Chapter 8 #2
Partnership, she thought, and nearly smiled despite everything.
The withdrawing room, when they entered, looked maddeningly untouched. Cards lay scattered over the table. One ribbon had slipped to the carpet. The silver tray sat near the center beside an arrangement of tea roses, and upon it were the six remaining cards, perfectly aligned.
Too perfectly.
Harrison saw that at once as well. “No one arranging these in haste would have left them so neat.”
Genny crossed to the hearth, her thoughts racing.
If the missing cards were meant to provoke confusion, there were only two likely possibilities.
Either someone wished the names to be called in the wrong order, thereby humiliating the ladies publicly, or someone intended to produce the missing cards at the last moment in altered form.
In either case, the culprit had not abandoned the game.
Which meant Mrs. Fanshawe’s exposure had not been the whole story.
A fresh chill moved through her.
“Harrison.”
He looked up.
“Marian may have begun it,” she said, keeping her voice low though the room stood empty, “but what if she was not acting entirely alone?”
His expression altered by a degree. “Go on.”
“She handled the printed orders, the cards, the social details. But yesterday’s changes came in different pencil points, at different times, and from more than one part of the house.
And Lady Dorring had too much interest in every altered placement to be merely a spectator.
If someone admired Marian’s grievances or simply wished to take advantage of the disorder she caused… ”
He finished it at once. “Then the game would continue even after she was removed.”
Genny nodded.
The idea had barely left her lips when voices sounded in the corridor. One voice she knew at once: Lady Dorring. The second was lower, younger, nervous.
Maggie.
Genny glanced at Harrison. He had heard it too.
Without a word he moved to the inner door leading to the little retiring room, and she followed him inside just as Lady Dorring swept into the room with Maggie stumbling behind her carrying a folded stack of cream cards.
Genny stood in the dim little space, scarcely larger than the anteroom of the night before, the scent of linen sachets and rose soap sharp in the air, and listened.
“Put them there,” Lady Dorring said. “No, not so. Must every servant in this house handle paper as though it were pastry?”
Maggie murmured an apology.
Genny looked at Harrison. His jaw had tightened.
Through the crack in the door they could see the edge of the table and the pale movement of Lady Dorring’s lavender sleeve as she sorted the stack. Genny strained to hear.
“I told Mrs. Wexley these should have been revised,” Lady Dorring was saying. “If Lord Penworth insists upon making a spectacle of subscribers, he might at least do them the courtesy of proper order.”
Maggie gave another uncertain murmur.
Then, to Genny’s astonishment, Lady Dorring said in a lower tone, “Has Mrs. Fanshawe truly been confined upstairs?”
Maggie whispered, “That is what the maids say, my lady.”
Lady Dorring made a displeased sound. “Inconvenient. She had the only sensible head in this house.”
Genny’s breath caught.
Harrison’s gaze cut sharply to hers.
Lady Dorring continued, “Very well. Since no one else appears equal to the matter, we shall correct it ourselves. Lady Castlemain cannot stand first. She will become insufferable.”
Maggie, who was evidently not equal to conspiracy, sounded near tears. “But, my lady, Lord Woodmere said—”
“Lord Woodmere is a man. Men notice only half the injury done by precedence and none of the memory that follows it.”
There it was.
Not Marian’s long bitterness. Not neglected labor sharpened to cruelty. Nothing so grand.
Vanity.
Lady Dorring had not designed the scheme, Genny realized. She had recognized the opening Marian created and helped herself to it, turning another woman’s bitterness into a tool for her own precedence.
Genny might have laughed if the cards in Lady Dorring’s hand had not held half the fête in its grasp.
Genny looked at Harrison and saw, to her profound and immediate danger, that he was very close to laughing as well.
Not because the matter was amusing exactly, but because only in Mayfair could a conspiracy begun in resentment and sharpened by social neglect end in a dowager correcting the world by hand so that no other woman might stand higher than she ought.
Genny pressed her lips together with great determination.
Then Lady Dorring said, “Where is Miss Moreland’s card? It ought to be attached to the committee acknowledgments. If she is to blunder through the house under everyone’s feet, she may at least stand where the blame naturally falls.”
That ended any danger of amusement.
Harrison moved before Genny could. He opened the door and stepped into the room with such composed abruptness that Lady Dorring nearly dropped the stack.
“My lady,” he said.
Lady Dorring spun. “What are you doing in Lady Penworth’s retiring room?”
It was, Genny thought, an excellent question, and not one they could linger over.
She stepped out behind him. “At present, discovering who has decided the correct order of society depends entirely upon your pencil.”
Maggie gave a tiny squeak.
Lady Dorring recovered with impressive speed. “I was correcting an obvious mistake.”
“By stealing the announcement cards?” Harrison asked.
“By preventing a vulgar error.”
Genny folded her arms. “One begins to suspect, Lady Dorring, that your devotion to civilization is extraordinarily personal.”
The older woman drew herself up. “If Mrs. Fanshawe had not been removed, none of this would have been necessary. She understood how things ought to be done.”
“And how ought they to be done?” Harrison asked, in that calm, dry tone of his that always made people speak more than they intended. “With Lady Castlemain publicly slighted? With Mrs. Vale omitted? With committee ladies blamed for every error within fifty yards?”
Lady Dorring flushed. “You cannot imagine, my lord, how intolerable Lady Castlemain becomes when she is encouraged.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is reason enough.”
No, it very much was not.
But the certainty with which she said it made the whole shabby pattern show itself.
Marian had opened the door. Lady Dorring, vain and aggrieved, had walked through because the altered order suited her better than the true one.
She was not the architect of the day’s ruin, only the sort of woman who found ruin in progress and decided to improve it in her own favor.
Harrison held out his hand. “The cards, my lady.”
For one stubborn moment Lady Dorring did not move. Then, perhaps seeing something in his face that advised against further heroics, she surrendered the stack.
Maggie began to cry.
Genny’s anger softened a little at once. The maid was plainly no mastermind, merely a frightened girl caught between a lady’s authority and a viscount’s displeasure.
“Maggie,” she said gently, “did you know what was meant by it?”
The girl shook her head violently. “No, miss. Lady Dorring only said the order was wrong and I was to fetch the cards from Mrs. Wexley’s tray because she would put them proper again. I did not know. I would never—”
“I know.”
Lady Dorring made a dismissive sound. “Oh, spare me the tears. The girl merely carried paper.”
Genny’s patience, tattered by two days of whispered blame and floral hostilities, finally snapped.
She stepped between Lady Dorring and the trembling maid before she entirely realized she had moved. Maggie’s breath hitched behind her.
“No, my lady,” Genny said, and her own voice, when it came, was so cool it surprised even her.
“What she carried was your presumption that every hand beneath your own exists to tidy the damage of your vanity. I begin to think that if civilization survives the week, it will do so in spite of its patrons rather than because of them.”
Silence followed.
Maggie stared. Lady Dorring went crimson. And Harrison, dear heaven, looked at her as though she had just become the single most fascinating object in the room.
She should not have noticed. She noticed anyway.
Lady Dorring gave a sputtering sound. “How dare—”
“How dare you,” Harrison said before she could gather force enough for full outrage, “tamper with Lady Penworth’s arrangements after yesterday’s disruption and after being explicitly informed the order was under review. You will give me the remaining altered cards. All of them. Now.”
Something in his tone ended the matter.
Lady Dorring, furious and breathing hard, yielded the rest from the reticule hanging at her wrist.
Genny stared at it. “Well,” she said after a beat, because if she did not laugh she might scream, “that is almost offensively theatrical.”
Harrison took the cards from Lady Dorring and passed them to Genny. “Can you restore the correct order in a very few minutes?”
She looked down at the stack, at the penciled marks, the substitutions, the committee notation meant to implicate her yet again. Then she looked back up.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He turned to Maggie. “You will go directly to Mrs. Wexley and tell her the cards were delayed but are on their way. You will say nothing more.”
The girl fled as though released from a spell.
Lady Dorring remained where she stood, furious dignity vibrating from every lavender seam.
“And I?” she asked.
Harrison’s expression did not soften. “You will join the receiving line and say nothing at all unless spoken to. If you are wise, you will remember that discretion remains possible even after folly.”
Genny nearly admired him for that one.
Lady Dorring, robbed at last of useful response, swept from the room in outraged silence. The door shut behind her.
Only then did Genny let out the breath she had been holding. “Well,” she said, “there is a sentence I should like embroidered upon a cushion.”
Harrison’s mouth twitched, but his attention was already on her hands. “Five minutes.”