Chapter 22 #2
He turned her on the figure, which brought them to a close-stand with the next couple. Between Lady Linwood’s shoulder and the column at the end of the floor he saw the small thin gold of Melody’s gown.
Melody was standing with her mother. A small group of women had collected near them with the polite attention London paid to a woman whose name had been in the air for three weeks, and one of them was speaking, very prettily, to Melody at the moment.
Her left hand was at her side with the fan in it, and the fan was held closed.
The dance turned him again. He had eight more bars before the figure brought him back to the place from which he could see her, and by the time it did he had counted three bars too slowly because the body was holding itself ready for a thing the mind had not yet named.
She was no longer being talked to prettily.
The small group had thinned, and the two who remained were standing close on either side of her with the careful angle of women delivering information.
The dance was too far across the floor for him to hear.
He saw her chin go up a degree, and her face go a degree paler, and her left hand close on the fan, and the fan in her hand close a fraction tighter.
Then he heard the sound. It was the smallest sound a ballroom held, the dry small report of an ivory stick giving way under a hand that had forgotten it was holding anything.
It came from the gloved hand of a woman who had not been told the women on either side of her were enjoying themselves, and who had not known until that moment what her hand had been doing.
The set ended on the next bar. He bowed to Lady Linwood, who said nothing because she had heard nothing, and he took her to the edge of the floor, and he kissed her gloved hand without dropping it for a second too long.
“Your Grace,” she said quietly, “go.”
“Yes.”
“Carefully.”
“Yes.”
He went carefully. To cross the floor at a stride would have been a public sentence he had not yet earned the right to deliver.
The edge of the room was the route he took instead, past Pringle and the urns and the two ladies who had been watching him for half an hour and were now looking very studiously at the candles.
He came up to Melody at the side of the floor at a pace that read, to anyone who measured it, as the pace of a duke who had remembered a small civility he owed a friend of his hostess’s friend.
The two women on either side of her were Mrs Drinkwater and a woman he did not know.
“Mrs Drinkwater. I do not believe I have made your friend’s acquaintance.”
“Lady Tarbet, Your Grace.”
“Lady Tarbet. You will forgive me. I have a tedious small word for Miss Carrow that I have owed Sir Marcus since yesterday. Mrs Drinkwater, I trust your husband is well.”
“He is very well, Your Grace.”
“Tell him from me that the matter we spoke of on Tuesday remains exactly as it was when we spoke of it, and that I shall write him by Monday.”
It cost Mrs Drinkwater two seconds to decide that the matter was nothing she had ever heard of and could not, therefore, be pursued.
The two seconds were enough. The women drifted, with the small disappointed grace of women who had not been allowed to finish a delivery, and Cole turned to Melody and lowered his voice.
“Miss Carrow.”
“Your Grace.”
“Three things.”
“What?” she said.
“The blue vase by the door. Lady Eversley’s dreadful feather. My left hand.”
“What nonsense is this?”
“Things to look at until the room remembers how to behave.”
She looked at the blue vase by the door, and then at Lady Eversley’s feather, and last at his left hand at his side, in its glove, with the small white seam at the wrist that her own glove had a near twin of.
Her breathing went out one notch and then in one notch, and her chin came down by a fraction it had no business coming down by in front of the room, and the fan with the cracked stick in it she set on the small stool at her elbow and did not pick up again.
“I have broken the fan.”
“I know. We shall blame Mrs Drinkwater. She will not mind, and the falsehood will be entertaining for her to repeat. Miss Carrow.”
“Yes.”
“Do you wish to leave, dance, or remain?”
She did not answer at once. She looked down at her hands as though she had not been certain, until he asked, that any of the three were available to her, and then she looked up.
“Dance, Your Grace.”
“Yes.”
He gave her his arm. The room did, then, the half-second of held breath again, in a different register from the first one, and then released it.
Sir Marcus, three paces behind, gave Cole the smallest possible inclination of his head, which was the only thanks he had been able to manage and was, Cole understood, more than he had any right to expect.
The music began on the next measure. He had not, in five years, danced this set, and he had not danced it with her in more than five, and she had been the smaller and lighter half of his hand the last time, in a country room with chalked boards, and she was not the smaller and lighter half of his hand now.
“I do not know how to forgive years in one evening, Your Grace.”
“Then do not, Miss Carrow. Give them the time they took from you.”
“That is fine of you.”
“It is not fine. It is what you should have heard a great many evenings ago and did not, and what I should have written into a letter you did not receive.”
“You stepped on my boot the first time we danced,” she said.
“You stepped on mine. I claimed permanent injury for politeness.”
“You said your pride limped for a week,” she said.
“It limped for considerably longer than the week, Miss Carrow. The limp went with me to Spain and has only this autumn been put down.”
“And Captain Certainty?”
“Captain Certainty did not survive the campaign. I have come home a great deal less certain of most things, and rather more certain of one.”
“You are a sentimental man,” she observed.
“I am. I had not understood the condition until late, and have spent the past eight weeks managing it, the way a man manages any chronic illness, by paying the cost of it as it falls due.”
She did not, in the end, laugh. The not-laughing came up under her ribs and went down again, and she let it pass without comment, because they were dancing and a laugh would have brought the room into the figure.