Either he was not a good teacher, he thought several minutes later, or she was a particularly poor pupil. Uncharitably, he thought the latter was the more likely. She kept complaining about running out of feet at critical moments. She tripped over the two she had. She giggled. She pronounced the whole thing impossible. She apologized profusely. But finally she appeared to have grasped the basic three steps of the dance.
The countess watched from just inside the doors without moving a muscle—or offering any comment, criticism, or encouragement. Her silence fairly shouted at the irritated dancing teacher.
“Let us try to set those steps to music,” he suggested. “It will be easier, perhaps, once you hear the rhythm.”
It was not. Music, it seemed, was the one additional factor that destroyed everything Margaret had learned. She was probably tone deaf, he decided, and lacking in any sense of rhythm. And yet she had played competently enough the evening before. He was the world’s worst teacher, then.
“Unclench your teeth,” he advised her. “Stop frowning. Listen to the music. Move to it.”
Margaret giggled.
But eventually, after Aunt Hannah had started and stopped a score or more times, she had improved quite markedly.
The countess said nothing. Doubtless she wasthinkinga great deal.
“Splendid!” the earl said with an enthusiasm he was far from feeling—what in the name of thunder was he doing in the ballroom at Thornwood of all places, trying to teach the waltz? He could think of at least a dozen of his Canadian acquaintances who would make very merry indeed with the fact for a decade or longer if they only knew. “Now let us try to do it together.”
He took a step closer to Margaret and directed her to place her left hand on his right shoulder while he set his right against the back of her waist. He took her right hand in his left. She blushed rosily even though they were the length of their bent arms apart.
“Start with your left foot,” he told her. “Listen to the music and feel the rhythm. Follow my lead. Aunt Hannah, if you please?”
His aunt, eternally good-natured and patient, struck up the tune yet again. Margaret’s forehead crashed into his chest at the very first step.
“Oh, dear,” she said and giggled.
“Margaret,” he said, trying to emulate his aunt’s patience, “you must not watch my feet. Look at me or over my shoulder. Eventually you must learn to smile and converse while you dance, but we will not press that point today.”
“But how am I to know what your feet are doing unless I watch them?” she asked.
He sighed. Howwasshe to know? But all the partners he had had in London had seemed to know by instinct. It was, he supposed, easier to be the man in such a dance than the woman.
“Trust me,” he said. “Try again. Aunt Hannah?”
But they had clearly reached their limit for today, he realized after six or seven more tries, none of which were very much more successful than the first. Perhaps tomorrow she would do better or he would have thought of another way to teach her. If worse came to worst, he supposed she could sit out the waltzes at the Christmas ball. She would not be able to perform the dance in London, after all, until one of the patronesses of Almack’s gave her the nod of approval. But she would be disappointed, he believed, if she were forced to miss one of the pleasures of the ball over Christmas. And he did not wish to see her disappointed.
The countess was still standing where she had been for the past hour. Perhaps she had thought it incumbent upon herself to act as chaperon, he thought unkindly. Perhaps she had imagined that while Aunt Hannah was engrossed in her music he would have been busy seducing Margaret behind the bench.
And then he had one of those sudden memories that had haunted him for a couple of years after he left England, and even in more recent years had come upon him out of the blue, so to speak, often when he had least expected them, to disturb his peace. A memory of dancing the minuet with a young and smiling Christina. Graceful, light of foot, almost ethereal in one of the delicate white ballgowns she had always worn, she had held his eyes and the whole of his attention. There had always been warmth in her sparkling eyes, in her flushed cheeks, in her parted lips.
She had, he had told her once, been born to dance. She had laughed at him and danced on.
She stood now, dark and cold and disapproving just inside the ballroom doors—Christina ten years later. He felt another wave of the growingly familiar dislike.
“Thank you, Aunt Hannah,” he said. “And thank you, Margaret. I believe that will do for today. You will learn more, perhaps, from watching the dance performed correctly. You will watch her ladyship and me waltz together.” He was leading Margaret across the floor as he spoke—and he had raised his voice.
The countess stared at him with her impassive face, though her lips compressed more if that were possible.
“I cannot waltz, my lord,” she said. “And I have informed you that I will not dance at all at the Christmas ball.”
“As you will,” he told her, shrugging carelessly. “But Margaret needs to watch the steps demonstrated and I need a partner if she is to do that. You are the only one available.”
“But I do not know the steps,” she said.
“You have been watching them for a full hour,” he pointed out
“And it looks as impossible to me as it seems to Meg,” she said. “And it is quite as improper as I had been led to expect.”
Because the partners touched and stood face-to-face and very nearly body to body for its duration? And why had he made such a suggestion anyway? he wondered. He would have to touch her. He had no wish to do so. He had the strange impression that he might be turned to ice if he did so.
