Chapter 1 #2
She crossed to one of the farther orange trees and loosened the ribbons of her evening slippers by just enough to ease the pressure at her ankles. The hem of her gown, a pale silver-blue silk, whispered over the tiles as she moved. For a minute she allowed herself the luxury of stillness.
The house behind her felt distant. Voices reached the conservatory only as a softened murmur through the partially open door, more atmosphere than language.
The fountain continued its faint liquid music.
Flora rested one hand on the back of an iron chair and looked out through the glass toward the dark silhouette of the garden beyond.
This, she thought, was all she had wanted.
Silence.
Naturally, that was the moment the catastrophe began.
Her reticule, which she had looped carelessly over her wrist in a lapse she would later condemn with feeling, slipped as she turned. It fell not to the floor but into the low stone basin of the fountain with a soft, traitorous splash.
Flora stared. For one completely unreasonable instant she thought indignantly that it had no business doing that. Then she lunged.
The basin, however, had been designed by some Italianate sadist with a taste for marble flourishes and no understanding whatever of women’s evening sleeves.
The edge of the reticule caught on one of the carved shells.
Flora leaned too far, the damp silk of her skirt slid against the polished tile beneath her slipper, and the next moment she was saved from a full and disgraceful collapse only by the fact that she managed to catch herself against the basin with one hand.
The cost of that recovery was immediate. She heard the unmistakable sound of silk tearing.
Flora closed her eyes.
Not entirely. Just enough to mark the solemnity of the occasion.
When she straightened and looked down, the damage was plain.
The side seam of her gown, just below the waist where the overskirt fell most gracefully, had caught on the iron arm of the chair and torn with disheartening efficiency.
Not enough to expose catastrophe, thank heaven, but enough to make a return to the drawing room impossible without repairs, pins, prayer, or all three.
This was bad—very bad—and precisely the sort of stupid, private mishap from which scandal was eventually made if one were foolish enough to be discovered in the wrong company while trying to fix it.
As if the thought itself had summoned fate, a voice from the doorway said, “Lady Flora?”
She went still. Arthur Cavendish stood at the threshold of the conservatory, one hand still resting upon the frame as though he had only just realized he had interrupted something.
Moonlight and lamplight divided his face into silver and gold.
He had removed his coat since dinner, and in shirtsleeves with his dark hair slightly disordered from running a hand through it, he looked less polished than he had in the drawing room and therefore more dangerous by half.
For one foolish, suspended instant Flora thought not disaster but of course it would be him.
Then disaster resumed its rightful place. “Do not come any farther,” she said at once.
Arthur stopped. To his credit, he did so instantly.
Something in his expression sharpened, not into alarm exactly, but into attention of a kind Flora had always found unsettling because it never looked performative on him. He did not merely look at people. He noticed them.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I had not meant to intrude. Lady Tilden said you had gone in search of your shawl, and I thought one of the maids had perhaps lost you in the hall.”
“How very considerate.”
The line came out more dryly than she intended.
Arthur, however, took no offense. “I infer from your tone that I have found you at a bad moment.”
Flora glanced down at the torn seam, the damp reticule still hanging half in and half out of the fountain, and the very general ruin of her dignity.
“That would be a fair inference.”
His gaze followed hers.
He saw the reticule first, then the basin, then the tear at her gown.
To Flora’s relief, he did not laugh.
To her greater concern, he also did not look merely embarrassed on her behalf. He looked intent, sympathetic, and altogether too ready to help.
“No farther,” she repeated, because his instincts were already plain in every line of him.
Arthur remained where he was. “As you wish.”
The answer was immediate, unforced.
That, absurdly enough, made the situation harder rather than easier.
Flora looked at the reticule and considered her options.
They were few and poor. She could abandon the thing entirely and explain later why half her belongings smelled like fountain water.
She could attempt to retrieve it herself and risk completing the destruction of the gown.
Or she could accept help from Arthur Cavendish in a moonlit conservatory at half past ten in a house full of guests who needed only a dropped glove and the wrong silence to furnish themselves with gossip for a week.
No sensible woman would choose the third.
No sensible woman, unfortunately, had ever tried to fish a wet reticule from a decorative basin while one side seam quietly surrendered to doom.
She looked at Arthur.
He was still standing just inside the doorway, waiting exactly where she had told him to wait.
That, too, made him dangerous. Men who obeyed well in small matters were forever making women trust them farther than prudence advised.
“Would you,” Flora said at last, and hated that the words cost her so much, “be very good and rescue that ridiculous reticule before it drowns entirely?”
Arthur’s expression altered at once into something almost like relief that usefulness had finally been permitted. “Of course.”
He came forward then, but carefully, with no trace of the amused gallantry some men would have found irresistible in such a scene.
He did not make light of her embarrassment.
He simply crossed to the fountain, leaned in, and retrieved the little beaded reticule from the water with all the solemnity of a man conducting a salvage operation at sea.
When he turned back, the reticule dripping faintly in his hand, Flora could not help it.
She laughed.
The sound escaped before dignity could prevent it. It was not a bright drawing-room laugh, not one polished for company, but a softer thing born of sheer absurdity.
Arthur looked at her and smiled.
And there, Flora thought later, was the true beginning of the trouble.
Not the fountain. Not the tear. Not even the late hour.
It was that smile, warm with understanding and not one grain of mockery in it, offered to her in the middle of humiliation as though the thing itself had become survivable simply because he had seen it and refused to make sport of it.
Such moments ought to have come with warning.