“I am being selective.”
“You are being very picky,” she replied.
“Thank you,” he said.
“That was not a compliment.” She looked at him with the expression she reserved for occasions when she was deciding whether to laugh or continue the argument.
She decided, after the third redirected suitor, to simply watch him do it.
It was more interesting than arguing about it, and considerably more revealing. There was a pattern to it, she noticed, he never did the same thing twice and always had a new reason.
“I think I need a break,” she told him. “I see that my friends are here, and I think I will go speak to them. Maybe in the meanwhile you might find someone suitable.”
She rushed off, not waiting for a response and found Charity near the refreshment table. Charity took one look at her face and handed her a glass.
“You’re doing okay?”
“I just wanted to come see you. The duke has been acting a bit strange, and I thought I needed a little break,” she admitted earnestly.
“What’s he doing now?” Charity laughed.
“Oh, I don’t even know. He said that he wanted to introduce me to some suitors, but he keeps redirecting them when they approach.”
“Duncan noticed,” Charity said. “He pointed it out to me during the second redirection. What do you think?”
“I think he is controlling,” Temperance said. “He has decided that he knows best and he is acting accordingly, which is entirely consistent with everything I have observed since.” She said it in the even tone she had developed for this particular subject.
“And?” Charity said.
Temperance was quiet for a moment.
“It bothers me less than it should,” she said finally. “That is the and. The redirections and the selectiveness and all of it, I know what it is, I have named it accurately, and I am bothered by it less than I was two months ago. But I cannot entirely account for the difference, which bothers me more than the thing itself.”
“It sounds like you’re in a hard place.”
“The thing is,” Temperance said, after a moment, “it doesn’t matter. What he does or doesn’t mean by things. What I feel or don’t feel about things. My mother’s situation is what matters. If I marry, I will have a household and an income and the ability to make choices for her without needing anyone’s permission.”
“And if you could make your own choices entirely freely?” Charity asked. “Without the practical considerations. What would you choose?”
Temperance looked at her.
“That is not the situation I am in,” she said.
“You should tell me, still.”
Temperance looked back at the room. She could see Harper from here, across the ballroom, talking to someone she didn’t recognize. Even from this distance and behind the mask he had the particular quality of stillness that she had catalogued over weeks. She had found it arrogant in the beginning but was not entirely sure what she found it now, which was itself a kind of answer to Charity’s question.
“He is looking over here,” Charity observed.
“I know,” Temperance said. She did not look back. “He is not happy that I am standing here instead of making the most of the suitors he has so carefully curated.”
“He looks concerned,” she said finally. “More than annoyed.”
“Perhaps,” Temperance said, “I will ignore him for now.”
She found him by the windows an hour later, or he found her, she was not entirely certain which, only that she had drifted toward the quieter end of the room and he had materialized at her side. The music behind them had slowed into something that encouraged conversation, and the crowd had thinned somewhat.
“You are not circulating,” he said.
