Chapter Nine
The next morning, Isaac sat in the dining room with Tom.
He was determined to put into practice the lesson Helena had taught him the night before. Not only because he wished to master the art of cutlery, but also because it took his mind off the moment they'd shared the night before, when their fingers touched.
Isaac shifted in his chair, firmly pushing all thoughts that were not about silverware to the back of his mind.
"You're doing it again," Tom said, watching with open fascination.
Isaac ignored him, choosing instead to focus on selecting the correct fork from the small arrangement beside his plate.
"Since when did I become less interesting than cutlery?" Tom asked.
Again, Isaac said nothing.
"What in God's name has come over you?" he pressed. "Your bloody eggs will be cold by the time you've decided which fork to use."
"Nothing's come over me," Isaac grunted.
Tom reached across the table and plucked up the wrong fork with exaggerated care. He speared a piece of ham with it, watching Isaac over the gesture.
"Tell me, Your Proper Lordship, have I offended some ancient law of cutlery? Ought I be using the little one instead? I confess I can hardly keep track anymore, seeing as how you've apparently become an authority on the subject sometime between Tuesday and today."
"Leave off, Tom."
"I will not leave off. This is the finest entertainment I've had all week."
Tom set down the offending fork, still grinning.
"First the House of Lords put the fear of God into you, and now you're sitting up straight and minding your forks like a man expecting the Queen herself to walk through that door. Next you'll be telling me you've taken up embroidery."
"I've no wish to make a fool of myself twice in the same fortnight, that's all."
Isaac kept his eyes on his plate, uncomfortably aware that the explanation, while true enough as far as it went, left out rather more than it included.
"Westminster was bad enough. I'd rather not repeat the experience at Fenwick's table tonight."
Tom's teasing softened somewhat.
"Fair enough, I suppose. Though I'll say this much—wherever you've been picking up your new manners, they're doing you some good. You didn't use to know a soup spoon from a shovel."
Isaac said nothing to that, only reached for his tea, and he was grateful when Whitby's arrival with the morning's correspondence gave Tom something else to occupy his attention.
***
The dinner that evening, hosted by Mr Aldous Fenwick and attended by a handful of the neighbouring gentry Isaac had thus far met only in passing, began with precisely the dread he had felt at the House of Lords a week past.
He arrived expecting another evening of the same careful, poorly disguised contempt he had endured in London. The sidelong glances, the polite condescension, the sense of being watched for a mistake everyone in the room had already decided he would make.
It did not, in the end, unfold that way.
Seated at Fenwick's table, he remembered what Nell had taught him, so much so that the spread of cutlery arranged before him did not leave him with the familiar sharp lurch of panic the sight of multiple forks had once produced.
What was more, he waited until his host had started the first course before beginning his own.
He selected his utensils without hesitation, working from the outside in as he had been taught.
He held his wine by the stem, and when the conversation turned, as it inevitably did, toward matters of estate management, he felt on steadier ground than any lesson in cutlery could have prepared him for.
"You've made some improvements to the tenant cottages already, I understand," Fenwick observed, midway through the second course.
Isaac noticed how the man's tone carried the careful neutrality of someone still deciding what he thought of his new neighbour. Isaac could not help but feel the heavy burden of scrutiny weigh a little heavier on his shoulders.
"Started on the Hartfield farm's roof last week," Isaac said. "Fletcher tells me it's been leaking since before the old Baron's time, and a family can't work land properly if half their harvest is ruined before it can go to market. Seemed the sensible place to begin."
"Practical," Fenwick said, with what sounded like genuine surprise. "Most men in your position concern themselves first with the house, and the grounds, and only later with the tenants, if ever."
"Land's no good to a man if the people working it are drowning," Isaac said simply.
As he spoke, he caught, from further down the table, an older gentleman nodding slowly. Nor could he ignore how the nod helped to loosen the knots in his stomach.
The conversation continued in much the same vein through the remainder of the evening.
Roads in want of repair, a proposed improvement to the local drainage that three of the assembled landowners had been quarrelling over for the better part of a year, the price of wool holding steady despite poor weather.
Isaac found, to his own considerable surprise, that he had opinions worth offering on most of it, hard-won practical sense accumulated from a lifetime of watching how money either worked or didn't. He also noticed that several of the gentlemen present seemed inclined to actually listen when he spoke.
But despite his successes around the dinner table, no one forgot what he had been before he was Baron Rowan.
Mrs Fenwick's smile, though warm enough, carried a certain watchfulness that suggested she had not yet fully decided whether her husband's new neighbour was a curiosity to be tolerated or a genuine addition to their circle. Several guests glanced at his hands throughout the evening.
Etiquette could be learned; he understood that now. But what he also understood was that when dinner was announced, and the gloves came off, people noticed the scarred hand holding the right fork.
Still, the sharp, mocking edge that had followed him through every hour of the House of Lords was, if not absent, considerably muted, and by the time the evening drew to its close, Isaac had survived an entire dinner among the gentry.
And this time without once feeling the particular hot shame that had accompanied every previous encounter with people of this class.
Riding back to Rowan Hall, Isaac was in noticeably better spirits. And as the house came into view, he knew that there was only one person he wished to tell about the dinner.
"How was your evening, Mr Lord?" Mrs Ellis asked, as he stepped through the doors.
"Better than I expected," he said as he removed his coat. "No Whitby tonight?"
"He went into town, My Lord," she explained. "He did not think you would mind, as you were out."
"I don't mind," he replied.
"Very good, My Lord. Would you like me to get you anything? Some tea perhaps?”
Isaac did not want tea, but tea was the perfect excuse to see Nell and let her know how the evening went.
"I would, thank you, Mrs Ellis."
She bowed her head and turned to go.
"Would you have Nell bring it up?" he asked.
She hesitated a moment. "Very well, My Lord."
Isaac headed up to his study. He had barely begun sorting through the correspondence piled across his desk when a soft knock sounded at the door.
"Come in," he said.
Nell stepped inside the room. As she did, Isaac smiled at the sight of her in a way that surprised him.
"Your tea, My Lord," Nell said.
"Just put it over there," he said.
Nell did as he asked and then turned to him. However, she kept her chin bent, refusing to meet his eye.
"It went well," he said.
"What did?" she asked, lifting her head then.
"Fenwick's dinner, of course," he said impatiently. "I minded my forks, waited my turn, kept my hands from betraying me too badly, and not one man at that table laughed at me the way half the House of Lords did."
He shook his head, still faintly disbelieving of it himself.
"I've you to thank for that. Whatever you did those first evenings, teaching a fighter which fork belongs where—it worked."
Something in her expression eased, and the guard she'd been wearing since stepping into the room slipped.
"I'm glad of it, My Lord. Truly."
"Well." Isaac cleared his throat, oddly pleased by her pleasure and uncertain what to do with the feeling. "I don't suppose our lessons are finished, unless you'd rather be done with the whole business now that I've survived one dinner."
Nell hesitated.
"You do not wish to continue the lessons?" he said, trying his best to hide his disappointment.
"No—" Nell said, stepping forward. "It's not that I do not wish to continue helping you, My Lord. It's only that I worry Mrs Ellis may find out and I shall get in trouble."
"Trouble?" Isaac said. "I am the Lord of this house, and should Mrs Ellis find out, then I shall deal with it."
Still, Nell looked uncertain.
"Is there something more?" he asked.
"I-I do not wish to do anything improper," she admitted, a faint blush creeping into her face.
A smile tugged at the corners of his lips. "Nell, you are teaching me about cravats and fish forks, I hardly think that constitutes anything improper, rather the opposite."
"I know," she said. "But might we agree now that nothing improper will transpire from our lessons? Nothing more than fish forks and cravats."
"Of course," Isaac agreed.
He saw Nell's shoulder drop in relief.
"Alright," she agreed. "Then I should like to continue helping you, My Lord."
"Good," Isaac said, smiling. "And might I ask one more favor of you, Nell?"
She waited.
"Might you consider, in private, calling me Isaac?" he asked. "I can't quite get used to all this "My Lord" talk."
The blush returned to Nell's cheeks as she nodded.
"Thank you," he said. "And now, if you aren't too tired tonight, perhaps another lesson? There is some ball or another I am to attend. And I don't know the first thing about dancing outside of a ring."
"I should go," she said suddenly.
He frowned, surprised at her sudden desire to leave, and without thinking, he caught her hand. Nell stopped, turning to him as their eyes met.
"Please, Nell," Isaac said. "I've never danced in my life, not once."
She held his gaze for a moment. As she did, he could not help but notice how thick her eyelashes were. He felt the back of his neck warm.
"A waltz," she said softly.
Isaac nodded.
"Your right hand goes here, at my waist," she said, guiding him to her. "Not too low, mind—and mine rests here, on your shoulder. We hold our left hands together, like so."
Isaac positioned himself as instructed, acutely conscious of the sudden nearness of her. He found his throat turning dry.
"Now," she continued. "The basic step moves in a count of three. Forward, side, together, for one partner, while the other moves back, side, together, to match. Shall we try it slowly?"
They tried it slowly, but it did not go well.
Isaac, who had spent fifteen years learning to move his body with practised precision inside a boxing ring, discovered within the first several attempts that none of that precision translated to guiding a woman backwards across a ballroom floor.
First he moved too quickly, throwing off her count. Then he forgot which direction the turn was meant to travel and sent them both nearly stumbling into a stack of shrouded furniture along the wall. More than once he stepped on her slippered feet.
"That's my foot again."
"I know it's your foot. I felt it." Isaac exhaled, frustrated, and released her only long enough to run a hand through his hair.
"I can put a man twice my size flat on his back inside three minutes, and I can't manage to walk in a circle without crushing your toes.
There's something deeply wrong with that. "
"Fighting a man and dancing with a woman require rather different skills, My Lord… Isaac."
"Clearly."
He resumed the position but promptly forgot the count within the first four steps, turning the wrong direction so thoroughly that Nell was obliged to catch his arm to keep them both upright. In the moment, the sheer absurdity of it all was not lost on him, and he guessed not on Nell, either.
Here he was, the Baron Rowan, terror of London's prize rings, tangled up in his own feet by a dance that every twelve-year-old of the aristocracy evidently managed without difficulty.
Suddenly, Nell began to laugh. Isaac stared at her for a moment, the sound of it stirring something in his chest. Then he began to laugh as well.
Within seconds, the two of them dissolved into peels of laughter that left Nell obliged to stop and catch her breath against the nearby wall, one hand pressed to her side.
"Fighting grown men," Isaac informed her, still laughing. "Is easier than this. At least a man tells you plainly when he means to hit you. Nobody's warned me a single time before I've gone and stepped on your foot again."
"You might try counting aloud, My Lord, rather than relying on some instinct that's evidently more suited to the boxing ring."
"Counting aloud. Right."
He resumed the position once more, and this time, following her patient instruction and his own grim determination not to be defeated by something so evidently simple, he began to find something like the rhythm she'd described.
Forward, side, together.
As Isaac concentrated all his attention on her count rather than his own frustration, he gradually began to improve. His movements smoothed into something that might, with sufficient charity, be called dancing. It was then that he became aware of how close they were standing.
He could smell the faint scent of something floral clinging to her hair and feel the warmth of her hand where it rested against his. And without intending to, found himself watching her rather than his own feet.
Nell had gone quiet too, he realised.
She kept her eyes fixed somewhere near his shoulder rather than meeting his gaze directly.
And as he looked down at her, he felt a sudden desire to be closer to her, not in the physical sense, but in any other way.
"Tell me something about you, Nell," he said.
She stiffened slightly. “Like what?”
"Tell me something that no one else knows."
She stopped suddenly. Immediately, he regretted asking the question.
"I—I ought to go, My Lord," she said, dropping his hand and stepping back. "I've chores to see to before dawn, and it's grown very late."
"Nell—"
"Thank you for the lesson. That is—thank you for allowing me to teach the lesson. You're improving a great deal."
The words tumbled out of her with a speed that betrayed exactly how flustered she was. As he watched, she gathered the tea tray before dropping into a hasty, imperfect curtsy. Then she fled the room.
Isaac watched her disappear through the doorway, the sound of her quick footsteps fading down the corridor beyond.