Just like every womanin the world before a ball, Madelaine spent a moment scrutinising herself in her mirror.
She wore a dress Lord Cotereigh had sent her—of course she did—white tulle over a sapphire blue satin slip. Blue and gold embroidery twined around her bust, adorned the hem, and prettified the puffed cap sleeves. It was both delicate and luxuriously exquisite. Some poor seamstress had probably gone blind over it.
Under the fine, silken layers and the perfume and the jewels, she felt clammy and strange. This was the night the wager ended. Lord Cotereigh’s victory would be complete. Or it would not. Either way, his involvement in her life would have reached its natural end.
That was a good thing.
She pushed at the hairbrush and comb on her dressing table, making them precisely straight.
It would be a very good thing. Just as it would be good to empty his house of every bottle to help his father. Someoneought to place the dark liquor of Lord Cotereigh well out of her reach.
Her chest fluttered just at the sound of his name in her thoughts. Ridiculous, when he was already forcefully present in every area of her life. He’d been there this morning, as the nascent committee assembled in her aunt’s dining room—their headquarters for now—blithely unconcerned that he was still one man short.
“You’ll have your man,” he’d promised her, eyes coal black and smiling. Any consciousness of their tête-à-tête in his cloakroom had been entirely absent.
No. That was a lie. It had been deep in the black gaze, banked embers burning low. Sweat broke out on her palms.
Ridiculous. She dried her hands briskly on the towel heaped on her dressing table. Messy. This whole room was a mess of discarded dresses and shoes and trinkets. When had she become vain? She pulled on her long silk gloves and left the room, refusing one more glance in the mirror.
Her aunt was a mixture of nerves and excitement, overstuffed with both. On the carriage ride over she fussed like a schoolgirl going to her first ball.
“It will be wonderful,” Madelaine reassured her. “You and Jane Littleton have organised everything marvellously. And besides, all eyes will be on the new duchess. We needn’t worry.” She smiled, feeling a pang of sympathy for the young woman—she now understood something of what it was to have society’s eyes upon oneself, and she didn’t envy her. But from the little she knew of the Duchess of Cumbria, she was sure it would hardly faze her.
How odd, and how lucky, to be the associate of a duchess. That it was Lord Cotereigh she had to thank, she was only too aware. He’d manoeuvred the introduction—indeed, he’d arranged for her to go to that very ball at the Allinghams entirely to make itpossible. She’d questioned him on it once, and the amused slant of his smile had told her all.
She straightened the twisted finger of her glove as the carriage rocked steadily through the lamplit streets.
She was beholden to him in so many ways. A dozen cords running between them. Tom, and the wager. But his father too, and his uncle. All the things she knew. It wasn’t comfortable knowing them. They had a weight inside her, a dozen anchors, hooking deep.
They made her care.
Oh, she cared far too much for that hard, cold, impossible man and the battered mess under his fine tailoring that he called a heart. Or probablydidn’tcall it, having no time for such nonsense.
He had a directory of everyone in London instead, and an acute knowledge of architecture and fashion and music and anything else that might form polite conversation; he knew about business and politics and sport; he knew how to stand and how to look and how to smile and how to snub, and he knew every possible shade of a bow.
He was nothing like her. And for weeks he had filled her every thought.
Taking root in a sacrosanct space.
Graves did that… Deformed and sunk under the weight of spreading trees… Rain and ice, year after year, weathered headstones into unreadable, crumbling stone, stealing their names. And people forgot…
Her hands tightened on her lap. Painfully tight. Deliberately so.
“I have been so glad to renew my acquaintance with Lord Arnon.”
Her aunt’s voice cut through the darkness of the carriage—she seldom bothered with the carriage lights, preferring to look out.Madelaine dragged herself back to the present, like coming up from underwater. Lord Arnon. The earl. Lord Cotereigh’s father.
“It had been a very long time since I saw him,” her aunt continued. Madelaine got the sense she was forcing herself to speak to distract herself from her nerves about the ball. The carriage had come to a stop. Glancing out, she saw they were now in the queue before Cumbria House, still far distant down the street. They might be waiting half an hour or more.
“He used to come to town with his wife, his first wife, when my dear Charles was still alive. Very beautiful, she was. The son has something of her look—that dark hair, those dark eyes. We didn’t know them much, it was a nodding acquaintance only—very particular, the Thornes, always have been, and when Charles married me…” She gave a faint laugh, old sorrow at the edges. “Well. That hobbled him, all right. Not everyone will overlook a mésalliance like ours.”
“Mésalliance! My grandfather, your father, was a clergyman. He was a gentleman. So is my father.”
But it was a rote defence without any strength. She knew earls—or their heirs—didn’t marry parson’s daughters. And for this current Thorne, who held himself at the very pinnacle of society, it would be unthinkable.
That helped, remembering that. She gave a mental nod, slathering the aches in her chest with pragmatism and realities, like shoring up an old building with fresh mortar. Make it weathertight. Pack the gaps between those creaking boards with oakum.
“But I’m still glad to see him so often as we now do,” her aunt continued, a soft smile in her voice. Her heart allowed her to forgive any slight. “He disappeared from society when his wife died. We all hoped his second marriage might help matters but…I believe it wasn’t a happy one.”
