“London is very much what I remember it to be. Pleasant enough on the surface, less so underneath.”
He grinned. “Many would say that about me.”
She couldn’t help but smile. “I have started to come to the conclusion that it was the other way around.”
His eyes widened in mock disbelief. “Do not let anyone hear you, or my reputation is ruined.”
At the mention of this, she expected to feel humiliation, but instead, there was resignation and beneath that, to her own surprise, relief. At least she need not pretend ignorance. At least he was not forcing her to smile through a conversation built on deliberate falsehood.
“Well, you would need a scandal for that,” she explained.
“Such as?” he asked, tilting his head a little to the side.
“Hm,” she mused, “you need a scandal graver than lace.”
A faint flicker passed over his mouth, gone almost before it formed. “So I gathered.”
“A very good one would be a scandal concerning the army. Or rather, a military affair that certain men preferred to have remembered in a particular way. Your father would need to believe the official account was not true. And your mother would refuse to support that same official account. That refusal …” She paused, then went on more evenly, “would, in turn, make her the enemy of those who had most to lose.”
He was very still now. She took that stillness for attention and continued, though carefully. She had no intention of pouring out old wounds to a man she had met twice, however unexpectedly easy it was to speak to him.
“A good scandal would then need to include some sort of a cover up,” she continued, “where the wrong people were protected from the consequences, and your parents simply refused to let the matter rest.”
She kept it there: broad enough to answer, narrow enough to protect herself. She had spent too many years learning how much to say and how much to leave untouched.
The pianoforte in the corner lurched through another determined phrase. Somewhere near the fire, someone laughed too loudly. Clara, still by the window with Captain Harrow,had tilted her face up in animated delight at something he was saying.
Aurelia scarcely saw any of it. “Lord Westbridge?”
He looked back at once, but the ease of a moment before had gone. There was tension in him now, tightly held and not altogether concealed.
“I think,” she suddenly heard him speak in hushed tones, “I recognize the incident to which you are referring.”
Aurelia felt the world narrow around the words. “You … recognize it?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Another pause followed, but it was shorter this time.
“Because I was there.”
Chapter 8
Owen had not expected the past to step out of a drawing room and stare at him straight in the eyes.
For one moment after Aurelia’s question, he could only stand there with the noise of the evening continuing absurdly around them, in the form of the uneven music at the pianoforte, the murmur of conversation and the occasional burst of laughter from guests who had not the least suspicion that anything in the room had altered.
Yet for him, the whole tenor of the evening had changed in an instant.
He had been there.
He said the words because he could not, after what she had told him, bear to let her go on speaking under a false impression of his ignorance. But now that they were spoken, he felt the full discomfort of them settling upon him.
Aurelia was looking at him steadily, waiting.
Owen drew a breath he did not need and said, “I was a junior officer at the time. I know of that affair, though I had no authority in it.”
