Chapter 6
“Ayoung lady’s accomplishments are all very well, but it is her steadiness that makes a house. My late wife had it. One knew that whatever the world threw at the door, the drawing room would hold.”
The Earl of Oldbrook said it to the little circle at large, though his eyes rested on Rosaline as he spoke, pale and sharp, moving over her with the frank assessment of the auction ring.
He was a tall man gone silver, courteous to the bone, with a stillness about him that made the younger lords defer without quite knowing why they did.
“Just so, My Lord.” Samuel had positioned himself at the Earl’s elbow within a minute of the last note dying down and had not left it. “My sister is the steadiest creature in London. Rosaline, tell Lord Oldbrook your thoughts on the second movement.”
Rosaline had no thoughts on the second movement. She had spent the second movement enduring the two ladies behind her and the small hot certainty that they were laughing at her, and she had heard perhaps four bars of it.
She folded her hands and reached for something that would not embarrass anyone. “It was very affecting, My Lord.”
“Affecting.” Oldbrook inclined his head, as though she had said something of substance. “Indeed.”
Beside her, Beatrice made a sound she muffled with a cough.
Two of the older lords’ sons, ranged behind their fathers like well-brushed hounds, looked at Rosaline with the mild, incurious attention men gave a girl their fathers had suggested they consider. She counted the seconds until she might be allowed to stop existing so publicly.
“Darton,” a new voice called, warm and resonating. “There you are. I have been trying to reach you across this crush for a quarter of an hour.”
Leo Hughes, the Marquess of Rivercourt, emerged from the crowd with an easy smile on his face. At his shoulder, half a head taller than all the men in the circle, was the last person on earth Rosaline wished to see.
Her stomach dropped clean through the floor.
“My Lords, forgive the intrusion.” Lord Rivercourt bowed to the circle, all charm. “May I present my friend, newly come to London and rather starved of decent company. His Grace, the Duke of Greythorne. Greythorne, you are among the finest men in the room, so do try to look impressed.”
A duke.
The word landed on Rosaline and would not fit.
The man from the hedge, the man from the corridor, the scandalous stranger she had kissed in the dark of a garden meant for wickedness, was a duke.
A Scottish duke, standing not four feet from her brother, close enough to open his mouth and end her with a sentence.
He bowed to the older lords precisely as he ought to. He said the correct things to Oldbrook and to the earl beside him. Then his gaze moved to her and stayed, and every correct thing he had been saying seemed to cost him more effort.
“And the ladies,” Rivercourt prompted, amused. “Darton, will you not present your sisters?”
“Lady Rosaline. Lady Beatrice.” Samuel gave the names grudgingly, his eyes already narrowing on Rivercourt, on the Duke, on the whole unwelcome interruption of his careful work.
“Lady Rosaline.” The Duke said her name slowly, as if setting it somewhere safe. The burr in his voice went straight down her spine. “I hope the evening’s found ye well.”
“Your Grace.” Rosaline dipped into the smallest curtsy that courtesy allowed and fixed her eyes on his cravat.
Oldbrook had resumed some thread about the harvest with Samuel, and the sons had drifted back into their own conversation. In that small pocket of inattention, the Duke leaned a fraction toward her.
“What did ye make of the performance, Lady Rosaline?” he asked.
“It was very affecting, Your Grace.” The same four words she had given Oldbrook. Safe. Finished.
“Affectin’.” His mouth threatened to curve. “Aye, that’s the word goin’ round the room. I’ve heard it six times since the last note. I’m beginnin’ to think it’s the only word the English keep for music they didnae care for.”
She should not answer. She knew she should not.
“Perhaps it is the only word polite enough to say aloud.”
“There she is.” He said it under his breath, and there was that spark again, the one from the maze, the one that made her feel briefly like the cleverest creature in any room. “So ye didnae care for it either. Go on, then. Tell me true. What was wrong with it?”
“I could not possibly—”
“Ye could. Ye’re dyin’ to.” He tilted his head. “The soprano?”
Heaven help her, the words came before she could stop them.
“The soprano was flat through the entirety of the second half, and the harpist knew it and spent the entire time a half-beat behind her, trying to drag her back onto the note. It was like watching a man try to lead a horse that has decided to sit down.”
The Duke laughed. Not the polite exhalation the room ran on, but a genuine laugh, low and surprised and far too loud for a musical.
Heads turned, and Rosaline felt the color flood up her neck.
“Rosaline.” Samuel’s hand closed around her arm at once, gentle for the audience, iron beneath it. “Do forgive us, gentlemen, Your Grace. My sisters and I have promised ourselves to Lady Carrow before the evening ends, and she is not a woman one keeps waiting. Beatrice, come.”
He had them out of the circle and moving before Rosaline could do more than murmur a goodnight. She did not let herself look back at the Duke, though she felt his eyes follow her the whole way, warm as a hand on the small of her back.
Samuel did not steer them toward Lady Carrow. He steered them to an empty stretch of wall near the doors, turned, and lowered his voice to the register he saved for correction.
“You will keep your distance from those two. Both of them.” His gaze flicked between his sisters and settled hard on Rosaline.
“Lord Rivercourt is a rake of the first order. There is not a hostess in London who does not count her daughters after he has left. And the Scot is worse, duke or no duke. A title scraped out of some bog does not make a man respectable, and that one arrived under a cloud I will not repeat in front of you. They are not for us. They are certainly not for you, Rosaline.” He let that sink in.
“You will not give them another word beyond what courtesy demands. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, Samuel.”
“Beatrice?”
“Perfectly.” Beatrice’s smile was sweet as spun sugar. “Avoid the interesting people. I have written it on my heart.”
Samuel’s jaw worked, but Lady Carrow was a fiction, and he had run out of excuses to scold them further in public. He straightened his cuffs, schooled his features, and went to find someone worth being seen with, leaving his sisters against the wall.
“Was it beautiful? Tell me it was beautiful. Tell me every single thing about it.”
Ivy was curled up in the middle of Rosaline’s bed in her nightgown, knees pulled to her chin, when Rosaline came up from letting the maid unpin her hair.
At eight, Ivy still believed the world was mostly wonderful and merely being kept from her by the tedious accident of her age, and that she had been forbidden from attending the musicale on precisely those grounds.
“There was a harp.” Rosaline sat on the edge of the bed and let her sister catch her hand.
“A real one, taller than Beatrice, all gold. When the woman played the low strings, I felt it here, in my chest, before I heard it. There was also a pianoforte, and a soprano in a gown the color of a robin’s egg. ”
“And the music? What did it sound like? Did it sound like the sea, or like rain, or like—oh, I don’t know the words for it, that is the trouble.”
“Some of it sounded like rain.” Rosaline brushed a curl from her sister’s forehead. “The quiet parts. The harp alone. As though someone very sad were telling you a secret and trusting you to keep it.”
Ivy sighed and hugged her knees. “One day, I will hear all of it. Harps and sopranos, mountains, everywhere, and no one will tell me I am too young for any of it.”
“One day, you will.”
The door opened without a knock, which meant it was Beatrice, who came in already mid-thought and dropped onto the foot of the bed.
“So.” She arranged a pillow with great care and did not look up from it. “Is no one going to mention the Duke?”
Rosaline’s hand went still in Ivy’s hair.
“What duke?” Ivy sat bolt upright. “There was a duke? Beatrice, there was a duke, and no one has told me?”
“A Scottish one. Tall. Handsome in a rather alarming way, like weather.” Beatrice’s eyes flicked up at last, bright, merciless, and fond.
“And he laughed at something our Rosaline said. Out loud. In front of Oldbrook and half the peerage. I have never in my life seen Samuel that particular shade of gray.”
“Scottish.” Ivy breathed the word like a prayer. “Rosaline, is it true? Has he been to the Highlands? Has he seen the lochs? Are there truly castles on the water? What did he sound like? Was it like the songs? Oh, I would give anything to go there—anything.”
“I have no idea whether he has seen the lochs or not.” Rosaline kept her eyes on the curl she was winding. “We exchanged perhaps four sentences. He asked about the music. I answered. That is the entire substance of it.”
“Four sentences and a laugh,” Beatrice said.
“He is a stranger, Bea.”
“A stranger you turned the color of a beet at twice. That I counted.”
“It is warm in here.” Rosaline’s cheeks betrayed her even as she said it.
Ivy giggled, and Beatrice’s smile softened into something knowing that for once she had the grace not to press.
“All right.” Beatrice held up her hands. “All right. I shall stop. I only wanted to see your face do that thing it is doing now.” She hugged the pillow. “But it was nice, was it not? To have someone in that dreadful room laugh with you instead of at you just once.”
“It was.” Rosaline let herself admit that much.
Then she set it down, because she had to.
“But it will come to nothing, Bea. It cannot come to anything. You heard Samuel. A rake and a Scot under a cloud, he said, not for us and least of all for me. I will very likely never exchange more than a greeting with the man again, and that is exactly as it should be.”
Beatrice groaned and flopped backward across the foot of the bed, her arms flung wide.
“Of course it is. Heaven forbid a single interesting thing should be permitted to happen to any of us. Samuel would have us marry three identical men named Bartholomew and spend the rest of our lives discussing drainage.”
“Bartholomew,” Ivy repeated, as though tasting something strange.
“There would be three of them. We would never tell them apart.”
Rosaline pressed her lips together against the laugh and lost. “Bed. Both of you. Now, before Samuel comes up and hears you libeling every Bartholomew in England, and hears the rest of it besides.” She rose and drew Ivy up by the hand, then pointed Beatrice at the door.
“Go, it is late. Plus, none of it will matter by morning, and we have a whole tedious Season yet to survive.”
They went, Ivy still whispering about lochs, Beatrice pausing only to kiss Rosaline’s cheek and murmur that she was glad Rosaline had laughed whatever had happened. And then the room was quiet and the candlelight low.
Rosaline sat alone at her vanity with her hair hanging down her back and told herself again and again that it did not matter in the slightest how her name had sounded in a Scottish accent, pronounced carefully and slowly, as though it were something worth keeping.
It did not matter. She would see to it that it did not.
She sat there a long while, not quite believing herself.