Chapter 1 #2
“The shape of it,” Elisabeth said, emphatically.
She traced the bird’s outline. “The wings, the head, the legs... It’s a little crow...
Petite corneille... I had it made especially for you.
It took the man weeks to perfect. I watched him working sometimes.
He let me stay and watch. He was very kind. ”
Gabriel recognized the shape now that she had explained, and he did not know whether to smile or cringe. “Crows are not this colorful. They are black to the core,” he replied to her in French.
“My little crow,” Elisabeth said in French. “Do you remember that I used to call you that, when you were so small, and your hair was so black against your skin? Just like your mother’s and my father’s when they were children?”
“I remember,” Gabriel said, nodding, though he tried not to follow the memory all the way. He clasped his hand over the crow, forcing a smile for his aunt, though his heart had sunk into his stomach. “The youngest crow from the youngest crow. This was a thoughtful gift. I will cherish it.”
He looked her in the eyes as he promised her this. But his aunt was looking elsewhere. She had grown more distracted in the last five years. Doctor Retcher had diagnosed her with melancholy, as though that wasn’t just some Shakespearean nonsense.
It was good that she had the conservatory to focus on. Gabriel held the bird tighter and bid her to return to the party with him, pulling her close to him again as he led her out of the plant room.
The ballroom was ripe with laughter and dancing.
Through the holes in his mask, the room seemed smaller than it was.
He could barely see beyond the knot of gentlemen crowding him.
They were masked as well, but unlike some of the other guests, they had not tried to conceal their identities from one another.
The masquerade ball had been Gabriel’s idea.
He had hoped a mask would allow him a modicum of anonymity, at least temporarily.
And maybe it had worked somewhat. But friends and acquaintances had found him from the first to congratulate him on his birthday, and he could always feel the eyes of the other guests on him.
Elisabeth’s Venetian crow was burning a hole in his trouser pocket.
“I was surprised to hear that you had returned to London for the day, Your Grace,” one baron said just then, a man he remembered from his days at Oxford. “Did you not spend your thirtieth birthday in Surrey?”
“What’s there to do in Surrey?” someone chimed in from his left. “His Grace is better here in London with us. Prinny is always boasting what a good time he has with His Grace. There is no gentleman more daring than the Duke of Hartmere. I heard it with my own ears. And the Prince is right.”
“Will we see you at Almack’s next week, Your Grace?”
“Have you heard, you must have, of that Levant fellow, Your Grace?”
The questions came thick and fast after that, likely owing to the punch circling the room on silver salvers. He answered them to the best of his ability, a little woozy from the punch in question, and the brandy he had imbibed with James.
James, he thought. Where did James go after the drawing room?
Just as he was about to ask whether the surrounding gentlemen had seen the marquess, he spied James from across the room. He wasn’t sure how he managed to spot him past his mask and his light inebriation.
It was an almost supernatural ability he possessed, and James possessed it too. The feeling of knowing they were nearby, a sense that could only manifest between people who had spent most of their lives together.
If the gentlemen had continued talking around him, Gabriel didn’t hear a word of it. He reached his free hand into his pocket and wrapped his fingers tightly around the bird. The glass talons bit into his hand through his glove.
James stood in the archway to the ballroom with a young woman. From this distance, she appeared to Gabriel as an amorphous, pale shape, but the way they stood had an intimate quality.
It was fleeting, but he saw it. The way their bodies curled toward each other while leaving sufficient room for propriety.
Her hands hovering in midair, as though waiting to be caught.
The tilt of her neck and her ear angled just enough so that if James wanted to say something privately, he could say it, and only she would hear him.
Gabriel had found himself engaged in similar dances before. The charge of the moment. The heat building between two people who should be cold and proper with one another.
This must have been his news, Gabriel thought, swallowing hard. James is not a rake. He is not like me. He is a serious gentleman. He has never sinned. This woman must be an object of formal courtship.
He didn’t bother announcing his exit before he cut through the group of gentlemen and headed toward the archway. The music was loud around him. Who had told them to play Haydn at this volume? Someone almost crashed into him, and he steadied her before pressing forward.
James must have seen him coming. By the time they were face to face, the woman had disappeared.
“Are you not making your speech soon?” James asked, pursing his lips, like he always did when he was lying.
“I would rather hear a speech from you. Who was she?”
James narrowed his green eyes behind his mask. The tips of his ears turned red. He hesitated a moment, then sighed. “You must mean Miss Warwick.”
“That is for you to decide,” he countered, keeping his voice low. “Who is she to you?”
“She is Charlotte’s younger sister.”
“Your sister-in-law, Charlotte? Very neat.”