Edmund looked at him with the alert interest of a man who had known Harper long enough to understand that this sentence.
“Tell me,” he said.
Harper told him the relevant parts, and Edmund listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Harper had always valued about him, and when Harper had finished, he looked across the room to where Temperance was standing with her friends.
“That’s her?” he said.
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t look like the scandal sheets,” Edmund looked. “What are they like? The two of them together?”
Harper considered the question with more care than it perhaps deserved.
“Formidable,” he said.
“Formidable,” Edmund raised an eyebrow.
“Individually. Together, “ He stopped. “Together they are something else.”
Edmund looked at him for a moment with the expression he wore when he was paying closer attention than his posture suggested.
“You like them?” he said, with the slight note of someone making a discovery.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said formidable with the tone you use for things you respect, which in your case is closely adjacent to liking.” Edmund drank his wine. “What’s the plan? The daughter, she’s to marry?”
“That’s the intention.”
“How is she taking it?”
“Better than I expected,” Harper said.
Edmund glanced across the room again. “She’s been here the whole season?”
“Three years, I’m told. She and her mother both.” Harper followed his gaze briefly. Temperance had tilted her head at something Charity was saying, and there was a small, private smile on her face of the kind she didn’t produce for general consumption. “Thetonhas apparently found them very entertaining.”
“Oh, very,” Edmund said, with a slight change of tone that Harper registered and filed away. “The dowager especially, obviously, she’s been in the columns enough times that she’s practically a regular feature. But the daughter as well with the spinster angle. “People love an oddity. A girl raised in a nunnery, no prospects, no income, dragged around the season by a mother who shows up to balls in trousers, they invite them because they’re entertaining, Harper. You must know that, half the invitations they receive aren’t kindness, they’re…”
“Don’t,” Harper said.
Edmund stopped.
Harper had not raised his voice. He had not changed his posture or his expression by any outward measure that would have beenvisible to a casual observer. But something in the single word made Edmund go very still in the way of someone who had known a person long enough to recognize the specific quality of a line being drawn.
“Don’t talk about her that way,” Harper said. “Either of them.”
Edmund looked at him for a moment. Something moved in his expression.
“All right,” he said, simply.
Harper looked across the room. Temperance was laughing now, properly, at something Duncan Grey had apparently said, and the sound of it didn’t carry across the room but the fact of it did, the open, unguarded quality of it, the realness of it in a room full of people performing their best versions of themselves.
“She is not entertainment,” he said. It came out with a flatness that was not anger, exactly, but was something that had passed through anger and come out the other side as something more settled. “She is a woman who has had a considerably more difficult life than most of the people in this room are capable of imagining, and she is navigating it with more grace than it deserves, and I will not sit here and listen to you.”
He stopped himself.
“I’m going to get some air,” Harper said.
