They stopped to talk with Lydia’s brothers and Lawrence Hill.
Boris and Audrey were standing in a group with Peter and Ivan and Fanny Leeson.
“Andthisis the family you are going to marry into,” Ivan said, addressing his future sister-in-law. “Boris had no choice. Pete and I had no choice. We wereborninto it. You have made the free choice, Audrey. Are youmad?” He grinned cheekily at her.
“You can be quiet anytime you wish now, Ivan,” Boris informed him cheerfully.
“Or he will plant you a facer,” Peter said.
Fanny laughed.
“I cannot think of any family I wouldrathermarry into,” Audrey said. “Unless it were the Wayne family, your father’s side.”
“Good answer, my love,” Boris said.
“And I really cannot wait for my own wedding day,” she added.
Ivan made a gargoyle face and clutched his neck with both hands, threatening ruin to his neckcloth.
“I cannot take him into decent company without him disgracing me,” Peter said, shaking his head.
“I amsoglad we chose to come to London this year,” Jessica was saying to Gabriel. “I missed Abby’s wedding.Everyonedid except Harry. I was never more vexed in my life. I would have hated to miss Harry’s too. When I was a girl, you know, I thought it was most unfair that one ought not to marry one’s first cousin. He was my absolute hero. I thought I would never meet anyone more handsome or more … dashing.”
“And now, Jessie,” Gabriel said, “you have squashed all my self-esteem.”
She laughed. “Oh, that was when I was a very younggirl,” she said. “When I became a woman I met an insufferably arrogant man who informed me almost at our first meeting that he intended to marry me.Informedme. He did not bother to ask. But then I decided that I would marry him anyway because I discovered that he was…full ofpassion.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Self-esteem restored.”
She laughed again as Boris and Audrey came up to them and wanted to know what the joke was.
Avery, Duke of Netherby, was standing in what was always his favorite spot in any room—a corner. Gorgeously clad and sparkling with jewels on his fingers and in his elaborately tied neckcloth and embedded in the handle and about the rim of his quizzing glass, he gazed through the glass before lowering it. His posture was indolent, his eyes keen. He turned them upon Anna, who was beside him and sparkling, not so much with jewels as with bright animation.
“Happy, my love?” he asked with a soft fondness in his voice that might have surprised almost everyone else in the room, who saw only his public manner except upon very rare occasions.
Anna turned her eyes upon him, and they brightened with tears, though none spilled over.
“I still sometimes expect to wake up one of these days to find myself back in the classroom at the orphanage in Bath,” she said.
“Please do not,” he said. “I would miss you.”
“Would you?” She smiled softly at him—one of the few people ever to look at him so.
“You would take my heart with you,” he said. “And my very life.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Not to mention my unborn child,” he added.
“I looked at you ten years ago,” she said, “and hated you on sight.”
“I know,” he said with a sigh. “And how could I resist the challenge? I could not—despite those shoes. I had to have you.”
His eyes gazed lazily into hers until something distracted him.
“Ah,” he said, nodding toward the ballroom doors. “I believe the bride and groom must be in the house.”
Anna turned her head to see Viola and Marcel slip from the room.
