Chapter Fourteen
“You look different tonight, my dear.”
Aunt Margery said it in the carriage, her hand on Imogen’s wrist, her eyes soft with something that might have been pride, worry or might have been both, because Aunt Margery was a woman who understood that the line between a niece who was blossoming and a niece who was about to be hurt was sometimes invisible until after the hurt had arrived.
“I feel different,” Imogen said, and it was true.
Different in every part of her body, in the deep blue silk that had become her armor and her invitation, in the hair that Cassie had helped her dress tonight, swept up with pins she had borrowed from Bethany.
Different in the pearl earrings, the straight spine and the knowledge, sitting in her body like sunlight sitting in glass, that yesterday afternoon a man had knelt at her feet in her own bedroom and worshipped her.
He told her he loved her and showed her a license with a blank space for her name, and tonight he was going to fill it.
She was also different in the particular looseness of her limbs and the unfamiliar warmth that had not left her body since yesterday and that she carried now underneath her clothes.
It was a secret warmth that belonged to her and to him and to no one else, and the carrying of it made her walk differently and hold herself differently.
The difference was visible, and she did not mind its being visible, because visibility was what she wanted tonight.
She had stopped being invisible. She could feel it as the carriage pulled up to the Carlisle townhouse and she stepped out onto the pavement, the torches flickering along the entrance.
She was not invisible anymore. She was a woman who had been chosen by a duke and who had chosen him back, and the choosing sat on her face and in the particular quality of her walk as she crossed the Carlisle threshold, unhurried, unafraid, and present.
The ballroom was enormous, hot and full.
Five hundred people at least, the season’s most anticipated ball, candles in every chandelier, the orchestra already playing, the floor crowded with dancers.
Aunt Margery took her arm, and they entered together, and Imogen let the room see her.
Tonight she was the woman the Duke of Ravenhurst had waltzed with and protected, and the ton had revised its opinion of Imogen Goodall.
The revised opinion was visible in the glances that followed her across the ballroom and the small nods of acknowledgement from women who had spent four seasons pretending she did not exist.
Ash saw her cross the ballroom. She watched him see her from across the room, and the look on his face was one he had never worn in public, open, unguarded and soft with something that made three eligible mothers stop talking mid-sentence and turn to see what had produced that expression on the face of London’s most carefully guarded duke.
He was wearing dark evening clothes, his cravat done properly for once, his hair pushed back, and his eyes found hers across the crowd.
He held that look, and the holding was a promise.
He claimed her first dance, and led her to the floor without speaking.
The dancing was different tonight because everything was different.
Yesterday she had given him her body, and he had given her his words and tonight the license was in his coat, and the blank space was going to have her name in it by the end of the evening.
After the dance he steered her into a window alcove, a small space behind a curtain where the noise of the ballroom was muffled, the candlelight was dim, and they were, for a brief moment, alone.
“I have something to say to you properly,” he said, and his voice was low and steady and carried the particular weight of a man who had rehearsed a sentence many times and was now delivering it.
“Somewhere quieter than this. The library. Wait for me there. I have to disentangle myself from Lady Carlisle near the orchestra. Five minutes. No more.”
She agreed. She was glowing. She could feel the glow on her face and in her body and in the tips of her fingers where they rested against his sleeve, and the glow was happiness.
Her happiness was so complete, so unguarded and so unlike anything she had felt in four seasons that it did not occur to her, not for a single second, that the happiness was about to end.
She left the alcove alone, crossed the front hall and a footman in the Carlisle livery directed her to the library.
The Carlisle townhouse had two libraries, the small one off the morning room on the ground floor and the proper one upstairs, and the footman, assuming that any lady asking for a quiet room meant the smaller one, sent her to the morning room.
She entered the morning room. It was dim, lit by a single lamp, furnished with a settle and two chairs and a writing desk.
The connecting door to the small library was an inch ajar, the gap narrow, the room beyond dark.
She settled on the settee with her back to the door, her hands folded in her lap and her face still carrying the glow, and she waited.
She was thinking about yesterday. About the words he had whispered, and about their two bodies becoming one. She was thinking about the blank space on the license, the sound of her name in his voice and the narrow bed, and she was happy.
Behind her, through the inch-wide gap in the connecting door, someone entered the room.
The sound was quiet. A door opening and closing, footsteps on carpet and the clink of glass. Then a second set of footsteps, heavier, and a second clink, and the murmur of men’s voices settling into conversation.
She did not turn around. She did not think anything of it.
People moved through townhouses during balls, looking for quiet rooms, card games and the particular privacy that large gatherings provided for small conversations.
She sat on the settee and waited for Ash and listened, without meaning to listen, to the voices in the next room.
The first voice was Devlin’s. She recognized it immediately, the smooth assured tone, the particular polish of a man who spoke as if every sentence were a gift he was bestowing on the listener.
“Eleven days,” Devlin said. “And Ravenhurst is so far ahead of his timetable that I begin to suspect he has been cheating.”
A laugh. Lord Rourke. “Cheating at a wager is rather the point, Devlin.”
“The wager is five thousand and the chestnut. The wallflower falls in love by the thirtieth of June. Those were the terms.” A pause.
The sound of brandy being poured. “Our dear Ravenhurst opened Debrett’s at random in a brothel and put his finger on her name, and now, six weeks later, he has the poor girl so thoroughly in his pocket that she came to a house on a forged invitation believing a married hostess would be waiting for her. The cruelty of it is almost elegant.”
The glow went out.
It did not go out slowly. It did not fade or dim or recede. It went out, all of it, at once, a candle snuffed between two fingers, and the darkness that replaced it was immediate and cold.
Five thousand and the chestnut. The wallflower falls in love. Debrett’s at random. A brothel.
She sat perfectly still on the settee. Her back was straight, and her hands were in her lap. Her body, from the outside, had not changed at all, but from the inside, everything had changed.
The words assembled themselves into a structure, and the structure was a scaffolding that was not love.
It was a wager, a game, an entertainment for bored men at three in the morning, proposed over brandy and accepted over brandy.
It was recorded in a betting book at White’s where her name, Miss Imogen Goodall, was written in ink beside a sum of money and a horse.
“The conservatory was the masterwork,” Devlin continued, and his voice carried through the gap in the connecting door with the clarity of a man who was speaking deliberately loud, though Imogen did not yet understand why, did not yet understand that the loudness was intentional, that the door was ajar because Devlin had arranged it.
She understood only the words, and the words were dismantling her.
“Ash made the wallflower put her hand on him through his trousers. He reported back to me in the side hall, and said the lady had surprised him.” A pause. The sound of brandy swirled in a glass. “He said she gasped like a virgin reading her first French novel. Which, I suppose, she was.”
The conservatory. His voice in the dark saying: feel what you do to me.
Her hand on his body, his pulse against her palm, his forehead dropping to hers.
She had believed every second of it. She had believed the rawness, the honesty and the trembling, and now Devlin was telling her, from one room away, that the rawness had been reported to him over brandy in a side hall, the most intimate moment of her life reduced to an anecdote about a virgin and a French novel.
The reduction was so complete, so casual and so contemptuous that it did not feel like cruelty.
It felt like arithmetic. She had been calculated, and the calculation had been correct, and the answer was five thousand and a horse.
Rourke laughed, and then she heard footsteps, the door opening and closing, and the room beyond was empty.
Her hands, when she lifted them, were steady.
She was not yet thinking about yesterday. She was thinking about the conservatory and Ash reporting to Devlin.
She was thinking about the deadline. The thirtieth of June.
Eleven days. She had been a deadline. A figure in a ledger.
A line item in a betting book at White’s, her name beside a sum of money and a horse, and the man who had knelt at her feet yesterday and told her he loved her had accepted the wager in a brothel.
Yesterday’s events arrived in her thoughts.