They looked at her uncertainly—then back at Lady Hackworth—which darkly amused Catherine. They were probably wondering why they were being compelled to commune with a peasant wearing a two-year-old dress.
And she fought the urge to roll her eyes. Of all the things being a doctor was, charming was probably the least of them.
She would have loved for Lord Kirke to be wrong, except she’d known all along that he wasn’t.
She had done, for the first time in her life, something sheknewwas reckless and foolish: she’d come without a chaperone, slipping out of The Grand Palace on the Thames to hail a surprised hack driver, who took her to St. James’s Square and the Hackworth town house. Lord Kirke was right: she was not that sort of person.
As far as she knew, Lord Kirke hadn’t been in when she’d left.
He hadn’t been at dinner, either.
And the whole last hour or so had felt like walking barefoot over cut gems. Everyone was beautiful. But all of their edges were glitteringly sharp and uncomfortable to brush against. They were witty and quick but their accents were all drawled, London-y irony, as though they took nothing at all seriously. She thought about how Northumberland haunted her vowels. She knew she betrayed her otherness the moment she opened her mouth.
Lord Vaughn wasn’t present. Perhaps he knew better than to associate with the Hackworths, too.
She felt she hadn’t really anything to say to them—how could they find her life particularly interesting? And yet they seemed to be enjoying her anyway, the way they would enjoy a pantomime. She was aware that they saw her as both very pretty and quaint. She knew that to consider something quaint, one must feel superior to it, at least a little.
She knew that if she asked what they thought about Lord Kirke in the airy, insinuating, knowing sort of voice that Lady Hackworth used conversationally, they would likely tell her. And as much as she wanted to know—she was afraid to know.
“What is your favorite poem by Byron?” she asked Lady Glossop, when someone mentioned Keats. This was a salon, after all. She thought she might as well exhibit a little of her education.
There was a little silence. Followed by a sympathetic head tilt.
“Oh, my dear, we don’t talk about him ever since that little to-do between him and Lord Hackworth over Lady Hackworth.” She said it on an admiring hush. “Everyonewantsher, you see.”
Ugh.
“Tell me, Miss Keating,” Lady Glossop pressedon a hush. “You danced with him. You were close enough. What does hesmelllike? Lord Kirke? I’ve always wondered. We have a wager, you see.”
Catherine stared at her. For God’ssake.
But oh, she’d never been more sorely tempted. “Like sin and strawberries,” she considered purring. Or “Like sulfur and brimstone and blossoms all rolled into one.”
But she knew anything glib she said would be repeated, and possibly printed in the gossip sheets. She would never, never, never do that to him.
“My parents raised me not to sniff members of Parliament,” she said gravely, instead.
“Oh,” Lady Glossop said, bored with her again.
“Why did he ask you to dance, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know,” Catherine said, and offered a blandly disingenuous expression.
They didn’t seem to know how to respond to that.
Catherine stifled a sigh. She didn’t particularly want to be anything other than who she was. But it was a strange, gray feeling to know there were people in the world who viewed her as a novelty. It was new, and she supposed it was valuable to know that such a viewpoint existed, and that she wanted none of it.
She liked the people at The Grand Palace on the Thames, which was where she properly fit. She wished she was there right now.
Well, it had been an experience, even if coming here was a mistake. She was sorry she’d come, because it was a reminder of how empty the world could feel when no one truly knew you. It seemed a foreshadowing of the loneliness that seemed to lie in wait for her if her London season was a failure, after all, and in a fit of superstition, it made her want to bolt.
And it seemed patently ridiculous, infuriatingly ridiculous, that a famous, scandalous politician—thirty-five years old, with a little gray in his hair and faint lines about his eyes, and the most fascinating face she’d ever seen—should suddenly feel like her best friend, when he could so easily do without her.
Surely this, too, was the fault of London. If she were to return home, perhaps every bit of this confusion would recede like a fever.
And yet. She’d somehow been certain he would appear here tonight anyway, despite his well-founded scorn for the Hackworths. Because she had seen the expression fleeing his face as she’d turned around in the little park today.
Raw hunger.
