Chapter 15
“You have surprised me, Rosaline. I do not say it often, so mark it. Two dinners and a musical now without catastrophe, and I am reliably told that Lord Bracewell asked after you by name this week. By name.”
“I am glad, Samuel.”
For the fortieth time that evening, Rosaline resisted the urge to draw the neckline of her gown a half-inch higher. It was a deep blue silk, cut lower than anything she had worn before, and she felt half-naked in it and entirely on display. Which was, she had been assured, precisely the point.
“See that it continues.” Samuel surveyed Lady Bexley’s crowded reception room with the air of a general reviewing ground.
“This is not for your amusement, you understand. Whatever has come over you these past weeks, whatever accounts for it, I do not much care, so long as it holds. Beatrice came out in the spring. Ivy much later, but still… Every rung you climb now is a rung they will not have to climb alone.” He glanced at her, and there was no warmth in his eyes, only calculation.
“Do not grow careless simply because you have finally grown competent.”
“I understand.”
“Good.” He moved off to be seen among better people.
Rosaline let her shoulders drop a fraction, and it was in that small unguarded moment that she saw him.
The Duke of Greythorne stood across the length of the room with Lord Rivercourt at his side, the pair of them ringed by a knot of gray-headed lords.
From what she could see, he was being perfectly charming.
He bowed at the correct depth. He laughed at the right moments. He had one old earl positively beaming.
She understood, with a small private jolt, that she was watching her own lessons worn like a well-cut coat, and that he wore them better than she had dared hope.
He did not look at her, not once.
She told herself she was glad and turned away, not daring to examine why the gladness sat so poorly.
“Lady Rosaline, is it? I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. Denby. Charmed, thoroughly charmed.”
The seating had been arranged by a hostess with either great mischief or none at all in her heart, and it had placed Rosaline between two dull baronets and directly across from Lord Denby, a florid young man with a high opinion of himself and a wine-colored waistcoat straining to contain it.
Beside Lord Denby, close enough that Rosaline could not lift her eyes without risking a blush, sat the Duke of Greythorne. She did not lift her eyes to his. She fixed them with great deliberation on Lord Denby.
“Lord Denby.” She let her lashes fall, slowly lifted her gaze to his, and held it. “I had so hoped there would be interesting conversation on this side of the table.”
Denby’s fork paused halfway to his mouth. “Had you? Had you, indeed?” He set the fork down, the better to devote himself to her. “Well, you have come to the right place, Lady Rosaline. I am considered rather good company. I have just returned from Vienna, you know.”
“Vienna.” She widened her eyes the exact degree the word deserved. “How I envy you. One hears such things of the music there. You must tell me everything.”
It was working, of course. It always worked now, which still astonished her a little each time.
Denby puffed out his chest and began to hold forth on Vienna, of which he plainly knew a great deal less than he believed. Rosaline arranged her expression into rapt attention and made the small encouraging sounds that kept a man of Denby’s sort talking indefinitely.
“The opera houses, chiefly,” he was saying. “Though I confess the German tongue defeated me. Guttural stuff. No music in the language itself, whatever they manage to wring out of the instruments.”
“Odd,” Magnus commented, “for it is the language that gave us nearly every composer worth the name.”
Rosaline’s eyes flicked to him despite herself. He had not looked up from his plate.
“I beg your pardon?” Denby huffed.
“Nothin’ at all, My Lord. Only that Herr Mozart and Herr Beethoven and Herr Haydn all managed to find a wee bit of music in it somewhere, guttural or nae.” Magnus cut into his fish with great mildness. “But then, ye’ve been to Vienna and I havenae, so I’ll defer to the man who’s seen it.”
A brief tense silence fell over their corner of the table. Denby’s color deepened. He had understood just enough to know he had been made to look foolish and not nearly enough to know how to answer it.
Rosaline broke the silence before the poor man could flounder.
“His Grace is teasing you, Lord Denby, but he makes your point for you rather than against you.” She turned the full warmth of her attention back to Denby and away from Magnus, like a door closing.
“For it is one thing to know the names of composers, which any schoolboy can recite, and quite another to have stood in the rooms where they played and breathed in the air of the place, as you have. Knowledge from a book is nothing beside knowledge from the world. I would rather hear a thing from a man who has lived it.” She let that settle on Denby like a warm cloak.
“You were saying, My Lord? The opera houses?”
Denby, restored and glowing, resumed speaking. He got perhaps two sentences into the architecture of the opera house before informing the table that its famous dome was the largest in all of Europe.
“Larger than St. Peter’s in Rome?” Magnus asked his plate.
“I… well… comparable. Very comparable, certainly.”
“Comparable. Aye.” Magnus reached for the salt. “That’ll be it, then.”
“How well traveled you both are,” Rosaline said warmly, before Denby’s face could finish falling, “to be comparing the great domes of the Continent across the fish. You must forgive His Grace, Lord Denby. Scotsmen are famously literal creatures. They have not our English gift for a generous approximation.”
She smiled at Denby as though the two of them were sharing a private joke at the Duke’s expense, and Denby, who a breath ago had been the butt of one, found himself suddenly on the flattering side of it and rallied magnificently.
Rosaline permitted herself one glance across the small distance to the Duke and found him watching her. She let her eyes say very clearly, I do not need your help. Sit down.
A spark kindled behind his eyes, half temper and half admiration, and she looked away before it could catch.
“You are enjoying yourself,” she heard Lord Rivercourt murmur to him under the noise. “Rather more than the situation strictly calls for. Eat your fish, Your Grace. Our side of the table misses you desperately.”
The Duke said something too low to carry. Whatever it was, Lord Rivercourt laughed.
The trouble came with dessert.
A syllabub, and a dish of glazed fruits, and tiny almond cakes so pretty it seemed a shame to disturb them. Rosaline, who had spent the whole of the fish course being charming with her voice, understood that the moment had arrived to be charming with more than that.
She thought of a dim sweet shop. She thought of a low voice saying, Ye eat like ye mean it. She took up her spoon and did not hurry.
She let the syllabub linger. She drew the spoon slowly from her lips. She caught the smallest trace of cream at the corner of her mouth with the tip of one finger, unhurried, the way she had been shown.
Across the table, Lord Denby forgot entirely what he had been saying about Vienna and turned a deep, blotchy red from his collar to his hairline.
She had done it correctly, then. She could feel that she had.
She could also feel, without looking, the exact moment the Duke stopped eating.
She risked one glance. It was a mistake. The Duke was not looking at her. He was looking at Denby’s flushed face, nothing charming left in him at all.
His jaw had set. His knuckles had gone pale where they gripped the stem of his glass, and he had the sharp look of a man deciding precisely which bone to break first.
Beside him, Lord Rivercourt had grown very alert, and she saw his hand move beneath the table. She saw the almost imperceptible pressure of it against the Duke’s arm. Then Rivercourt leaned toward him and said something short and urgent through a pleasant smile.
The Duke picked up his glass and drank from it deeply, which was, Rosaline suspected, the entire purpose of Rivercourt’s intervention.
She lowered her eyes to her syllabub and did nothing further with it. Her heart was beating far too fast, and not on account of Lord Denby.
Lady Bexley’s drawing room was vast and warm and loud with after-dinner voices.
Rosaline stood near the window with a cup of coffee she did not want, trying to feel clean. It was a strange and unpleasant sensation, and she turned it over with distaste.
She had performed for Denby, and Denby had flushed and stammered and looked at her mouth as though he owned it. The whole of it had left her feeling as though she wanted a wash.
And yet in the sweet shop, with the identical lesson and a very different man, she had felt nothing of the kind. She had felt looked at, yes, but warm with it, seen rather than devoured, and she despised herself thoroughly for noticing the difference.
It is for my family, she reminded herself—every bit of it. Denby earns four thousand pounds a year, and his mother likes quiet girls. That is what matters.
It did not help nearly as much as it ought to have.
“All right.” Beatrice appeared at her elbow with two glasses of ratafia and handed one over. “I have been watching you for a fortnight now, and I am no longer able to hold my tongue, so out with it. Who are you, and what have you done with my sister?”
“I have not the faintest idea what you mean.”
“You know precisely what I mean. Three weeks ago, you could not order a lemonade without rehearsing it. Tonight, you took Lord Denby apart and put him back together grateful for the experience, and you did something with a syllabub that I am frankly too young to have witnessed.” Beatrice’s eyes were bright and searching.
“People do not change like this in a fortnight, Rosaline. Not without a reason. What is the reason?”
Rosaline sipped her ratafia to buy herself a moment.
“The reason,” she said carefully, “is that I have decided to secure a match this Season—a real one. And a woman who means to be chosen must first learn how to be seen. That is all it is, Bea. Motivation. It sharpens the mind wonderfully.”
Beatrice narrowed her eyes. She did not believe it, that much was plain, and for a dreadful moment, Rosaline thought she would say so.
“And why the sudden appetite for matrimony,” Beatrice said instead, “from the girl who spent three Seasons treating every proposal like a summons to the gallows?”
That, at least, Rosaline could answer honestly, and the honesty steadied her voice.
“Because I would like to be my own mistress.” She looked down into her glass.
“I am one-and-twenty, Bea, and I have spent every one of those years under the roof and the thumb of one man or another. If I marry, and marry sensibly, I might at last run my own house, keep my own hours, have my sisters over whenever I please, without asking anyone’s leave.
I might find a husband who is a great many things Samuel is not.
” She allowed herself the smallest wicked pause. “A shade less discerning, for a start.”
Beatrice snorted so loudly that she had to press her glass to her lips to smother it.
“Discerning,” she repeated, delighted. “Oh, that is generous. That is the understatement of the year. Discerning. Our brother, who last week returned a whole ham to the kitchens because he did not care for the angle at which it had been sliced.”
“He did not.”
“He did. Cook told Ivy, and Ivy told me, and now I am telling you, and none of us shall ever unknow it.” Beatrice was laughing properly now behind her hand.
Rosaline found herself laughing with her, the tight unclean feeling in her chest loosening at last into something warm and ordinary and good. For a moment, they were simply two sisters laughing at a window, and it was the best she had felt all evening.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she caught movement across the drawing room.
It was the Duke of Greythorne, crossing unhurriedly toward the tall glass doors at the far end that opened onto a balcony, a dark shape against the candlelight.
Just before he stepped through them, he turned his head, and for the briefest instant, his eyes found hers across the crowded room.
They held, then moved once, deliberately, into the dark beyond the doors.
Then he was gone, out into the night air, and the invitation hung behind him plain as anything.
Rosaline’s pulse did the unforgivable thing it did only for him.
“Bea.” She set down her cup, not meeting her sister’s knowing eyes. “It is dreadfully packed in here. I would like a breath of fresh air for only a few minutes. If Samuel comes looking, would you—”
“Tell him you have gone to repair a torn hem and will be an age?”
Rosaline risked a look up and wished she had not. Beatrice was watching her with an expression that saw a great deal more than Rosaline would have liked.
But she nodded and stepped smoothly sideways to block their brother’s view. “Go on. A few minutes. I have never in my life seen a hem so stubbornly torn.”
Rosaline squeezed her sister’s hand once, in gratitude and in warning both, before slipping away through the crowd toward the open doors, the dark, and the man waiting in it.