Chapter Two
“You are determined to dislike him before he has so much as bowed to you twice,” Helena said.
“I am determined to do no such thing.” Marianne sat on the end of the bed with her chin in her hand, watching Bess press the last pins into her sister’s hair. “I am waiting for him to deserve liking. You would see the difference at once if you were not so busy hoping.”
“I am not hoping.”
“You have changed your ribbon three times.”
Helena’s hand stilled at her throat. “The first was too bright for a house in half-mourning. I will not walk in looking as though I have come to dance on the old duke’s grave.”
“And the second?”
“Too plain.”
“So we have arrived at the third. It is precisely right, and you chose it because you are thinking of the dance he asked you for on the road.” Marianne let the words lie where they fell. “I only observe. I do not say a thing.”
“You say a great many things. You have merely learnt to call them observations so that no one may scold you for them.”
Bess set the final pin and stepped back, and Helena looked at the woman in the glass, at the grey ribbon and the borrowed pearls and the face that would not stop hoping however firmly she instructed it.
“He will have forgotten me by now,” she said. “A gentleman of that sort meets fifty people in a week.”
“He will remember you.” Marianne rose and shook out her own skirts. “You promised him two dances. He will have kept the dances, Helena. Depend upon it. He has not mislaid a single thing he means to use.”
“You make him sound a creditor.”
“I make him sound charming. I have not yet worked out what the charm costs.” Marianne caught her sister’s hand at the door. “I am not trying to spoil it. I am trying to see the whole of him. You never can, with people you want to like.”
***
Pecking Hall stood above the village on a rise of dark stone, square and tall and without apology, its long windows lit and its great door set open to a night turned cool against the warmth of the day.
Helena had spent the carriage ride bracing for a palace.
She found instead a house built to outlast everyone foolish enough to be impressed by it, and was impressed regardless, which annoyed her in a manner she suspected Marianne would have enjoyed.
The evening was smaller than she had feared and a good deal quieter than she had let herself hope.
The family had not entertained since the old duke’s death three months past, and the household wore the fact openly, the candles fewer than the sconces would carry, the music kept to a murmur, the company no more than a dozen near neighbours moving between two opened rooms. A little dancing had been allowed at the far end of the long room, and had the look of a thing granted on sufferance.
“You came,” said a voice at her shoulder.
She turned, and there was Lord Sylvester, bright as a struck coin against the grey of the room, and her heart performed the small foolish leap she had ordered it not to perform.
“I promised,” she said.
“Then you are already superior to half my acquaintance, who promise me a great deal and arrive at none of it.” He bowed over her hand and kept it a breath past propriety.
“You will forgive the gloom. We are being respectable this season. My mother decreed it, and her decrees carry the force of weather. One does not argue. One dresses warmly and waits for the season to turn.”
“I think the house suits being quiet.”
“The house suits being a mausoleum, which is very near the same thing and was, I believe, the architect’s settled intention.” He drew her hand through his arm. “You owe me two dances, Miss Fairford, and I mean to claim the first before some bishop’s nephew finds you and spoils my whole evening.”
He danced lightly and a little carelessly, and talked the entire way through it.
“You are looking at the door,” he said, turning her. “Three figures in and already plotting your escape. I shall take it very ill.”
“I am looking at the room. I have never stood inside a house like this one.”
“No one has. It was built to be looked at and never enjoyed, a principle my family has since extended to most of its living members.” He tipped his head towards a stout gentleman planted by the fire.
“Sir John Crale. He will tell you the history of his low meadow if you give him the smallest opening. Do not give him the opening. Beside him is his wife, who has heard about the low meadow for thirty years and lives yet, and is on that ground the bravest soul in the county.”
Helena laughed before she could prevent it, and the laugh was gone almost before it was out of her.
“You need not do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Put it away the instant it escapes. You did the same on the road.” He turned her again, and his voice came lower.
“I have decided to make it my whole business this summer to spend that laugh for you, since you will not spend it for yourself. Consider it a charity. I am reliably informed I ought to take one up.”
“You should choose a worthier object than my laughing.”
“I never choose worthy objects. They are so rarely any fun, and they always want a building fund by the end of it.” His glance went past her shoulder to the dark figure at the edge of the room, and his manner sharpened and smoothed again in the space of a breath.
“My brother is watching us. Do not look at once. He watches the way other men breathe, without noticing he does it, and he disapproves of dancing on a principle.”
“What principle?”
“That a person might enjoy a thing he has not first inspected and approved.”
She looked anyway, because being told to wait is the surest way of making a body look at once, and met for an instant the Duke’s dark, unreadable attention before he moved it elsewhere.
“You looked,” Sylvester said, delighted. “I knew you would. We are going to get on extremely well, you and I. We are both far too curious for our own good, and not nearly sorry enough about it to mend.”
Marianne was waiting at the wall when the dance set Helena free, wearing the particular stillness she kept for occasions when she had been watching and meant to give her report.
“Well,” Helena said. “Say it.”
“He dances beautifully.”
“You say it as though it were a charge read out at the assizes.”
“It is very nearly one. He has danced with a great many women to dance as well as that.” Marianne kept her eyes on the room rather than her sister. “I do not say he will disappoint you. I say he has had the practice for it. I keep thinking about the ones who are not in this room tonight.”
“You have decided the whole of his character from a single country dance.”
“I have decided nothing. I am gathering it a little at a time.” She tipped her chin towards the far wall. “His brother watched the entire dance and never once troubled to pretend he was looking elsewhere. I cannot make that man out at all. He is the only interesting thing in this room.”
The Dowager found her a little later and received her with the cool, thorough attention of a woman appraising cloth she had not decided to buy.
She was tall and straight-backed, handsome rather than soft, and wore her half-mourning like a sentence she meant to serve with dignity and not a grain more grief than the law required.
“Miss Fairford. You are the Allardyces’ guest.”
“I am, Your Grace. You are very kind to have included me.”
“I am not kind. I am curious.” The Dowager’s mouth moved by a fraction. “My son tells me he rescued you from a hedge.”
“From a ditch, Your Grace. The hedge was incidental to the business.”
“He improves a story every time he tells it. There was a ditch, then. I am glad to have the ditch back.” Her eyes had warmed by a degree even so. “And how do you find him, now you have had a second look at him in better light?”
“I find him very kind, Your Grace.”
“Yes.” The Dowager looked across the room at her younger son with a fondness that had tiredness folded inside it.
“He is kind. It has never once cost him anything to be. I would not build a house upon it, were I a young woman. But it is pleasant to stand near. I will grant him that much. It has always been pleasant to stand near.”
A neighbour at her elbow, a comfortable woman in puce, leant across. “Such a small party, but it must be, so soon. Though I did hear you are to have Lady Rosamund Harbury before the summer is out. Such a comfort to a house, an old friend at a time like this.”
“Lady Rosamund is an old friend of my younger son’s,” the Dowager said, and gave nothing away with it.
“Lady Rosamund is an old friend of everyone’s.” Sylvester had come back to Helena’s side without her marking the approach. “It is her one true talent, and she has polished it to a high shine. Miss Fairford, you are neglecting your negus, which I take as a personal injury.”
Helena let the name go by without catching on it. She had no reason yet to hold on to it. A glass was pressed into her hand, and the moment closed over and was gone.
“Miss Fairford.”
The voice came from behind her, low and level, and she turned to a man she knew at once for the Duke though no one had named him.
He could be no one else. He stood taller than Sylvester and darker, broader through the shoulder, and held himself with the stillness of a man who had learnt that movement invited remark. He bowed, flawless and wholly cold.
“Your Grace,” she said.
“My brother tells me you suffered an inconvenience on the road.”
“He was kind enough to make it a great deal less inconvenient than it might have been.”
“Sylvester has always had a talent for making inconvenience appear charming.” He said it without colour, watching her, and she could not for her life tell whether she had been paid a compliment or handed a warning dressed to resemble one.
“You see?” Sylvester laughed at her side. “He growls even while he is agreeing. It is his only music, and we have all of us learnt the steps to it.”