CHAPTER 1
“Absolutely not. Do not look at me like that. You are not coming.”
William did not raise his voice, which was precisely why both girls froze.
Isadora opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again in the particular way that meant she had prepared an argument, but didn’t particularly know how to deliver it.
“William–”
“No.”
“You haven’t even heard–”
“I don’t need to.” He straightened his cuffs without looking at her, keeping his voice low. The ballroom doors were twentyfeet away, and already he could hear the orchestra tuning, the particular restless murmur of two hundred people deciding how the evening would go. “Whatever you were about to say, the answer is no.”
Letitia, who had been hovering just behind her sister with an expression of elaborate innocence, dropped the pretence. “We only want to watch. From the doorway. No one would even notice us.”
“I would notice you.”
“You’d be too busy dancing with Lady Somebody to notice anything.”
“Letitia.”
She fell silent, but her chin lifted in that way she had—their mother’s chin, their mother’s stubbornness, which was either a gift or a catastrophe, depending on the hour.
Isadora, more strategic, tried again. “It’s only a party. It isn’t as though Brighton has never seen two young ladies standing in a doorway.”
“Brighton,” William said, finally turning to look at them both, “is precisely the problem.”
They were in the corridor outside the east wing, where the candlelight was mercifully dim, and no one from the party had yet wandered.
Isadora was sixteen and trying very hard to look reasonable. Letitia was fourteen and not trying at all. They were both dressed far too carefully for an evening they had clearly hoped to attend, which meant they had been planning this for at least an hour—had dressed for bed, waited, and then crept down on the reasonable calculation that he would be too distracted by guests to be thorough.
He was never too distracted to be thorough.
“The men in that room,” he said, keeping his voice even, “are not the kind of men I would introduce you to.”
“They’re your friends,” Letitia pointed out.
“Exactly.”
A pause. Isadora had the grace to look slightly unsettled by that. Letitia looked like she was filing it away for future use.
“Go to bed,” he ordered. “Both of you. Mrs. Hatch will have noticed you’re gone by now, and she’ll be catastrophizing somewhere on the second floor.”
“She catastrophizes regardless,” Isadora scoffed. “It’s her primary occupation.”
Despite himself, something tugged at the corner of his mouth. He suppressed it. “Bed. I mean it.”
“You always mean it,” Letitia said, aggrieved. “That’s the trouble with you. Other guardians don’t always mean it.”
“Other guardians have the luxury of not meaning it. I don’t.” He said it without heat, simply as a fact, because it was one. He looked at them both for a moment—Isadora with her book-serious eyes, Letitia still flushed from the argument—and then said, more quietly, “Brighton is not London. People here are looking for something to talk about, and they will not be careful about who they talk about. I will not give them your names. Do you understand me?”
Neither of them answered immediately.
“Do you understand me?” he asked again, and his tone had changed just enough.
“Yes,” Isadora replied.
