Chapter 5
Five
Harrison had always held that the most dangerous moments in society were rarely the loud ones.
Public scenes, however unpleasant, at least declared themselves honestly.
A raised voice, a wounded vanity, a glass set down too hard upon a table, these things could be seen, named, and, with sufficient tact, contained.
It was the quieter moments he mistrusted: the slight pause before a greeting, the emphasis placed upon a single innocent word, the glance exchanged over a fan, the faint correction slipped into conversation as neatly as poison into wine.
A ballroom, a drawing room, a charity committee, a country-house breakfast table, all could be fields of war if the wrong women chose to make them so.
When Harrison entered the front drawing room at Lady Penworth’s house beside Miss Moreland, it looked at first glance as harmless as any other fashionable room in Mayfair.
The curtains stood drawn back to admit the pale spring light, which lay in generous bands across the Aubusson carpet and caught upon the gilt edges of picture frames.
Lady Penworth’s porcelain shepherdesses smiled from the mantel as though no human being had ever uttered a malicious syllable within a few paces of them.
A tea tray waited upon the low table before the settee, complete with lemon cakes and delicate cups painted with forget-me-nots.
Yet the room held within it a tension altogether out of proportion to its furniture.
Lady Castlemain stood near the hearth.
She was a handsome woman still, though handsome in the polished, imperious fashion of one who had spent years learning the value of her own appearance and no time at all pretending otherwise.
Her gown was a rich celadon silk trimmed in silver, her dark hair arranged with severe elegance, and the expression with which she regarded the room suggested that she considered everyone in it a potential disappointment.
Mrs. Vale occupied one chair near the window with the immovable satisfaction of a woman who believed herself superior to nearly all living creatures.
Lady Penworth, fluttering at the tea service, looked as though she were one sharp phrase away from calling for the hartshorn.
And Miss Moreland, confound her, walked into the room as though she had not spent the last hours under a cloud of suspicion, gossip, and deliberate malice.
Harrison knew better than to mistake that brightness for ease now.
He had begun, to his disquiet, to see the labor beneath it.
Genny was not unfeeling; she was simply practiced.
She wore lightness as armor, wit as camouflage, and laughter as a refusal to give others the pleasure of her hurt.
The knowledge had settled somewhere awkwardly permanent in his mind.
He disliked the effect it had upon him.
He disliked even more the fact that the effect was not diminishing.
“Lady Castlemain,” he said with a bow. “I understand you had a question regarding the printed order.”
Her gaze traveled over him and then, unavoidably, to Genny at his side. Harrison saw the exact instant recognition stirred. Not alarm. Not curiosity. Calculation.
“I had a question regarding several matters,” Lady Castlemain said. “The printed order among them. The dais arrangement. The order of acknowledgments. And whether Lady Dorring has truly been placed before me in the flower pavilion, which I should find most inventive if intentional.”
Lady Penworth made a little sound of distress.
Before Harrison could reply, Genny smiled and moved toward the tea table with all the graceful unconcern of a woman approaching a pleasant afternoon call rather than the brink of social warfare. “How fortunate that we may put your mind at ease before anyone is forced to expire over refreshment.”
Harrison watched Lady Castlemain’s brows lift a fraction.
He also watched Mrs. Vale’s mouth tighten by half a line.
Miss Moreland had entered the room in the very worst possible position, carrying with her whatever whispers had already begun circulating through the house, yet somehow within a sentence she had shifted the air.
Not softened it. Not made it safe. But altered it.
Harrison was beginning to understand that this, too, was one of her gifts.
She did not merely brighten rooms. She rebalanced them.
“Miss Moreland,” Lady Castlemain said. “I had heard you were at the center of this morning’s rearrangements.”
The remark was perfectly civil. It landed like an arrow.
Harrison felt himself go still.
Genny, however, accepted the barb as though it were no more than a ribbon offered across a milliner’s counter. “Then I have achieved the distinction of being discussed before luncheon, which I believe is one of the ton’s less generous honors.”
Mrs. Vale gave a thin smile. “Some distinctions are dearly earned.”
Harrison was aware, with uncomfortable clarity, of the urge to say something sharp enough to cut the moment in half.
He did not. A gentleman did not intervene in every female exchange as though women were schoolroom misses requiring rescue, and Miss Moreland would likely never forgive him if he tried.
Yet neither did he like standing idle while she was pecked at by women old enough to know better and vain enough not to care.
He forced himself into composure.
“The changes under discussion,” he said, “do not affect Lady Castlemain’s proper place in the printed order.”
“Then there have been changes.”
“Not to your disadvantage.”
“That is not quite the same reassurance.”
No, Harrison thought, it was not.
Lady Castlemain had the sort of mind that listened less for facts than for gradations of tone.
She did not wish merely to be reassured; she wished to be deferred to.
There was a difference, and it mattered.
He was still arranging the exact form his answer ought to take when Genny, who had been pouring tea with outward serenity, spoke without turning.
“Lady Castlemain, if Lady Penworth had intended even for a moment to slight you publicly, she would not have invited half of Mayfair to witness it. She values her peace far too dearly.”
The line was outrageous.
It was also perfect.
Lady Penworth gave a startled laugh before she could stop herself. Mrs. Vale looked offended on behalf of dignity. Lady Castlemain, to Harrison’s astonishment, appeared almost amused.
“An excellent point,” she said, accepting the cup Genny offered. “Very well. I shall postpone my indignation for ten minutes.”
“An act of generosity history ought to record,” Genny replied.
Harrison turned slightly away under pretense of checking the printed order sheet, because he had no wish for anyone in the room to see that he was battling an entirely inappropriate impulse to smile.
She was impossible.
She was also, he admitted privately and with some irritation, magnificent.
While Lady Castlemain and Mrs. Vale occupied themselves with tea and suspicion in nearly equal measure, Harrison drew Lady Penworth aside long enough to verify the printed order of acknowledgments.
As he had feared, the draft in the drawing room did not match the original subscription record.
Lady Castlemain’s name appeared lower than it ought, while Lady Dorring’s appeared twice, once in the subscription sequence and again in the floral patron list, where Lady Castlemain should have been named.
It was subtle enough that a hurried eye might miss it and disastrous enough that, once noticed publicly, it would be impossible to dismiss as mere oversight.
He was still comparing the sheets when he heard Genny laugh.
The sound cut through his concentration with humiliating ease.
He looked up before good sense could stop him.
She sat angled slightly toward Lady Castlemain now, her expression lively, her posture easy, one gloved hand resting beside her untouched cup.
There was wit in her face when she sparred, but also alertness.
She was not drifting through the conversation on charm alone; she was steering it, gathering particulars, encouraging confidences, turning vanity into revelation with all the art of a seasoned diplomat disguised as a charming nuisance.
He found himself watching the room as much through her as through his own eyes.
Lady Castlemain said, “I do not object to Mrs. Vale in principle. I merely object to the way she smiles whenever sums of money are discussed, as though generosity in others were a private insult to her character.”
Mrs. Vale, who had either not heard or elected to ignore it, was meanwhile explaining to Mrs. Fanshawe that she had increased her subscription solely because someone must maintain standards where committees were concerned.
Genny murmured something suitably sympathetic, then glanced briefly toward Harrison.
It was only a look, fleeting and light. Yet because he was already too aware of her, it felt perilously like a private communication in a room full of people.
He went back to the papers at once.
That was wise.
It was also futile.
By the time Lady Dorring arrived ten minutes later in a rustle of lavender outrage, the room had become a tinderbox politely waiting for a spark.
Harrison saw it at once in the lift of Lady Castlemain’s chin, in Mrs. Vale’s attentive silence, and in the way Lady Penworth’s fingers had begun trembling over the teapot.
He also saw Genny see it, which was somehow both reassuring and profoundly unsettling.
He had not been wrong earlier. She listened to rooms. She could feel where they strained.
Lady Dorring swept toward the hearth. “I have just passed two footmen carrying the blue silk streamers to the east terrace. The east terrace, Lady Penworth. I had understood my pavilion was to stand in the south garden.”
There was the spark.
Lady Castlemain lowered her cup with exquisite slowness. “How singular. I had understood the south garden was to be reserved for principal benefactors.”