Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
Worthington House had been lit from pavement to parapet, every window blazing, the light falling in warm columns across the street where the carriages waited in a queue that stretched along half the block.
Alice sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the house grow larger through the carriage window and told herself that her stomach’s current behavior was nerves, nothing more, the ordinary and manageable nerves of a woman who had not danced in three years and was attending her first ball as a duchess.
The two things were, of course, not at all the same. She was fully aware of this.
Kenneth sat across from her. He had said nothing since the carriage rolled away from Grosvenor Square, which was not unusual, but tonight his silence had a particular quality she could not name, directed and deliberate, the silence of a man attending carefully to something he was not looking at.
She knew, because she had been doing the same thing for the past ten minutes. She was not looking at him; she was looking at the illuminated house and the procession of silk-clad guests.
She was aware of every inch between them with the acute specificity that had been her affliction since the clearing, since the garden and the wall and his hands and his mouth and the thing he had said to her afterward when he smoothed his coat and told her they should go back.
“Your body is not a thing to be endured.”
She pressed her palms flat against her skirts.
“You are quiet,” he remarked.
“You are also quiet,” she replied. “I did not wish to disturb the symmetry.”
He half-smirked at her words, then asked, “Are you nervous?”
“No.” She held his gaze. “Are you?”
“I never attend a ball without a measure of apprehension.” He said it with the flat evenness of a confession that cost nothing. “The Worthington music tends toward the overlong.”
“You dislike dancing.”
“I am indifferent to dancing.” He looked at her. “But I am not indifferent to tonight.”
The carriage stopped. The footman opened the door, and Alice accepted his hand and stepped down onto Brook Street with her chin at the correct angle and her pulse behaving in a manner she found entirely unreasonable.
The ballroom was full.
Candles burned in chandeliers above them. The musicians were arranged at the far end of the room. The smell was warm wax and hothouse flowers and the faint, layered sweetness of too many perfumes in one enclosed space.
Alice stood at Kenneth’s shoulder as they were announced, and she felt the shift, the familiar tide of turning heads, of conversations that paused and resumed at a lower volume.
She had felt it at every gathering since the wedding. By now, she had learned to absorb it the way one absorbed a cold draught through a window left unlatched: unpleasant, present, and not particularly surprising.
What she had not anticipated was the woman standing twelve feet away, near the refreshments table, who observed her entrance with the composed attention of a person who had been waiting for precisely this.
She was not someone Alice recognized. She was perhaps forty, impeccably dressed, her face arranged in an expression of social pleasantness but communicating nothing of the kind.
Beside her stood a younger woman, perhaps twenty-two, fair-haired and watchful, who was currently failing to pretend she was looking at the musicians.
Alice noted them and looked away.
Lady Worthington received them with genuine warmth, which was a relief, and her husband shook Kenneth’s hand with the enthusiasm of a man who had business reasons to be pleased about the Duke of Bearmoor’s presence and saw no virtue in concealing it.
They moved away from the receiving line into the press of the ballroom. Kenneth’s hand settled briefly on the small of Alice’s back, guiding her through a gap in the crowd, and the contact sent a heat up her spine that she repressed quickly.
“Your Grace.” Lord Ashton appeared from the direction of the card room, hand outstretched, wearing the expression of a man who had been waiting specifically to intercept a target.
They shook hands. “Didn’t expect to see you tonight.
The quarterly shipping figures came in. Have you had Pemberton look at them yet? ”
“Tuesday,” Kenneth said.
“Good. Tuesday.” Lord Ashton turned to Alice, and the warmth in his expression, though tempered by habit, was genuine. “Your Grace, lovely to see you.”
“And you, Lord Ashton.”
Kenneth looked at her, a question in his eyes.
“Go,” Alice urged. “I am perfectly well.”
He held her gaze for a beat longer than the occasion required and then moved away with Ashton toward the card room corridor, his back straight, the crowd parting around him the way crowds parted around men who expected them to.
Alice turned to find herself alone for the first time all evening.
She was not, in fact, perfectly well. She was highly conscious of the musicians tuning their instruments and of her own feet, which had not been on a dance floor in approximately three years.
She had practiced in her room at Bearmoor House in the mornings for the past fortnight, before the household was properly awake, counting the steps of the cotillion and the country dance in her stockinged feet while the fire was still just embers.
She was not going to embarrass herself. She had decided this with the same deliberate certainty with which she had decided to bob for apples at the village fair, which was to say she had decided it while simultaneously being quite uncertain and had simply declined to let the uncertainty govern.
“Alice!”
Lucy appeared at her elbow, flushed from the warmth of the room, her dress a blue shade that made her eyes very bright. She pressed Alice’s hands between her own and pulled her toward the edge of the dance floor.
“You look magnificent,” she said in the emphatic way that suggested she meant it as both a compliment and tactical intelligence. “That color is exceptional, my dear. Did you have it made here or at Bearmoor?”
“London,” Alice said. “The amber was the modiste’s suggestion.”
“Wise woman.” Lucy turned them both toward the far wall, away from the largest cluster of guests, and lowered her voice. “Where is he?”
“Who?”
“Do not be obtuse. Bearmoor! Your husband. The man you described to me at the garden party in terms that left very little ambiguity about your feelings for him.”
Alice felt her cheeks heat up but tried keeping her expression neutral. “He is speaking with Lord Ashton.”
“Mm.” Lucy looked across the room with an expression of elaborate disinterest. “And has anything else occurred since the garden party?”
Alice looked at her fan. “We received a report on Rachel’s whereabouts. A lead near Bath. Nothing definitive, but Carver has men in Wiltshire now.”
“And…?” Lucy prompted.
“My father visited,” Alice added. “You know how he is. But this time, Kenneth defended me rather comprehensively, and my father left without finishing his tea.”
“Finally! I know he’s your father, dear, but he had it coming at some point,” Lucy responded. “Anything else?”
“The invitation to the ball arrived,” Alice said. “And he told me I would dance, first with him.” Her voice remained admirably even, but she felt Lucy’s grip tighten on her arm. “And that is the sum of events since the garden party.”
“That is not quite the sum, is it?” Lucy asked carefully.
Alice looked at the dancers beginning to arrange themselves for the opening set and said nothing at all, which was, she found, a more honest answer than the alternative.
“Alice.”
“I am not going to discuss it at a ball.”
“You never discussed it at a garden party either, and look how that turned out.”
“Lucy.”
“Forgive me.” Lucy’s voice softened. “I simply want to know that you are well. That you are not hiding from it.”
“I am not hiding from anything.” Alice looked at the chandelier, at the light falling warm and indiscriminate across two hundred and fifty people who did not know that she had spent a fortnight counting dance steps in her stockinged feet.
“I am standing at a ball in amber silk waiting to dance with my husband. That is the opposite of hiding.”
Lucy smiled. “It is, rather.”
The musicians settled. The first notes of the opening movement reached them, and Alice watched the couples take their positions.
She was aware, somewhere in the middle distance, of the woman near the refreshments table still watching her. She had not moved.
She found Kenneth before he found her, which was unusual.
He was standing near the doorway to the adjoining salon, Jonathan at his side. She saw, before he saw her, the brief and involuntary movement of his gaze across the crowd, searching.
He was looking for her.
The realization moved through her before she could name it: warmth beneath the ribs, involuntary, the kind that arrived in the body before the mind had any say in the matter.
She looked away.
But only a moment later, he found her. She felt it without looking, the way she had felt it in the breakfast room and the corridor and across every distance they had managed to put between them: the weight of his attention arriving, specific and directed, like sunlight through a lens.
She turned.
He crossed the room toward her, leaving Jonathan behind.
“You look—” He stopped. His jaw worked once. He looked at her dress, her hair, her lips, and his eyes darkened. Then he cleared his throat. “The dancing has started.”
“It has.”
“The first set is nearly over.” He extended his hand, palm up, in the way of a man who had decided something and saw no virtue in theatrics. “The second will be a country dance.”
Alice placed her hand in his. The contact, even through her glove, sent a current from her fingertips to the inside of her wrist.
She followed him toward the dance floor.
Standing at the edge of the floor with the other couples assembling around them, she forgot to be nervous.
She was so occupied with him, with the breadth of his shoulders and the warmth of his hand, that the nerves waited politely at the edge of her attention until the music began and then arrived all at once.
Her feet followed the steps she had counted a hundred times in the darkness of her room, and the muscle memory carried her through the first bar before she had consciously decided to trust it.
Kenneth moved with her. He was, she discovered, an excellent dancer. Precise and controlled in the way he was precise about everything, his hand firm on her waist when the figure required it, his steps even and unhurried.
They separated for the crossing figure. She moved down the line and acutely felt the weight of the room’s attention.
This was different from a garden party, from a dinner table, from any of the smaller social stages she had navigated since the wedding.
This was two hundred and fifty people watching the Duchess of Bearmoor dance for the first time in public.
They were watching the way audiences watched high-wire acts—with the anticipation of spectators who would prefer to see a success but would not be entirely dissatisfied by the alternative.
She completed the crossing figure and did not stumble.
She turned to find Kenneth waiting at the opposite end of the line, and his gaze when it found her held something she had no name for yet.
It was not approval, which was too small and too impersonal, but something attentive and particular and very warm.
She advanced toward him. He advanced toward her. The figure brought them close, his hand on her back, her hand on his shoulder, and they moved together in the tight spiral of the promenade.
“Stop counting,” he said, his voice pitched beneath the music.
She looked up at him. “I am not counting.”
“You are. Your lips are moving.”
She pressed her lips together. He almost smiled.
“You are doing very well,” he praised.
“I’ve been practicing.”
“I know.” He guided her through the turn. His hand on her back was steady and warm and entirely appropriate for a country dance, which made it more difficult for her to think clearly than she would have liked. “I heard you.”
She missed a step, recovered. “At what hour?”
“Early. Before the household was up.” He said it without emphasis, as though this were ordinary. “I go to the study early. Your room is two floors above.” His hand shifted slightly on her waist, and her pulse fluttered in response. “The floorboards creak.”
Alice kept facing ahead, focused on the line of dancers. The knowledge that he had heard her practicing even after they had danced together so easily settled into her chest and lodged there, warm and inconvenient.
“You might have said something,” she told him.
“You would have stopped.”
She had no answer to that because it was true. She would have stopped. She would have been mortified, and she would have dressed it in composure, and she would have stopped.
The figure separated them again. She moved down the line and felt the absence of his hand at her waist the way one felt a draught after warmth, a specific and measurable cooling of the air.
She completed the crossing and turned.
He was watching her. He was always watching her, she had come to understand, in the particular deliberate way of a man who had decided to pay attention and was finding the decision expensive.
She could see it in the tight set of his mouth, in the way his hands fell to his sides in the pause between figures with a studied precision that was in itself a form of restraint.
She felt the warmth building at the base of her throat and repressed it, and met his gaze across the line of dancers, trying with considerable effort to appear cool and collected.
They advanced toward each other for the final figure.
“I should like to tell you something,” he said, when they were close enough for it.
“The music is still playing,” she reminded him.
“I am aware.”
The promenade brought their shoulders together. She could feel the warmth of his coat sleeve against the silk of her gown.
“Tell me later.” Her voice was remarkably level.
She did not look at him. She turned correctly through the figure, her feet obeying their weeks of instruction, her heart doing something considerably less disciplined.
“Alice.”
“The music is still playing, Kenneth.”
A beat. She felt him exhale beside her, short and controlled, the sound of a man exercising patience at some cost to himself.
The music eventually came to a close, and they returned to their starting positions.
He held her hand a second longer than the dance required. The contact lasted, warm and deliberate, through the applause of the other couples, through the rustle of ladies stepping back, through three full seconds of the room rearranging itself around them.
Then he released her hand, and the air rushed in where his warmth had been.
Alice folded her hands together and looked at the middle distance, feeling the second set of nerves arrive—the ones that had nothing to do with dancing at all.