Chapter 12
“And so I said to him, Your Grace, that if the man wants my mare, he may have her at four hundred and not a penny under, and do you know what he had the gall to say to me?”
“Mm.”
“He offered three fifty.” Lord Harold Pike waited for the outrage this deserved. “Three fifty, Your Grace. For a mare out of Selim.”
“Aye,” Magnus uttered. “Scandalous.”
Across the hall, Lord Bracewell had said something, and Rosaline had laughed.
Not loudly. She did not do anything loudly.
But she had tipped her chin, let her lashes fall, and lifted her eyes back up to Bracewell’s exactly as she had been taught to do it not one hour ago, in a corridor, by a man standing thirty feet away with a warm glass of champagne he had no memory of accepting.
Bracewell put a hand to his own chest, delighted, as though she had knighted him.
“Three fifty,” Lord Harold repeated. “I ask you.”
“Ye should have chopped his hand off at the wrist,” Magnus remarked.
Lord Harold blinked. “I, well, it is rather a strong position.”
“It’s a strong mare.”
“It is a very strong mare.” Lord Harold rallied, entirely unaware that the man before him had not heard a syllable in ninety seconds. “You have a good eye, Your Grace. I said so to Pemberton not an hour ago. I said, ‘Whatever they whisper about the fellow, he has an eye.’ Now, the hocks on her…”
Magnus made a sound that could be taken for interest.
There were four of them around her now. It had been two when the applause died down.
Then three, when Fenwick drifted over to see what had become of Bracewell’s conversation, and now a fourth, a fair young man Magnus did not know and had already decided against, was angling in from the left with two glasses in his hands, one of them plainly meant for her.
She would take it. She would take it and thank him and lower her lashes, and the fair young man’s whole evening would rearrange itself around her, and that was precisely the point of the entire exercise.
Magnus’s back teeth had begun to ache.
“You are glaring,” Leo observed, materializing at his elbow.
“I’m nae glaring.”
“You are glaring at a group of perfectly inoffensive gentlemen with an intensity that suggests you are pricing their coffins.” Leo followed his gaze across the room. He watched for a moment. “Ah.”
Magnus turned his head. “Ah, what?”
“Nothing.” Leo sipped his champagne. “That makes sense, is all.”
“What makes sense?”
“Mm,” Leo looked serenely around the hall.
“Leo.”
“I did not say a word.”
“Ye said ah. Ye said it in that particular way ye have. That’s nae a word at all, but a wee pamphlet on the subject.”
“You are hearing things.” Leo’s mouth was doing something insufferable at one corner.
“It is the heat. Musicales are terribly close.” He let the silence sit precisely as long as it took to become unbearable, then briskly changed the subject with the air of a man doing a great kindness.
“Anyway, I have news, which I am delivering out of pure friendship and no other motive whatsoever. Lady Craven is here.”
“Who?”
“Who?” Leo turned to look at him properly.
“Lady Craven. The widow. Handsome, wealthy, five-and-thirty, and by all accounts thoroughly finished with mourning. She spent twenty minutes at the Alcott dinner in February telling you about her late husband’s stables while looking at your shoulders, and she has just asked me, with a directness I found frankly bracing, whether you would be at cards later.
” He raised his eyebrows. “You are being pursued, Magnus. It is a novel experience for you, being pursued by someone who has not first been paid to do it.”
“I’m nae entertainin’ ladies tonight.”
“You are not entertaining—” Leo stopped. He set down his glass on a passing tray, the better to give this his full attention. “Say that again?”
“Ye heard me fine.”
“I did, and I intend to have it engraved. The Duke of Greythorne, in a room containing a rich, willing, unencumbered widow with an interest in his shoulders, declines to entertain ladies this evening.” Leo folded his arms. “And would this uncharacteristic monkishness have anything to do with a certain Lady Rosaline, who has spent the last quarter of an hour becoming the most interesting woman in this hall in a manner remarkably sudden, given that a week ago she could not order a lemonade without turning to stone?”
Magnus felt the hall shift a degree closer.
“Keep yer voice down.”
“I am whispering.”
“Ye’re performin’.” He turned, putting his back to the hall, and took Leo by the arm and steered him two steps toward a pillar.
When he spoke again, his voice was barely above the din of the crowd.
“Ye’ll nae say her name and mine in the same breath.
Nae in this house. Nae anywhere there’s a soul with ears. ”
Leo’s amusement vanished, and what was underneath it was rather more serious than Magnus had expected.
“Magnus, what have you done?”
“Nothin’.”
“That is not a no. That is not remotely a no.”
“I’ve done nothin’ to her, and I’ll do nothin’ to her.
” The words came out harder than Magnus meant them to, so he softened his voice.
“Listen to me. That lass has two younger sisters and a brother who’d sell the lot of them for a rung on a ladder, and a name that’s one whisper from bein’ a joke this town tells at supper.
D’ye ken what happens to her if she’s linked to me?
To me, Leo. The savage. The one who lifted Mowbray off his feet at White’s.
The one with a cloud over him that half the Lords would dearly love to name aloud.
” He shook his head once. “She’s spent three years tryin’ to be small enough that nobody notices her.
She doesnae need me makin’ her the story of the Season. ”
Leo was quiet for a moment.
“That,” he said at last, “is the most thoroughly considered thing I have ever heard you say about another person.”
“It’s arithmetic. There’s nothin’ considered about it.”
“Mm.” Leo plucked a fresh glass from a tray and handed it over.
“Then let me offer you a piece of arithmetic in return, since we are being so mathematical this evening. You may certainly protect the lady’s name by refusing to be seen near her.
It is a sound plan. It has, however, one flaw.
” He nodded subtly across the hall. “You have not taken your eyes off her in twenty minutes, and this room contains a hundred people, and at least forty of them have nothing to do but watch a duke and wonder what he is looking at.”
Magnus looked at his friend. Then he looked, quite deliberately, at the ceiling. At the chandelier. At Lord Harold, who had cornered someone else and was telling them about a mare, judging by his gestures.
“Better,” Leo uttered.
“Say a word of this to anyone, and I’ll throw ye out a window.”
“You would never. I am the only man in London who will still be seen with you.” Leo drank. “Though I will say, purely as a matter of record, that this is not going to work.”
“What isnae?”
“Whatever it is you are doing when you look at the ceiling and pretend the arithmetic holds.” Leo’s voice was pleasant, and entirely without mercy.
“Go and be charming to somebody, Magnus. Anybody. Lady Craven, a bishop, the pianoforte. Stop standing in the corner, glaring at Bracewell as though you mean to rip the man apart at the seams, because I promise you it is a great deal more legible from across the room than you imagine.”
With that, he drifted off into the crowd, insufferable to the last.
Magnus stood alone by the pillar with a glass he had no intention of drinking and made himself look at the chandelier, and the carpet, and the door.
He lasted the better part of two minutes.
When his eyes drifted back, Rosaline was laughing again, and the fair young man had gotten the second glass into her hand after all.
Bracewell was speaking with quite a lot of gesticulating, and Rosaline was looking up at him through her lashes.
All four men leaned in like they were warming their hands at a fire.
She was doing it perfectly, every bit of it, exactly as he had taught her.
Magnus set the glass down on the nearest surface, hard enough to make it rattle. Then he went to find someone to charm.