Chapter 9
“If His Grace asks you to dance, my dear, do remember to breathe before you refuse him.”
“I shall breathe,” Melody said. “I make no promises about the refusing.”
“I do not ask for promises. I have given those up as an extravagance, along with the carriage horses.” Lady Carrow paused at the foot of the assembly stairs to settle her gloves, and under the settling her hands were not quite steady.
“I ask only that you do not refuse him in a way the whole room can frame and hang on a wall. There is refusing, and there is refusing as theatre, and you have a gift for the second when you are frightened.”
“I am not frightened.”
“No, my darling. You are armoured to the teeth and white as the tablecloth, and those are different things, I am sure, in some country where you keep the dictionary.”
Melody had no answer to that, and her mother said nothing further, only pressed her arm as they came into the assembly rooms. It was worse than a lecture, because it meant Lady Carrow had decided to hope again and was trying not to let it show, and a mother’s suppressed hope was a heavier burden to carry across a crowded room than her open anxiety had ever been.
The assembly was the largest the county afforded, which was to say a long hot upper room over the Crown with a good floor and a bad band and every family of consequence for fifteen miles packed into it.
Melody had not come to one in two years.
She had given out that she found them tiring, and the county had agreed that of course she did, poor creature, at her advanced season of life, and the agreement had been its own small coffin.
That night she had allowed her mother to lace her into the good blue and pin up her raven-black tresses, leaving her to gaze out with bright grey eyes that betrayed a sudden, quiet anxiety, because to stay away now, with a duke paying calls and sending roses, would have said the one thing she could not afford to have said, which was that she was hiding.
So she came in with her chin level and her fan in her hand and her thumb finding the seam of her glove, and the room did what she had known it would do.
It looked at her, though never openly. The county was too well bred to stare, and far too well practised at the sidelong glance that costs the watcher nothing and the watched everything.
She walked into the heat and the candle-smoke and the scrape of the band feeling every one of those glances land and slide away, land and slide away, a soft continuous weather of attention that had been waiting all evening for her arrival to give it a subject.
Cassandra was already the brightest thing in the room.
She stood near the top of the set in white and silver, lovelier than the candles deserved, surrounded by the people who arrange themselves around beauty the way iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet.
When she saw Melody she lifted one gloved hand in a little wave of such warmth that three matrons turned to see who could possibly merit it.
“Miss Carrow. You have come. How brave.”
“You will all have to find another word,” Melody said. “I have been called brave so often this fortnight that I have begun to suspect myself of something heroic and I am utterly bewildered as to what it could be that has merited me with such an honourable title.”
“It is only that we so seldom see you now. We had quite given you up to your books.” Cassandra’s eyes moved past Melody to the door and brightened, and the whole arrangement of her body turned a few degrees towards it the way a flower turns, and Melody did not have to look to know who had come in.
The room knew it too. The soft weather of attention lifted off Melody all at once and swung towards the door, and for one blessed moment she was not the most observed person in the room, and she used the moment to breathe, twice, properly, the way her mother had told her to.
Then he was crossing the floor, and the moment ended, because he was not crossing it towards Cassandra.
“Miss Carrow.” Cole bowed. He was in plain dark evening dress with nothing about him to declare the dukedom but the way the room bent around him, and he did not so much as glance at Cassandra, who stood arranged and ready not eight feet off. “Will you dance with me?”
It was very quietly said. It carried regardless, the way a dropped pin carries in a room that has stopped breathing to listen, and Melody understood in the half-second before she answered exactly what was being asked and exactly what every answer would cost. To refuse a duke in a public room was an event.
The county would carry it home in their carriages and unwrap it over breakfast. To accept him was also an event, the larger one, the declaration he plainly intended it to be, the duke who had come home and crossed a crowded floor past the marquess’s daughter to ask the woman everyone had agreed he had outgrown.
There was no answer that was not a sentence read aloud. So she chose the one she could bear to have heard.
“Thank you, Your Grace. I will.”
She gave him her hand. They took their places within the forming set as the musicians struck up a tune, achieving something resembling the proper key, and a sudden, profound stillness settled over the pair, so dense and palpable she felt she might have leaned against it.
Her fingers tightened inside her glove. She could not help it. The whole room was a single held breath and she was the thing it was held over, and the old sick closing came into her throat, the one that came when too many people were deciding something about her at once.
“Look at me,” Cole said, low, as the figure brought them together. “Not at them. At me.”
“That is hardly less alarming.”
“No. But I am only one man. They are a great many, and I grant you so many eyes is a fearful thing, but you need only manage the one pair, and I promise to be no more alarming than I can help.”
“You are a duke. That counts as at least six. I am being looked at by you and by your title and by your departed relations and by the entire weight of what this room thinks should be happening, and not one of them is dancing the steps for me.”
“Then we shall ignore the other five and dance with the one.” The figure parted them, and brought them back, and his hand closed over hers in the turn, gloved over gloved, steady. “Do you still cheat at Spillikins?”
It was so absurd, so exactly aimed, that her step did not falter only because her body knew the dance better than her shock did.
“I never cheated. I improved the rules.”
“You improved them in your own favour, every time, and called any objection a failure of imagination.”
“The rules of spillikins are not handed down from heaven, Your Grace. They are a human invention and may be humanly improved. You only minded because I won.”
“I minded because you won and then explained at length why winning had been morally inevitable.” The dance carried them down the line and back.
“You did the same at chess. You called it a Sicilian defence. It was no defence known to any Italian living or dead. It was simply you, moving a bishop where a bishop had no business, and daring me to say so.”
“You never did say so.”
“I was two-and-twenty and you were laughing. I have never in my life found the words to object to a thing while you were laughing. It is a great deficiency in a soldier. The French were under no such handicap.”
“The French had not the pleasure of my acquaintance.”
“The French,” he said, “have my sincere condolences.” The figure brought them close, and his voice dropped under the band.
“You stepped on my boot, you know. The first time we ever danced. I have never told you. You came down on it with your whole weight, in the middle of the Boulanger, and smiled at me as though nothing had happened.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You claimed afterward it was the floor.”
“It very probably was the floor. The floors at that assembly were a scandal.” She heard herself and stopped, because there was a thing happening to her voice, a lightness coming into it that she had not given it leave to come into.
“You cannot have remembered that for five years. No one remembers a trodden boot for five years.”
“My pride limped for a week. A man remembers an injury to the pride longer than an injury to the foot. It is the least dignified of our organs and the slowest to heal.”
She almost laughed, the real one coming up in her, the laugh she had not let out in a public room in longer than she could comfortably count, and she got her teeth into it just in time and turned it into a breath.
But he saw, of course he saw, because he saw everything, and that was the whole trouble with him.
The thing in his face when he saw it was no triumph she could have armoured against. It was a quiet undefended gladness, as though her nearly laughing were a thing worth crossing an ocean for.
And then a strange thing happened, which was that the room went away.
It went only partway, and only for the space of a figure and a turn and the low run of talk between them, pitched so quietly that no one beyond their two selves could have caught a word of it, the watching weather thinned and lifted and she forgot to feel it.
There was the warmth of his gloved hand and the old sure rhythm of a man she had danced with in the years before fear, and the band scraping its honest country measure, and the two of them moving inside a small moving circle of quiet that the whole bright loud room could see and not enter.
It was the most public thing she had done in years and it felt, impossibly, like the most private.
He had made a room full of curious observers into a wall around the pair of them, and she did not know how he had done it, and she was furious at how much she did not want it to stop.
It stopped, the way the music always stops.
He bowed over her hand, and she curtsied, and the watching weather came down again with the last chord, and she was Miss Carrow once more, who had been danced with by a duke in front of everyone, and now had to walk the length of the room under the consequence of it.
Cassandra was waiting where the sets broke up.
“How charming you two looked,” she said, warm as ever, loud enough for the nearest ears and no louder.
“Quite like old times. There is something so touching in a childhood attachment, I always think. So long as no one is foolish enough to mistake it for destiny. The two look very alike from a distance, the childhood fondness and the grand passion, but only one of them survives being grown up.”
The nearest ears took it in and passed it along. Melody felt the small ripple of it go out across the room, the pleasure people take in a clean stroke.
“I have always found destiny a great deal less troublesome than ambition,” Melody said.
She did not lower her voice. She had spent her whole life being talked about quietly and she found, this once, that she preferred to be heard.
“Destiny asks so little of one. It does not require an audience, or a strategy, or a marquess’s interest in the Lords.
It simply arrives, and one is either glad of it or not.
Ambition is the one that needs everyone watching.
I do wonder, sometimes, how exhausting it must be, to want a thing chiefly because of who is looking when you get it. ”
“How quaint,” Cassandra said, “to speak of destiny as though it had ever once arrived for you.”
“It is true I have waited some time. But then I have never confused arriving early with arriving welcome. A woman may be first into a room and still be the last anyone wished to see. I have watched it happen at every assembly these ten years, and I have ceased to envy the punctual.”
It landed, and she watched it land, watched the warmth on Cassandra’s face hold its shape by main force while something cold moved underneath it, and the nearest ears, which had so enjoyed the first stroke, enjoyed the second far more, because a county is loyal to nothing but a good return of fire.
Cassandra recovered, as she always recovered, and laughed, and touched Melody’s arm as though they were the dearest of friends sharing the dearest of jokes, and drew her a half-step apart on the pretext of it, close enough now that the words were for the two of them alone.
“You dance beautifully, my dear,” she said, very low and very kind.
“Truly. I had forgotten how well. But you must not let it turn your head. Being danced with by a duke is not at all the same thing as being wedded by one. The first costs him a half-hour and a little talk. The second costs him everything I have just named, and men of his rank do not, in the end, pay everything for a half-hour they enjoyed. I should loathe to see you confuse the bill with the receipt.”
Melody’s nerves came up all at once, the old flood of them, the heat behind the eyes and the closing throat and the body’s certainty that it had been seen through to the frightened thing underneath.
She kept her face, as four years of practice had taught her to keep it.
But her hand, down at her side where she had thought no one was looking, closed hard around her fan, harder than she meant, until the thin ivory ribs of it gave a small dry creak of protest under her fingers.
Across the floor, in the middle of saying something civil to the vicar’s wife, Cole stopped.
He did not turn his head, and did not need to.
His eyes had found her hand and the fan in it from forty feet away through a crowded room, the one thing in a wide landscape that is about to break.
He held there, the civil sentence dying half-finished on his lips, watching the ivory creak in her grip and understanding, exactly and from across the whole bright length of the room, what had just been said to her.