“By a great wall of a man who has clearly forgotten his manners somewhere north of the border.”
“Ah, there she is.” Something behind his eyes kindled, the same spark she had seen catch in the maze when she’d read the hedges by their roots. “I did wonder if ye’d tucked her away for good, the lass with the sharp tongue. Turns out she only comes out when she’s cornered.”
“I am not cornered.”
“Nay?” He edged a half step closer, testing her, watching her face for retreat.
She did not retreat.
That was the trouble of it, the thing she would ponder over for hours after. Her feet stayed exactly where they were. Her chin came up instead of down.
Every rule stitched into her since girlhood told her to step back, to lower her eyes, to murmur an apology, and to flee.
Yet her body ignored every one of them and held its ground a hand’s breadth from his chest, near enough to feel the warmth radiating from him again, near enough to catch his scent under the candle smoke.
“You are a brute,” she scoffed.
“I am.” He said it without a flicker of shame, pleased, as though she had guessed his favorite color.
“But I’m told the polish can be learned.
Perhaps ye’d teach me. A season of yer good English breeding, and I might pass for a gentleman yet.
” His gaze dropped to her mouth and came back up slowly.
“Only I’ve a suspicion ye like me better as I am.
A lady who wanted a gentleman wouldnae still be standin’ here. ”
The corridor had gone very quiet. His head bent a degree. Hers, she realized, had already tipped up to meet it, the whole of the ballroom, her brother, her name, her sisters shrinking to nothing against the small warm space between them.
For one suspended breath, she was back in the hedge, with the moon down and no tomorrow waiting to claim her.
A door opened somewhere down the corridor. Voices rose, and laughter spilled out, drawing nearer.
Rosaline came back into herself all at once. She stepped back so fast that her slipper caught in the carpet, and this time, he let her go. Her hand pressed flat against her breastbone, her breath ragged for an entirely different reason than the one that had driven her from the ballroom.
What was she doing? Standing in a corridor, tilting her face up to a stranger like a girl in a penny novel, when one glimpse of them together could undo everything.
“Good evening,” she managed, before turning and walking away from him as quickly as dignity allowed.
She did not look back to see whether he was watching her go. She knew that he did. She could feel it the length of the corridor, like heat from a fire she had no business standing near.
“Your sister, Beatrice, has the conversational grace of a dropped tray,” Samuel addressed the remark to Rosaline without looking up from his correspondence.
The breakfast hall was bright and cold, the long table set for a family that ate in silence. Rosaline slid into her chair and reached for the toast as though she might make herself small enough to be overlooked.
“I laughed twice,” Beatrice said. “That is two more times than anyone else at that table managed. I consider it a public service.”
“You mocked the Fenwick girl’s gown.”
“I complimented it. That she chose to hear otherwise says a great deal about the gown.”
“You will apologize to her mother at the Alcott dinner.” Samuel set down one letter and took up another. “You are eighteen, Beatrice. You have precisely one Season’s worth of goodwill left before people stop finding your tongue amusing and start finding it a warning. See that you spend it wisely.”
Beatrice opened her mouth. Rosaline caught her eye across the marmalade and gave the smallest shake of her head, and her sister subsided, jaw working.
Then Samuel turned to Rosaline, and it was worse.
He did not scold her. He set his letter down, folded his hands, and looked at her with the particular weary patience he saved for disappointments, the look that said he had expected so little and been given even less.
“You spoke to no one of consequence,” he remarked.
“You stood by the wall for an hour looking as though you wished the floor would swallow you, and when I placed you before Lord Ackerley, you gave him three words and a stare. He is a viscount, Rosaline. He earns eight thousand pounds a year, and his mother is dying to hand over her keys.” He sighed, and the sigh did more damage than shouting ever had.
“I trust you have not forgotten what we discussed last night. I would hate to have to say it again in front of our sisters.”
The toast turned to ash in Rosaline’s mouth. She set it down. “I have not forgotten.”
“What did you discuss last night?” Beatrice looked between them, her flippancy gone. “Rosaline? What does he mean?”
“Nothing.” Rosaline reached for the teapot to give her hands something to do. “He means I ought to try harder at the next event, and he is right. More tea, Bea? You have that Alcott dinner to survive. You had better be fortified.”
Beatrice held her gaze for a moment, unconvinced.
Whatever this was, it was Rosaline’s to carry. Not Beatrice’s. Not little Ivy’s, who was asleep upstairs and blessedly ignorant of the arithmetic that governed their futures.
Rosaline poured the tea, steadied her hand, and said something light about the weather. Samuel returned to his letters, satisfied that the family's machine was running as he had built it to.
“He was there? The Scot? Your Scot from the maze, in the flesh?” Abigail seized both of Rosaline’s hands and very nearly upset the tea tray. “Tell me everything this instant. Leave nothing out. If you leave out even one word, I shall perish on this very settee and haunt you.”
“He is not my Scot.” Rosaline withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap, a bulwark against her friend’s delight. “He is a man I collided with in a corridor. That is the entire romance of it.”
“You collided with him. In a corridor. Alone.” Abigail pressed a hand to her chest. “Rosaline, do you understand what this is? A masked house, a hedge in the dark, a stolen kiss, and a year later the very same man walks out of a ballroom straight into your path, in an empty corridor? That is not a coincidence. That is Providence with a sense of theater! My grandmother would call it fate, surely.”
“Your grandmother would be wrong, and so are you.” Rosaline made herself say it plainly, the way one pressed a splinter out before it festered.
“Abigail, think. What sort of man attends that house, that hunt, with that prize? A respectable one? He was scandalous enough to be there in the first place, the same as we were, only we had your mad darling grandmother’s invitation and the good sense to be ashamed of ourselves after. ”
“I was not remotely ashamed.”
“You are the exception to every rule ever written.” Rosaline almost smiled.
“But I cannot afford him, Abigail. Not a man like that. Whatever he is, however he makes me—” She stopped and started again.
“I need a sensible match. A dull, safe, respectable man with a dull, safe name, one that lifts my sisters rather than dragging them into whatever storm follows a Scot who kisses strangers in gardens. Samuel has made the price of failure very clear.”
The mirth vanished from Abigail’s face. She reached over and took Rosaline’s hand again, gently this time.
“You always do that,” she noted. “Every time there is a door open in front of you, something for you, only for you, you look straight through it to see who else might be hurt if you walked through.” She squeezed.
“When do you get to want a thing, Rosaline? Just because you want it, not because it is sensible, safe, or good for the girls. When is it your turn?”
“It is not about turns.” Rosaline looked down at their joined hands. “It is my duty. I am the eldest. Samuel is Samuel, and the girls have only me between them and him. If wanting a thing costs them their futures, then it is a thing I have no business wanting. That is all.”
“That is the saddest sensible thing I have ever heard.”
“It is only sensible. There is nothing sad about it.”
But even as she said it, even with her friend’s hand warm in hers and the argument neatly won, some traitorous part of her had slipped its leash and gone wandering back down a lamplit corridor, back further still to a hedge in the dark, to a warm unhurried mouth and a low voice calling her clever, to the one moment in three long Seasons when she had wanted something purely and for no one but herself.
She had kissed him back. A year after, and she still could not make herself sorry for it. That, she suspected, was the real trouble, and no amount of sense in the world had ever managed to talk her out of it.