Chapter 22 #3
“You danced with Lady Linwood first.”
“I did.”
“Intentionally,” she said.
“Intentionally. She has been campaigning for the privilege since Tuesday and is entitled to it, and I owed her more than I have so far had any chance to repay her for the sake of you.”
“You are kind to my friends.”
“I am attempting to be.”
The figure turned them apart at arm’s length.
Across the small distance the room came back into the dance for a half-second, the candles brighter and the music louder, and Cole counted to the end of the bar and the figure turned them in again.
Melody’s eyes had not, in the half-second of being parted from him, left his face.
“Your Grace.”
“Miss Carrow.”
She did not, then, say what she had been about to say.
Her mouth shaped the first letter of the name she had said in the conservatory in his mother’s house and had said again, by accident, in a barouche in the Park.
The letter came out, and the name did not follow it, and her lip closed instead.
The next bar of the music covered the small dry catch of her breath, and they went on with the figure.
“I had thought to ask you a thing, Your Grace. I find I cannot, at this bar. I shall not waste the rest of the dance on the failure.”
“You will not waste anything by it, Miss Carrow. I am, as it happens, available to be asked things at most hours. The asking does not need to be done from a ballroom floor.”
“You will not press me,” she said.
“I shall not.”
“You have given your word on it. It is in writing, also, on a piece of paper on my desk in Brook Street.”
“It is.”
“I have read the paper a great many times.”
“Yes.”
“You have not called,” she said.
“I have not. I had said I would not, until you sent for me. I had given my word. The keeping of it has been a tedious form of exercise that I should have undertaken far earlier in life. I find I have not yet got used to it.”
She looked at him then, fully, in the way she had not looked at him since the conservatory.
“Your Grace.”
“Yes.”
“I shall not, tonight, send for you,” she said.
“No.”
“I shall send for you when I am able. I am not yet able.”
“That is sufficient, Miss Carrow.”
“You will wait,” she said.
“I shall wait.”
The dance ended at the bar. He bowed and she curtsied, and he led her, with the small public correctness of a duke returning a lady to her father’s elbow, back across the floor to Sir Marcus.
“Sir Marcus.”
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Carrow.”
Cole did not stay at her elbow. He had been there long enough to be measured, and he had nothing further to gain from a longer measurement.
Melody had a sentence she had not been able to deliver on the floor of the ballroom and was not going to be able to deliver in the side of a room that was now openly watching.
He bowed once more, to all three of them, and went away across the room towards the door.
Pringle caught him by the elbow in the corridor.
“Greenstone.”
“Yes.”
“You have made it,” Pringle said.
“Have I?”
“You have. You danced with the wife of a third son. You danced with the daughter of a baronet. You did not dance with the daughter of a marquess. The room has now spent the past half hour explaining your intentions to itself, and it is going to make of them an announcement by morning whether you wish it to or not.”
“It may make what it pleases.”
“You are not going home?” Pringle said.
“I am going home. To stay longer would be to spend the evening at her elbow, and her elbow is not the position I have been invited to occupy. I have been invited to leave it free.”
“You are a strange duke.”
“You said so last week. I am consistent in my strangeness.”
Pringle laughed and let him go. Beale had the carriage up at the door in three minutes, which was three minutes faster than the carriage of a guest who had stayed the proper hour.
“Greenstone House.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
He sat in the dark of the carriage and went over the evening the way a soldier went over an action after it was past. The dance with Lady Linwood, the absence of the dance with Cassandra, the three things he had given Melody and the choice between them, the standing at her elbow without pressing for the sentence she had not, in the event, been able to give him.
It had been the longest hour of an evening he had ever been required to stand through.
The Dowager would be coming home later, by the arrangement of the evening, and the Greenstone House hall was his when he came in. The small lacquer dish on the table by the door was empty, as he had at no point of the evening expected it not to be, and he looked at it anyway and went up.
He stood for a minute at the window of the small library.
In the street below a lamplighter passed going home, his ladder on his shoulder.
A woman in a gold gown on the floor of a ballroom that had been bought to crush her had told him she would send for him when she was able. She had not, this evening, been able.
He went to bed, and did not, for some time, sleep.