Chapter 6 #2
From outside came the distant sound of the garden in the evening, birds and wind and the uncomplicated sounds of the world going on regardless.
Harper walked toward her, and he did it slowly, and he stopped when there was considerably less distance between them than there had been before. He was tall, and she found herself very aware, all at once, of the way he was looking at her with that expression she was still learning to read.
“You have no right,” he said, quietly, “to tell me how to raise my son. You know nothing about what is required of him. Nothing about what it means to prepare a child for the life he will have.”
“I know what it is to be told how to behave every moment of every day,” she said, “from the time I was old enough to be told anything. I know exactly what that does to a person. And I know that it does not improve with age.”
He was very close. She had not entirely registered how close until this moment.
Close enough that she was aware of him with a specificity that was difficult to account for and impossible to dismiss. The warmth of him and the compressed something beneath all that composure that she did not have a name for yet.
Her heart was doing something it had no business doing.
She was not afraid of him. That much she was certain of. She had been afraid of people before and this was nothing like that. This was something else entirely, and it was considerably more annoying.
“It is no wonder,” Harper said, “that you have not married.”
Everything in her went still.
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“A woman who cannot conduct herself with appropriate….”
“Do not go there,” she snapped. “Not marrying was my choice. It has always been my choice and I do not require a husband to validate my existence or give my life some shape you find more legible.”
She held his gaze as she went on.
“I do not need a man for anything. And I certainly do not need your opinion of why I don’t have one.”
His eyes dropped.
It was only for a second that his gaze moved to her mouth and came back up to meet her eyes. Suddenly, she could not breathe properly but before she knew it, Harper took a step back.
The expression was gone. Whatever she had seen was replaced by the familiar, controlled composure.
“Stay away from my son,” he said. “You are not a good influence for him and I do not want him getting the wrong ideas about how things are done.”
Oh.
That was colder than she had expected.
“He has a future that requires a great deal of him, and I will not have it complicated by you.”
Temperance looked at him and there were things she could have said but understood that there was nothing she could say that would move this man one inch from where he had decided to stand.
He was perhaps even more stubborn than she was.
“Fine, then. But I suspect that he likes me better perhaps,” she muttered the last part under her breath.
“One more thing before you go,” Harper said. He seemed to soften a bit, only if by the barest amount. “There is a ball that you need to be in attendance in the coming days. You are expected to wear your best dress, and conduct yourself properly.”
“Balls bore me.”
“That is not relevant,” he snapped back, annoyed at her again.
“When is the ball?” she asked.
“Friday and we leave at eight.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said, knowing that there was little use in fighting with him. She picked up Peabody, who had been sitting through the entire exchange with great patience, and walked past Harper toward the stairs without another word.
She did not look back.
She climbed the stairs with a straight spine and unhurried steps and the absolute, ironclad composure of a woman who was not going to let him see a single thing she was currently feeling.
But when she stood for a moment alone, and pressed her free hand flat against her sternum where her heart was doing something thoroughly unreasonable.
Stop it, she told herself. What was he doing to her?
“Stay by my side tonight. I will introduce you to several gentlemen and I would ask that you receive them with an open mind and appropriate courtesy. Can you do that?”
Harper had not phrased his question to be very polite, or even one that allowed her to refuse. She knew that there was only answer.
Temperance looked straight ahead at the lit entrance and the guests moving through it.
“Of course,” she said. They had finally arrived at the ball, and Temperance was dressed in her finest silk.
Vanity was something that she occasionally enjoyed, but it was surprising for her when she had noticed Harper looking at her, and second glancing even.
Did that mean she looked nice this evening? She wanted to know badly, but would not dare ask him.
She kept her expression perfectly neutral and kept walking, and after a moment he walked with her, and she heard Albina fall in behind them.
“And I suspect that it is going to be harder to keep your mother in check,” Harper said, in a defeated voice.
“Oh, let her be. She is not looking to get married again, so you need not police her movements so heavily,” Temperance replied, and she knew that Harper did not agree with her. But for the time being, he did not brook an argument.
They went inside.
The Ashworth ballroom was large and warm and full noise. Temperance had attended enough of these evenings to know them by their rhythms, and enough to know precisely where she stood within them.
Harper, she noted, knew what he was doing.
He moved them through the room with the quiet authority of a man of his title. People noticed him.
It helped.
She could see it helping, the way eyes that had been sharp with amusement or calculation smoothed slightly when they landed on him.
It was the exact opposite of how people behaved when they saw her, and her mother.
She could not escape their whispers tonight, either.
Even though she had the duke by her side.
“The Hosmer women. Good lord, has he brought them both?”
“I heard the mother was in the papers again last week.”
“Poor man. He’s inherited quite the situation there, hasn’t he.”
Temperance kept her expression perfectly neutral and kept walking.
She had learned, a long time ago, not to let them show on her face.
It was one of the more useful things the nunnery had given her.
Harper’s hand was at her elbow, steering her left around a cluster of guests near the entrance, and she wondered, briefly and without intending to, whether he had heard them too.
But he said nothing to her about it, which she appreciated.
“I need you to stay close to me,” he said. “And there’s someone I’d like for you to meet.”
“A suitor?” she said, knowing fully well that is who he was referring to.