The lady herself merely widened her smile, though it had grown brittle at the edges. “Naturally, Your Grace. I meant no offence. We are all simply... concerned for propriety. An unmarried woman like that, an unmarried man… surely you understand how such arrangements might appear. And then there is the child…”
“I understand that appearances matter a great deal to those with nothing of substance to occupy their attention.” Thaddeus inclined his head with glacial courtesy. “Good evening, Lady Forsythe.”
He stepped around her and continued into the crowd, his pulse steady despite the anger that coiled in his chest.
He thought of Oliver as he had left him that evening—settled in the nursery with Mrs. Allen, his blanket clutched between his fingers, his eyes following Thaddeus with an expression that was no longer pure fear. Something else had crept in over the past fortnight. Something that looked almost like hope.
You will not make her go?
The boy’s words echoed through his memory. The small hand reaching for Maribel’s. The implicit trust in a woman Oliver had known all his life, offered freely to one who had been a stranger until tragedy intervened.
Thaddeus had not made her go. He had imposed conditions and demanded boundaries, had treated her presence as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a gift to be acknowledged. And yet she had remained. She had accepted every term, swallowed every insult to her pride, subjected herself to his authority without complaint.
For Oliver. Everything she did, she did for Oliver.
He found himself scanning the room again, searching for that glimpse of deep blue among the pastels and whites of more favoured ladies.
There. Near the doorway that led to the card rooms, speaking with Lady Eleanor Whitcombe. The older woman had taken Maribel’s arm, drawing her slightly apart from the flow of traffic, and was speaking with evident intensity. Maribel’s face had gone very still, but even from the distance he could see the tension radiating from her.
Thaddeus watched as Maribel nodded once, twice. As Lady Eleanor released her arm with a final, emphatic squeeze. As Maribel turned back toward the ballroom with an expression that anyone else might have mistaken for composure.
Thaddeus knew better. He had seen that expression before—in his own reflection, in the weeks after his mother’s death, in the years of maintaining control when everything within him threatened to shatter.
It was the face of someone holding themselves together by force of will alone.
He turned away from her, walking back to the crowds. Ignoring her was the only true option, he decided. Yet, it became increasingly difficult as the evening wore on.
Thaddeus danced twice, because refusing would have invited comment, and each time he was acutely aware of Lady Maribel somewhere in the periphery of his vision. She did not dance. No one asked her. She moved through the gathering like a ghost, present but unacknowledged, and something in the set of her shoulders grew heavier with each passing hour.
He should not have noticed. He should not have cared.
He noticed. He cared. And the realisation sat in his chest like a stone.
Near midnight, he observed a minor commotion near the refreshment tables—a cluster of ladies laughing rather too loudly, their attention fixed on something beyond his line of sight. He altered his course, driven by an instinct he did not care to examine, and arrived in time to see Lady Maribel stepping back from a small group of young women with her head held high and her cheeks burning.
“—hardly surprising,” one of them was saying, her voice carrying with deliberate clarity. “What else would one expect from someone of her family? The apple never falls far from the tree, as my mother says.”
“Such a shame.” Another voice, dripping with false sympathy. “She was quite pretty once, before the disgrace. Now look at her—reduced to playing nursemaid to someone else’s cast-off child.”
Anger coursed through Thaddeus at the thoughtless diction.Cast-off.
He stepped forward before conscious thought could intervene.
“Ladies.”
The young women turned, their expressions shifting rapidly from malicious satisfaction to wide-eyed alarm as they registered his presence. Curtsies were performed with varying degrees of grace, champagne glasses clutched like talismans against his displeasure.
“Your Grace,” one of them managed. “We were just?—”
“Leaving.” His voice held no warmth. “Were you not?”
They fled with admirable speed, trailing whispers in their wake.
Thaddeus turned to find Lady Maribel regarding him with an expression he could not entirely decipher. Her eyes were bright—too bright—and that damnable chin remained lifted at its defiant angle.
“That was unnecessary,” she said.
“It was entirely necessary.”
