Chapter 11
“Ye came. I gave it even odds.”
Magnus was waiting behind the bend in the corridor, out of sight of the blue door, one shoulder leaning against the wall as though he had all the time in the world and no particular use for it.
Rosaline pressed her back against the opposite wall, as far from him as the corridor allowed, and folded her hands in front of her.
“I have four minutes.” Her whisper barely carried the width of the corridor. “Possibly three. What is the first lesson?”
“The first lesson isnae a thing ye say.” His eyes slowly slid over her from hem to throat. It was not remotely the way a gentleman looked at a lady in a corridor. “It’s what a man sees before ye ever open yer mouth. Yer gown, lass.”
Rosaline looked down at herself. Gray silk. High neck, long sleeves, not a stitch out of place.
“What is wrong with my gown?”
“Nothing at all, if ye mean to be a governess.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ye’re dressed to be overlooked.” He tilted his head.
“And ye are overlooked, and then ye stand at yer pillar and wonder at it. Ye want a lower neckline. A good deal lower. Ye want colors that arenae the color of the wall behind ye. Ye’ve a great deal to display, and ye’ve spent three Seasons hidin’ every bit of it under enough gray wool to rig a ship. ”
Her arms came up and crossed over her chest before she had decided to move them. “A great deal of what, precisely?”
Magnus’s gaze dropped briefly to her folded arms.
Her breath left her. “You—” Her mouth opened and closed. “You are a cad.”
“Aye.” His eyes came back up to hers, without a flicker of apology in them.
“I am. And so is every man in that hall, only they’ve better manners and worse intentions.
” He pushed off the wall. “That’s me point, Rosaline.
Ye can be scandalized that I looked, or ye can understand that this is the game as it’s played and start playin’ it.
It’s nae fair. It’s nae fine. But it’s true. ”
She wanted very much to slap him.
She wanted, far more inconveniently, to concede the point, because he was right, and she had spent three Seasons at a wall watching him be right.
Honoria Dunmore had not been prettier than her. Honoria Dunmore had simply been seen.
“Go on,” she said stiffly.
“Now, the look.” Something in his manner changed; the teasing banked, replaced by the flat attention of a man about to teach a thing he took seriously.
“This is the whole of the art. Everything else is trimmin’.
When a man speaks to ye, ye look at him as though there’s nae another soul on this earth.
Nae the room. Nae his friends. Nae the door behind him.
But him. As if he’s the only man God troubled Himself to make and ye cannae believe yer luck at havin’ found him. ”
“That is absurd.”
“It has ruined kings.” He held her eyes. “Ye lower yer lashes. Slow. Then ye look up through them, slower still. And ye hold it one beat longer than ye ought. One. The beat where a proper lady would look away is the beat ye stay.”
“And that is all?”
“That’s all. It’s nothin’. It’s everything.” His mouth curved. “Try it.”
Rosaline squared her shoulders, dropped her chin, and lifted her eyes to his.
There was a pause.
“Well…” Magnus trailed off.
“What?”
“Ye look like ye’re about to sneeze.”
“I do not.”
“Ye do. Ye’ve the exact face of a woman workin’ up to a sneeze and thinkin’ better of it.” He was fighting a grin and losing badly. “Again.”
She did it again.
“Worse,” he tutted. “That’s the fish at the market. All eye and no warmth. The fish at least has an excuse—bein’ dead.”
“You are the most troublesome teacher I’ve ever had.”
“And the most handsome, I bet. Again.”
She did it again, and again, and each time he sent it back to her ruined.
Her face burned. The whole enterprise was so profoundly humiliating that she very nearly turned and walked back down the corridor to her pillar, where she belonged.
“Ye’re performin’ it,” he said, quieter now. “That’s the trouble. Ye’re doin’ a shape ye think I want to see, and it’s dead on ye. Stop that.” He leaned back against the wall. “Ye did it to me once already, ye ken. Ye did it perfectly, and ye werenae tryin’ at all.”
“I never—”
“In the hedge.” His voice dropped. “A year past. Ye’d just told me how a gardener trains a young wall flat against a frame, and ye were pleased with yerself and tryin’ nae to show it.
Ye looked up at me through yer lashes, exactly so, and held it.
And I havenae been right in the head since.
” He shrugged. “So daenae give me a shape, lass. Give me that.”
The corridor went very quiet.
Rosaline stopped thinking about her lashes.
She thought instead of a black mask in the dark and a low voice saying Huh, so it does, and the strange bright pleasure of being listened to.
She let her chin drop, and her eyes lift slowly.
Then she held them there, one beat past the moment where a proper lady would have looked away.
Magnus did not say anything.
She watched his throat bob as he swallowed. She watched his grin vanish, and something replace it that had nothing to do with teaching. She felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the corridor.
“Aye.” It came out rough. He cleared his throat. “Aye. That’s the one.”
Rosaline’s pulse was doing something unforgivable. “Was that adequate?”
“Ye’re a fast learner.” He was still looking at her. “A deal faster than is convenient for me.”
A door banged at the far end of the corridor. Feminine voices spilled into the adjoining card room, three or four of them, loud with the confidence of people who believed themselves entirely alone, and the click of a latch, and a fan snapping open.
Rosaline moved without thinking. She was through the blue door and back into the heat and the noise with her heart slamming against her ribs, smoothing her skirts, arranging her face into something that had never in its life been alone in a corridor with a Scottish duke.
She did not look back to see whether he had followed.
He did not. He was far too clever for that.
Samuel was precisely where Beatrice had abandoned him, and he turned on Rosaline a glare of such hot fury that she very nearly retreated into the crowd.
He did not, however, say a word. He could not, because Beatrice was speaking.
“… which is precisely my point, My Lord. If the sonata form demands a return to the tonic, then the second movement you have just praised for its daring is doing nothing that Haydn had not already done thirty years before, and rather better.” Beatrice beamed at the young man in front of her.
“So, I cannot think it daring. I can only think it late.”
Lord Hartley’s mouth opened and then closed. He had the expression of a man who had reached confidently for a step that was not there.
“I… Yes. Quite so.” He tugged at his cravat. “You must forgive me, I see my mother across the room. She must need me.”
With that, he fled.
“Beatrice.” Samuel’s voice was very low and very calm, which was always worse. “That was an earl’s heir with twelve thousand pounds a year, and you have just explained Haydn at him until he ran away.”
“He was wrong about Haydn.”
“He is permitted to be wrong about Haydn. That is precisely what eight thousand pounds a year buys a man.” Samuel pressed two fingers to his temple.
“You must learn to be malleable. Agreeable. When a gentleman offers you an opinion, you receive it as you would a gift, and you thank him for it. You do not turn it over, find the chip in the rim, and hand it back to him.” He exhaled through his nose.
“Heaven help me. One of you cannot speak at all, and the other cannot stop.”
Beatrice opened her mouth.
The first chords of the pianoforte saved them all.
The chairs filled. Rosaline sat between her brother and her sister with her hands folded and her spine straight, and the soprano began. For the entirety of the first aria, she kept her eyes exactly where they belonged.
Then she did not.
The Duke of Greythorne was seated across the aisle and four rows back, filling his gilt chair the way a bull filled a stall, arms folded, wearing the expression of a man being slowly and deliberately murdered by music.
She meant it to be a glance. It was a glance. He caught it and winked at her. Her eyes snapped forward so fast she felt it in her neck.
“Rosaline,” Beatrice whispered in pure delight. “Rosaline, the Scottish Duke just winked at you.”
“He did not.”
“He absolutely did. I watched him do it. His whole face did a thing.” Beatrice’s fan came up to cover the worst of her grin. “Ladies have been ruined by faces doing things like that. Why is he winking at you?”
“He is a scoundrel.” Rosaline kept her chin level and her voice profoundly bored, which required every scrap of skill she had ever possessed.
“It means nothing. He would wink at any woman careless enough to look his way, and I have no doubt he winks his way through three or four an evening. I would thank you not to make it into something in front of Samuel.”
“Mm,” Beatrice said, and hummed through the rest of the aria, entirely unconvinced.
The last note died down, applause erupted, and Samuel had them both by the elbows before it had stopped.
“Fenwick’s set. Both of you. Now.” He propelled them across the floor. “Beatrice, you will agree with everything that is said to you, and I do not care how wrong it is. Rosaline, you will speak, and I do not care what about.”
And there they were.
The same men. The same rose-walk crowd who had stood in a circle and watched her go down into the mud without one of them troubling to help her up.
Rosaline’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.
Look at him as though there is no other soul on this earth.
She did not let herself think. If she did, she would freeze. So she turned to the nearest of them, a Lord Bracewell, and lowered her lashes and lifted her eyes slowly and held his gaze one beat longer than she ought to.
“Lord Bracewell.” She let the smallest smile go with it. “I had hoped you would be here tonight.”
Bracewell, who was halfway through a sentence about a horse, stopped as though he had walked into a wall.
“Had you?” he said. “Had you indeed, Lady Rosaline? I—Yes.”
It was working.
Her astonishment nearly undid the whole performance. The man had gone pink to the ears and lost his words entirely. Two other heads in the circle had turned toward her, and for the first time in three Seasons, Rosaline was not the furniture in the room.
“I confess I had hoped to hear your opinion of the performance.” She lowered her lashes and let him find her eyes again. “One never knows quite what to think until one has heard it from someone who truly understands music.”
“Well.” Bracewell swelled to nearly twice his size.
“As it happens, I am something of a devotee. That final piece, for instance. Pure Mozart. You hear it in the drama of the thing, the storm of it, the sheer Romantic fire of the man. Nobody but Mozart ever wrote a thunderclap into a pianoforte like that. A wild spirit. Untamed.”
“That,” Beatrice corrected, “was Beethoven.”
The circle went quiet.
“It was the Tempest sonata,” Beatrice continued, entirely unstoppable, “published in 1802, which is some eleven years after Mozart had the poor taste to die, so unless the man was composing from beyond the—”
“But how clever of you, My Lord.”
Rosaline stepped into the gap without knowing she meant to and turned the full weight of her lowered lashes on Bracewell. She watched his collapsing face stop halfway down and begin cautiously to rebuild itself.
“To hear Mozart in Beethoven,” she said.
“That is exactly the connection the critics are forever making, is it not? That Beethoven learned his fire at Mozart’s feet, and that one cannot properly hear the pupil without hearing the master alive in him.
” She held his eyes one beat longer than she should.
“It is a discerning ear that catches it, My Lord. I would never have put it so well myself.”
Bracewell, who had been one heartbeat from ruin, expanded like a sail taking wind.
“Just so, Lady Rosaline. Just so. The master in the pupil. That was precisely my meaning, and I am glad to find one person in this room quick enough to follow it.” He beamed at the circle, restored, magnificent. “You have a remarkably fine understanding, if I may say.”
“You may say anything you like, My Lord.”
Beside her, Beatrice made a small sound. And on her other side, Rosaline felt their brother go still.
She turned her head to find Samuel staring at her.
Not with fury. Not with that weary, familiar disappointment she had lived beneath for three years, but with something she had never once in her life seen him aim in her direction: a startled, rapid recalculation, the look of a man who had been on the point of throwing out a chair and had just discovered it was worth money.
“Well…” he murmured.
Across the hall, at the very edge of everything, a large Scot she was being extremely careful not to look at raised his glass by half an inch and drank.