Chapter Five
“The cravat is not right, Your Grace.”
“The cravat is exactly right, Collins.”
Collins regarded him across the dressing room with an expression that suggested the valet was considering, after many years of loyal service, the possibility that the Duke of Ravenhurst had gone mad.
The cravat in question was a simple mathematical, tied too loosely, the folds sitting at an angle that would have earned a gentleman of lesser rank a quiet word from his host’s butler.
On a duke it would earn something worse.
Conversation. And conversation, at the Hartwood ball, meant the matrons, and by Friday morning every drawing room in Mayfair would know that the Duke of Ravenhurst had arrived at the most important ball of the early season looking as if he had somewhere better to be and had not yet arrived there.
Ash did not care. He had spent twenty minutes in front of the glass doing the cravat badly on purpose, and the result was precisely what he wanted.
He had been dressing to impress other people’s mothers for eight years.
Tonight he was dressing to impress one person, and she had already told him, across a cup of middling tea, that she did not require impressing.
“Your coat is also unbuttoned, Your Grace.”
“Leave it.”
Collins drew breath to protest, reconsidered, and stepped back, dignified and silent, because he had been overruled by dukes before and intended to survive this one.
He had also, Ash suspected, formed his own opinion about where the Duke of Ravenhurst was going this evening and why he had chosen to look, after eight seasons of impeccable tailoring, as if getting dressed were no longer the most important part of his evening.
Collins was not a man who volunteered his opinions.
But he was a man whose opinions were visible in the angle of his chin and the particular care with which he held the door, and tonight both the chin and the door were communicating something that Ash chose not to translate.
Ash took his hat and his gloves and walked to the carriage without looking in the glass again.
The watch was in his waistcoat pocket. His mother’s signet ring was turned inward against his palm.
He buttoned the coat in the carriage because the evening was cooler than he had expected, and even reckless dukes caught cold.
A cold, though, would keep him from calling on Imogen Goodall, and he was not yet prepared to examine how much that prospect bothered him.
The Hartwood ball was in its second hour by the time he arrived, the great house blazing with candles in every window, carriages queued along the crescent in a line that stretched past the church, around the corner and into the mews.
Footmen in livery were stationed at ten-pace intervals along the steps.
He walked past all of them without adjusting his coat or checking his cravat or doing any of the small self-conscious adjustments that other men performed on the threshold of a ballroom.
The front hall was immaculate and had the particular smell of beeswax and hothouse flowers that every imposing London house shared in the season, as if they had all agreed to smell expensive in the same register.
Beyond the hall the ballroom opened out in a blaze of candlelight, noise and heat.
Three hundred people at minimum. The orchestra was playing a cotillion, the floor was crowded with dancers, and the matrons were arranged along the east wall in their customary formation: fans moving in coordinated half-beats, every entrance tracked, catalogued and filed away for tomorrow’s morning calls.
They had elevated the observation of other people’s behavior to a competitive sport, and they were very good at it.
Mrs Alderton was nearest the door, her lorgnette already rising.
Lady Pembleton sat beside her, leaning forward in her chair.
Mrs Hartwood herself, the hostess, alert at the far end of the row, a woman who had spent three thousand pounds on a ball and intended to get her money’s worth in gossip if she could not get it in gratitude.
He did not glance at any of them. He cut straight across the ballroom floor between two sets of dancers, rude by any measure, and past the refreshment table without stopping, ruder still.
He came to a halt in front of the small cluster of chairs near the south windows where Imogen Goodall was seated beside her aunt and her sister and, three chairs to the left, Bethany Mercer.
The room noticed. The room always noticed when the Duke of Ravenhurst moved with purpose, and tonight his purpose was visible from the back of the gallery.
He was aware of heads turning behind him, of the cotillion faltering for half a beat as two dancers lost their place watching him cross the floor, of Mrs. Alderton’s lorgnette swinging to follow his path.
He did not care about any of it. He cared about one thing, and that was looking up at him from a gilt chair with her gloves buttoned to the elbow, her face perfectly composed and her dark eyes carrying a question she was not going to ask aloud.
“Miss Goodall.” He made his bow. “I should like the supper waltz.”
The supper waltz. Not a country dance. Not a reel.
Not even a regular waltz tucked safely in the middle of the evening’s programme.
The supper waltz was the most intimate dance of the evening, after which the gentleman was expected to escort the lady to supper and sit beside her for the meal.
No unmarried lady of good reputation accepted it from a duke unless she was prepared for every gossip in London to have an opinion about it by breakfast.
Aunt Margery made a small alarmed sound, audible at three paces, that landed somewhere between a gasp and a hiccup.
It contained, in its brevity, an entire sermon on the subject of ducal presumption and what it meant for a family’s standing when a gentleman of that rank asked one’s eldest niece for a dance that would constitute, in the eyes of every matron in the room, a declaration of serious intent.
Cassie’s eyes went round. Her programme slipped half an inch in her lap before she caught it.
Bethany Mercer, from her chair beside the matrons, rose an inch from her seat as if she were going to stand and intervene, held the position for a quarter of a second, her spine rigid, her fan still in her hand, and sat down again.
Her face did not change but her knuckles, wrapped around the fan, went white.
Imogen looked up at him. She was wearing the deep ivory gown she had worn to the Marchmont, let out slightly at the waist where someone with careful hands had added a panel of matching silk that was almost invisible unless you were looking for it.
But he was looking for it, because looking for the small signs of her poverty had become something his eyes did without consulting him first. Her hair was pinned simply, a few loose curls at her temples, and the small freckle at the base of her throat was visible above the neckline, and he was looking at it before he could stop himself.
She laid her gloved hand in his without speaking.
The silence of the gesture was louder than any answer she could have given.
The room heard it. Three hundred people in a Mayfair ballroom watched Imogen Goodall, fourth-season wallflower, daughter of a dead baronet, place her hand in the Duke of Ravenhurst’s palm as if she had been placing her hand in dukes’ palms her entire life and had simply been waiting for the correct one to present itself.
There was no flutter. No blush. No downcast eyes or prettily bitten lip or any of the performance that other women deployed when a duke asked them to dance.
She placed her hand in his, then met his eyes; and the placing and meeting were so steady and so unadorned that he heard Mrs. Alderton’s lorgnette snap shut from across the room.
He led her to the floor.
The waltz was the new Anglicised form, slower than the German original, the figures longer, the turns more deliberate, the whole construction designed to give two bodies maximum time in proximity while maintaining the fiction that the proximity was choreographic rather than personal.
His right hand settled at her waist. Her left hand came to his shoulder.
Their other hands met between them; his fingers closing around hers, and the contact arrived through two layers of silk and cotton and settled into the base of his spine and stayed there, a low steady warmth that had no intention of leaving.
The orchestra began. The first notes were a slow descending phrase in three-quarter time, and they started moving.
For the first four bars he concentrated on the mechanics of the thing because it was the only way to avoid concentrating on the fact that Imogen Goodall was in his arms and the entire ton was watching and his body was already responding to her proximity with a directness that the mechanics of waltzing could not disguise.
He had waltzed before. He had waltzed with courtesans in private ballrooms and debutantes at public ones, with widows who wanted to be seen with him and married women who wanted to be suspected with him.
But the dancing had always been a performance, the steps executed while his mind was elsewhere, his body going through the motions of proximity while his attention floated somewhere above the chandelier and waited for the music to end.
This was not that.