“The Alderman dinner is next Thursday,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“Lord Pemberton will be attending,” he said. “He is recently widowed, which I mention only because it means he is actively looking, which considerably improves the likelihood of a formal introduction becoming something more substantial than….”
“Harper,” she said. “I am at the opera and I would very much like to go back and watch the second act without thinking about Lord Pemberton or his recent widowing or his actively looking.”
He looked at her. “I am simply trying to ensure that you have adequate time to…”
“I know what you are trying to do,” she said. “I understand your intentions but I would appreciate, just for this one evening if we could not discuss practical matters.”
Something moved in his expression that she could not quite read.
“Very well,” he said.
She went back to the box.
Charity looked at her face when she sat down. “What did he want?”
“Lord Pemberton,” Temperance said.
Charity made a sound that contained several things at once.
“Recently widowed,” Temperance added. “Actively looking.”
“Good heavens,” Alethea said.
“He means well,” Temperance said, which was both true and completely beside the point, and she fixed her attention on the stage as the curtain rose for the second act and the tenor launched himself back into the fray with the same committed volume he had brought to the first.
She lost the thread of the opera somewhere in the middle of the second act.
It was not the tenor’s fault, or not entirely. The problem was that she could see Harper’s box from where she was sitting, if she looked in the right direction, and she had been very careful not to look in that direction, and the effort of not looking had become, somewhere around the halfway point, more distracting than simply looking would have been.
His profile was visible from this angle and he had not, as far as she could tell, looked at their box once since the second act began.
She looked back at the stage.
“Are you watching the opera or the other box?” Charity asked, very quietly, without looking at her.
“The opera,” Temperance said.
“I am not sure about that. You seem rather focused on the duke…”
“You’re imagining things,” Temperance rolled her eyes, “let’s not discuss him anymore.”
It was Charity who approached Harper at the second interval.
Temperance had not asked her to but Charity had been her friend for long enough to know when something needed to be said. She appeared at Harper’s elbow in the corridor as Temperance watched from across the corridor, mildly horrified.
Duncan drifted to her side.
“Should I be concerned?” Temperance asked.
“About Charity having a word with the Duke of Sedgewick?” Duncan said. “I would say at least moderately, yes.”
Alethea had appeared at Charity’s other side at some point, which meant it was now two against one, which Temperance felt was probably fair given the circumstances.
She could not hear the conversation from where she was standing but she could read the shape of it. Charity was saying something measured and direct. Harper was listening with the composed attention he brought to all things, his expression giving nothing away.
