Chapter 10
“Stand there. Do not move, do not touch anything, and most importantly, do not speak to anyone unless you are spoken to first.”
Samuel positioned Rosaline beside a pillar the way a man set down a parcel he was embarrassed to be carrying and stepped back to survey the room.
It was a dreadful crush. Lady Pemberton’s musicales always were, and tonight every gilt chair in the long hall had been claimed. Half of London stood behind them besides, fanning and murmuring in the heat.
Rosaline kept her back to the pillar, her eyes on the middle distance, and felt the whole room glance at her, one guest at a time.
A week had not been long enough. A month would not have been long enough.
“Do you suppose,” Beatrice murmured at her shoulder, “that if I set fire to the curtains, they would find something else to talk about?”
“Bea.”
“It would be a public service. I am prepared to be arrested for it.” Beatrice snapped her fan open with a flick of her wrist. “Look at them. Not one of them was brave enough to help you up out of that flowerbed, and now they have the gall to whisper about the state of your gown. I hope every one of them chokes on a grape.”
Somewhere behind them, a woman said flowerbed, and someone laughed.
Rosaline studied the pattern of the carpet. “It will pass,” she said. “Everything passes. They will find someone else to gossip about by Thursday.”
“It will not pass by Thursday.” Beatrice’s fan resumed its work. “Do you know what Miss Fairchild is telling people? That you were tipsy. That you had been at the ratafia and lost your footing among the roses, and that she quite selflessly called for someone to assist you.”
Rosaline’s fingers went cold inside her gloves. “She tripped me.”
“I know she tripped me. I mean, tripped you. I saw her do it. I have been telling everyone who will hold still that she did it.” Beatrice’s jaw set. “The trouble is that she is very pretty and I am very eighteen, and the world would rather believe a pretty liar than the plain truth.”
Ten feet away, as though summoned, Miss Fairchild walked by with two friends.
She did not stop. She looked at Rosaline for exactly as long as it took to be certain that Rosaline had seen her looking, and then she leaned in to her companions and said something behind three fingers, and the three of them moved on in a small ripple of laughter.
Rosaline kept her chin exactly where it was.
“One day,” Beatrice said pleasantly, “there will be a reckoning, and I intend to be holding the ledger.”
Samuel returned before Rosaline could answer, and Beatrice’s fan snapped shut.
“Beatrice.” He did not look at their younger sister. “Lady Pemberton is by the pianoforte, and she has a fondness for girls who can be quiet and ornamental. Go and be both. I want you in front of Hartley before the performance.”
Beatrice went, with one backward glance that promised she was going under protest. And then it was only the two of them at the pillar.
Samuel’s pleasant expression did not change at all as he bent his head a fraction toward Rosaline.
“They are still talking about it,” he said, beneath the noise. “Three people have mentioned it to me tonight. Not to be cruel, you understand, but to be kind. That is the worst of it, Rosaline. They pity us now.”
Rosaline said nothing. There was never anything to say.
“Do you understand what you have cost us?” His voice stayed perfectly level, perfectly quiet, pitched to reach her and no one else.
“Beatrice is out this Season. She is standing in that garden at this very moment with her name tied to yours. If your name is a joke, she inherits it. That is how it works. A younger sister cannot outrun an elder sister’s reputation.
She is dragged behind it, and every door that ought to open for that girl will be shut before she has raised her hand to knock.
” A breath. “She is eighteen. She has done nothing to deserve it. The only thing standing between her and a life of small, mean disappointments is you, and thus far you have been a poor wall.”
Across the room, Beatrice was laughing at something Lady Pemberton had said, her chin up, entirely unaware that her future had just been laid across her sister’s shoulders like a yoke.
“You will not embarrass this family again tonight.” Samuel straightened his cuffs. “Nod if you understand me.”
Rosaline nodded.
Samuel smiled at someone across the room and moved off to be seen.
“You will be pleased to know that I have identified three ladies of excellent family and no discernible scandal, any one of whom would improve your standing simply by being seen beside you.” Leo surveyed the hall over the rim of his glass.
“The Ashby girl, who is pretty and dull. Lady Margaret, who is dull and rich. And Miss Carrow, who is neither pretty nor rich, but whose father sits on every committee that matters, so I have every hope you will find her fascinating.”
“Mm,” Magnus murmured.
“You are not listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“What did I just say?”
“Somethin’ dull.”
“That is a lucky guess, and we both know it.” Leo turned to face him properly.
“Magnus, listen to me. You have precisely one task in this room tonight, and it is to be so relentlessly pleasant that by Thursday, the story going round is not the Scot who lifted Mowbray off the floor, but the Scot who was rather charming at the Pemberton musicale. That is the whole of the assignment. Smile at a dowager. Compliment a soprano. Avoid scandal for the length of a single evening, which I am given to understand is a thing other men manage without effort.”
“Aye.”
“You are scanning the room.”
“I’m takin’ in the company.”
“You are scanning the room like a hawk over a field looking for a mouse, and I have known you long enough to know the difference.” Leo followed his line of sight with growing suspicion.
“Magnus, I have only just fixed the Draycott business, at considerable personal cost and some genuinely creative lying. If you are about to do something that requires another intervention, I would take it as a kindness if you told me now, so that I might drink first.”
Just as Leo finished speaking, Magnus found her.
She was standing against a pillar near the far wall, half behind it, doing her best to be part of the plasterwork.
Chin down, hands folded. Her brother had gone off somewhere to be admired and left her there like luggage, and the room was doing to her precisely what he had watched it do on that lawn a week ago, in slow motion, one glance at a time.
Rosaline had a whole flock of them whispering at her back, and she had not moved an inch. She would stand there all evening and take it, and no one in the hall would ever know what it cost her.
Magnus’s jaw tightened.
Then she looked up. Across the crush, she looked up and found him at once, as though she had felt him come in.
“Ah,” Leo said. “Never mind. I see we are already past the point of drinking first.”
Magnus handed him his untouched glass and braved the crowd. He did not go to her. He knew better than that, whatever else Leo believed him incapable of learning.
He cut a path through the room that would take him past her pillar at exactly the distance a stranger might pass, exchanging a nod with a man he did not know. As he walked by, the back of his hand brushed her arm, light as a moth. He did not look at her at all.
“There’s a corridor beyond the blue door,” he muttered, without breaking stride. “Five minutes.”
The blue door.
Rosaline stood perfectly still while her heart tried to climb out of her chest. She had felt him from wrist to shoulder, the whole warm length of that brush, and the words had been so low she might have imagined them.
Now he was thirty feet away, laughing at something a dowager had said as though he had not come within ten yards of her all evening.
Five minutes.
Every instinct told her to stay exactly where she was. She had a pillar. She had instructions. She had a brother who had counted three separate pities tonight and a sister whose entire future was apparently hers to ruin.
And she had a bargain.
She found Samuel at the edge of a knot of men.
“Forgive me.” Her voice came out steadier than she had expected. “I should like a moment. The heat, I think. If I might sit somewhere quieter, only for a—”
“Absolutely not.” He did not bother to lower his voice as far as he might have. “You will remain where I can see you. I have not spent the entire evening shoring up your reputation so that you can wander off and misplace it a second time in some—”
“Oh, Samuel, thank heaven!” Beatrice materialized at his other elbow and took hold of his arm with both hands.
“Lord Hartley is standing not eight feet away, and he has been staring at me for a quarter of an hour. You said I was to be seen among the right people, and you said Hartley, specifically. I distinctly recall you saying, Hartley.” She was already towing him.
“You must come and introduce me before Miss Fairchild gets to him. You must. Now.”
“Beatrice—”
“Now, Samuel.”
She dragged him into the crowd, chattering the whole way, giving him no gap in which to look back. Over her shoulder, she caught Rosaline’s eye.
She knew. Rosaline saw it plainly in the glint in her gaze. Beatrice did not know what or why, but she had thrown herself into the breach regardless, because Rosaline had asked for something and Samuel had refused it, and that was reason enough.
Rosaline threw her a look that held a year’s worth of gratitude. Then she slipped away toward the blue door.