Chapter 6
A Glimpse Beyond the Facade
The fan in Sophia’s hand was ivory, painted with a scene of shepherdesses at rest, and it had belonged to her grandmother.
She turned it over in her lap, tracing the guard stick with her thumb.
The ballroom roared on without her attention.
Somewhere behind the screen of potted palms where she had retreated, the orchestra laboured through a country dance, and the floor shook with the percussion of two hundred feet striking in time.
The sound came up through the legs of her chair. She felt it in her teeth.
Three days since the Marine Parade. Three days since Lord Alistair Cavendish had leaned against the railing and spoken of surveyors’ errors and proud men who would not admit fault, and in those three days Sophia had composed and discarded four separate drafts of an essay she could not seem to finish.
The sentences kept curving back toward him.
Toward the way he had laughed—genuinely laughed, without the armour of irony—when she had compared the Season’s opening ball to a livestock auction with better lighting.
She had not told anyone about that conversation.
Not her mother, who would have paled at the mere mention of a Cavendish.
Not her brother Benedict, who had arrived from London that morning and was presently somewhere in the crush of dancers, no doubt charming some unfortunate girl’s parents into forgetting his lack of fortune.
The secret sat in her chest like a swallowed stone.
“Miss Ainsworth, you are hiding.”
Sophia looked up. Arthur Finch stood at the edge of the palm screen, his posture apologetic even in approach.
She had met him briefly at Lady Hargrave’s reception—a quiet young man with the kind of face one forgot immediately and the kind of eyes one did not.
He was a distant cousin of the Cavendish family, she recalled.
A poor relation, someone had whispered, though Sophia had found the whisperer’s tone more vulgar than the fact it conveyed.
“I am not hiding, Mr. Finch. I am conducting a strategic withdrawal.”
“Ah.” He did not smile, exactly, but something moved at the corner of his mouth. “And what is the strategy?”
“Survival.” She snapped the fan open. The shepherdesses gazed up at her with placid, painted indifference.
“My mother has introduced me to four eligible gentlemen this evening. The first spoke exclusively of his hunting dogs. The second spoke exclusively of himself, which was marginally more interesting but no less tedious. The third asked whether I had read any improving books lately and then looked alarmed when I said yes.”
“And the fourth?”
“The fourth asked if I was related to the Ainsworths of Derbyshire and then remembered an urgent engagement across the room when I confirmed it.”
Arthur Finch winced. “The feud.”
“The feud,” Sophia agreed. She closed the fan with a snap.
“It appears I am a compromised investment. The Cavendish taint, by association. Even though the original dispute was over a strip of land so narrow a man could not lie down across it, and even though neither family remembers precisely what was said, only that it was unforgivable.”
She had not meant to say so much. The words had simply come, propelled by an irritation she had been nursing all evening. Arthur Finch regarded her with that quiet, assessing gaze, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he was seeing more than she intended to show.
“You know the details of the original dispute,” he said. It was not a question.
“I heard them recently.”
“From someone in the Cavendish household?”
Sophia’s fingers tightened on the fan. “You are very direct, Mr. Finch.”
“I apologise.” He did not look apologetic. “I have spent too much time in libraries. One forgets that conversation is meant to be a dance, not an interrogation.”
“I prefer interrogation,” Sophia said. “At least one knows where one stands.”
That almost-smile flickered again. “Then I shall be direct: I came to warn you.”
The orchestra finished the country dance with a flourish. Applause pattered through the ballroom like rain against glass. Sophia waited.
“Lady Beatrice Cavendish is here tonight,” Arthur Finch said, lowering his voice. “She has been watching your family since you arrived. I thought you should know.”
Sophia had already known. She had felt the dowager’s gaze from across the ballroom within ten minutes of the Ainsworth party’s arrival—a cold, weighing pressure, like a hand laid against the back of her neck.
Lady Beatrice had not approached. She had not needed to. Her presence was statement enough.
“Thank you,” Sophia said. “Though I am not certain what she expects to see. We are hardly a threat. My mother is anxious, my brother is charming but penniless, and I am—” She gestured at herself with the closed fan. “—hiding behind a potted palm.”
“You underestimate yourself, Miss Ainsworth.”
Something in his tone made her look up sharply. But before she could ask what he meant, a commotion rippled through the crowd near the refreshment table.
It began as these things always did: a small sound, quickly swallowed. A gasp, a tinkle of breaking glass, and then the particular silence that falls when a roomful of people collectively decides to pay attention.
Sophia rose without thinking. Through the gaps in the palm screen, she could see a tableau forming.
A young woman—scarcely out of the schoolroom, by the look of her white muslin and unadorned hair—stood frozen beside the punch bowl, her hands pressed to her mouth.
At her feet, a shattered glass glittered in a spreading pool of lemonade.
And before her, vast and terrible as a ship of the line, stood Lady Margaret Harrow.
Lady Margaret was a dowager of the old school.
She had been formidable when Sophia’s mother was a debutante, and the intervening decades had only calcified her authority.
She wore a turban of purple silk and an expression that suggested the spill had been a personal attack upon her dignity, which, given the state of her gown, it very nearly was.
“You foolish, careless girl.” Lady Margaret’s voice carried effortlessly.
It had been trained in drawing rooms designed for eavesdropping.
“Look at what you have done. This gown is ruined. Ruined. Do you imagine silk cleans itself? Do you imagine I have nothing better to do than stand here while you gape like a landed fish?”
The debutante’s mouth worked. No sound came out. Her face had gone the colour of old milk, and her hands were trembling so violently that Sophia could see the movement from twenty feet away.
Around them, the crowd had arranged itself into the usual geometry of public humiliation.
The inner ring of spectators, close enough to see every detail.
The outer ring, pretending not to watch while watching intently.
And everywhere, the fans fluttering, the heads bending together, the gossip already being spun from raw material.
“I—I am so very sorry, my lady,” the girl managed. Her voice was a thread. “I did not—the crowd, it pressed, and I—”
“The crowd pressed.” Lady Margaret’s tone could have curdled cream.
“And so you decided to baptise me in lemonade. How enterprising. How original. I have been attending balls for forty years, and I have never—never—encountered such clumsiness. Who are your people? They should be informed of what they have unleashed upon society.”
The girl’s eyes filled with tears. One of them spilled over and tracked down her cheek, and she did not even raise a hand to wipe it away. She simply stood there, trembling, while the room watched her come apart.
Sophia’s jaw tightened. She knew that particular species of cruelty—the casual evisceration of someone too young and too frightened to defend herself.
She had seen it before, had written about it in her essays, had dissected it with the cold precision of her pen.
But writing was not action. Words on a page could not step between Lady Margaret and her prey.
She took a step forward. She did not know what she meant to do—only that she could not stand behind a palm screen and watch.
And then Lord Alistair Cavendish moved.
He had been standing at the edge of the crowd, half-obscured by a cluster of young men who had been laughing at something a moment before.
Sophia had not noticed him. Now she could not look away.
He detached himself from his companions with the fluid ease of someone who had never hurried in his life, and he crossed the space between the onlookers and the scene of the crime with the same unhurried grace.
“Lady Margaret.” His voice was warm, carrying the particular timbre of a man who had never needed to raise it to be heard. “I must beg your forgiveness.”
Lady Margaret turned. Her expression shifted from outrage to something more complex—irritation warring with the awareness that Lord Alistair Cavendish was not a person one simply dismissed. “Lord Alistair. What can you possibly have to beg forgiveness for?”
“For this.” He gestured at the shattered glass, the spreading stain, the trembling girl.
“The fault is entirely mine. I was passing behind this young lady a moment ago, and I am afraid my elbow is not as well-trained as it ought to be. I jostled her arm. The glass went flying. And now you have been doused through no fault of anyone but myself.”
Sophia stared. The lie was so smooth, so effortlessly delivered, that for a moment she almost believed it herself. But she had been watching. She had seen Alistair across the room, nowhere near the refreshment table. He had not been within ten feet of the girl when the glass fell.