John materialized at Theodore’s elbow approximately twenty minutes later, wearing the expression of a man who had been constructing a pleasantry since he arrived.
“You look,” he said with great care, “considerably less like a man attending his own reckoning than you did the last time I saw you in a room like this.”
“Mind your own affairs,” Theodore warned mildly.
“That is three full syllables more than you gave me at the Wentworths’ dinner party.” John arranged his expression into studied innocence. “I am calling it an improvement.”
He took a sip of wine, letting the silence breathe.
“She is doing very well,” he added, more quietly. His attention drifted briefly to the far side of the room, where Cressida was managing a trio of ladies with remarkable composure. “In case you had not observed.”
“I had observed.”
“I thought so.” He smiled. “The coat is excellent, by the way. I have it on good authority.”
The intelligence about Miss Oakley and Lord Emerton’s engagement arrived with the particular relish of those delivering it to someone they expected to be affected. Cressida heard it from a cluster of ladies near the center of the room, their faces arranged in subtle eagerness. They were here to observe a reaction rather than transmit information.
“I had not heard.” She smiled. “How very pleasing for them both.”
She was aware of nothing but mild relief, as if the last unfinished piece of a tedious correspondence had been settled.
Near the end of the evening, she turned away from a conversation and found Miss Oakley directly in her path.
The young woman was composed, bright-eyed, and smiling with the precision of someone who had chosen this moment with considerable care. Behind her, at half a distance, Lord Emerton stood with the easy posture of a man expecting entertainment.
“Your Grace,” Miss Oakley greeted, in a voice pitched to carry precisely as far as intended. “Lord Emerton and I were only justremarking how unexpectedly well your marriage appears to have turned out.”
The nearby conversations faltered. The room, in its practiced collective way, listened without appearing to listen.
Cressida met her gaze. “How kind of you both,” she said warmly, with a small tilt of her head. “I imagine it must be a comfort, in the early days of an engagement, to observe that the institution is not beyond the reach of general happiness.” She smiled. “I do hope yours offers the same discovery. You must allow me to wish you every joy of it.”
Miss Oakley’s smile remained in place. Her eyes, however, were doing the rapid calculation of a woman who had been handed something she could not quite determine the shape of—a compliment or its opposite, deployed with such pleasantness that there was no seam to grip.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said, after a beat too long.
“A pleasure,” Cressida returned, and moved past her toward the next room.
She had taken perhaps four steps when she heard Theodore’s footfalls behind her, and then he was beside her, his hand finding the small of her back with the unmistakable purpose of a man who had crossed a room and intended everyone present to notice it.
“You handled this evening with extraordinary skill,” he murmured into her ear.
She suppressed a shudder at his closeness and the thick timbre of his voice so close.
“I merely told the truth in a useful order,” she somehow found the sense to say, and he hummed.
Harriet found her near the end of the evening in the quieter stretch of the card room, where the music reached only as an undertone. She took Cressida’s aside in a quiet corner without ceremony and looked at her with the frank, attentive expression she had worn since they were girls.
“How do things actually stand?” she asked.
Cressida looked at their joined hands. She considered answering with the precision she had applied all evening and found she did not want to.
“I think I am very much in love with him,” she admitted. “And it frightens me rather more than I expected.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“The light’s different here.”
Cressida stood in the gallery doorway, speaking to the empty corridor behind her.
