Hid the body.
He leaned down, grasped the prone man under his arms, and dragged him from the inn-yard.
For a long time after he’d disappeared, Hyacinth was too terrified to move. She flattened herself against the building at her back, shaking, and gulped down one shallow, panicked breath after another. Her brain was so fuzzy with shock; she began to wonder if she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. But she could see the blood, the pool of vomit, and the two tracks the defeated man’s boots made in the dirt when he’d been dragged away. She could see them with her own eyes, and there were two coats as well, tossed to one side of the yard.
Two coats.
If she hadn’t happened to notice the coats, she might have remained there for hours, her limbs frozen with panic, but the realization that the man might return for them made her tear herself from her hiding place. Pounding blood and her own frantic gasps echoed in her ears as she fled for her room. Once she reached it, she darted inside, slammed the door, and fell back against it, nearly sobbing with relief.
“Hyacinth? Is that you?” Her grandmother rolled over in the bed to peer at her with sleepy, unfocused eyes. “Goodness, child. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“N-no, I’m quite all right, I-I-I…” Her denial faded to horrified silence as the truth crept over her, leaving raised hairs and gooseflesh in its wake.
I might well have just seen a ghost.
Or at the very least, a man on his way to becoming one.
“Hyacinth?”
“It’s all r-right, Grandmother. I j-just…I-I had a b-bad dream, that’s all. Go back to sleep.”
Her grandmother muttered something, and then rolled over. Within seconds, she was snoring again, but Hyacinth never closed her eyes that night. She wasn’t sure she even blinked. She lay in her bed; her shaking arms wrapped tightly around herself, and stared at the fire for hours, tears streaming from her eyes as she thought about that man slumped in the dirt, reduced to a bleeding pulp.
Not half an hour before he’d been beaten, she’d wished for something to happen.
Anything.
She squeezed her eyes closed, and longed with all her heart she’d been far, far more careful what she’d wished for.
Chapter Two
The First Ball
Lord and Lady Huntington request the pleasure of
Your company at a ball held in
Miss Hyacinth Somerset’s honor,
At 7:00 o’clock in the evening
Saturday, January 24
10 Grosvenor Street
“If you insist on hiding behind that column, Hyacinth, you won’t be asked to dance at all this evening.”
Hyacinth peeked around the white marble column she’d ducked behind to find Iris lying in wait for her, ready to drag her out of what had, until now, been a perfectly good hiding place.
“The gentlemen can’t put their names on your dance card if they can’t find you, can they?” added Violet, who was peering at her over Iris’s shoulder.
No, and that was rather the point.
Finn and Iris’s ballroom was massive, and Hyacinth had taken care to tuck herself behind the most inconspicuous column she could find, in a quiet corner at the very back of the room, but here were both of her sisters, like two homing pigeons descending on their nest. For pity’s sake, what use were dozens of immense marble columns if they couldn’t even hide one small lady?
Hyacinth made an attempt at a carefree shrug. “Oh, well, I don’t care to dance tonight.” To dance, to flirt, to speak, or to be noticed in any way. Not by any gentleman, and not by her sisters either, if the truth were told.
Iris and Violet exchanged glances. Some sort of mysterious communication must have passed between them, because they pasted identical bright smiles on their mouths, grasped Hyacinth by her elbows, and without further ado, dragged her out from behind her column.
