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While Harriet clutched her sprig of mistletoe, Octavia danced a quadrille with a raffish officer friend of Captain Fanshaw’s who hardly looked at her. Fanshaw, after his early attentions to Octavia, had disappeared. Harriet gathered that the girl had discouraged his heavy-handed flattery. The marchioness was nowhere to be seen. Somehow in Lady Hardwicke’s wooded ballroom everything had become confused. Octavia, who desperately wanted a husband, had no prospects. Harriet, who had never dreamed of a proposal, had a husband if she wanted him.

Standing absently at the edge of the dance, she kept her gaze on Octavia, but she could think only of Wynford. He was not who he appeared to be—the idle, foppish man of fashion with a taste for colorful waistcoats. He was a man on a government mission. His sister had called him a spy for looking at her post, but it occurred to Harriet that he might, in fact, be another sort of spy, and not the man she thought she knew at all. He had not intended his proposal. He was careful, but he was also dangerous. His mind was on the marchioness—and even Octavia, the sister he meant to protect, had been forgotten in the spy business that consumed him.

The moment the thought occurred, someone trod on Harriet’s skirts. She glanced down at her rolled satin hem drooping on the floor and gathered a fistful of fabric in one gloved hand. Looking up again, she saw Octavia, white-faced and rigid with emotion, embroiled in a conversation in the center of the room, attracting the attention of dancers who had perforce to navigate around her and the couple with whom she spoke. Her partner had apparently abandoned her.

The couple were a young gentleman in black and his tall, elegant-looking partner glittering in a champagne silk gown with gold braid trim, a triple strand of pearls looped around her neck, and a white ostrich feather curling down around fair golden curls and haughty face. Harriet clutched her skirts and her mistletoe and picked her way to them through the movement of the dance.

“You,” she heard Octavia say. “Why are you here?”

“You invited me, you ninny,” answered the young man.

“Invited you?”

“In your letter a sennight ago, as Miss Burrell can confirm.” He smiled at his companion.

“You had a letter from me?” Octavia demanded. “And you showed it to her? You must be mad.”

“Well, I’m not mad. As my fiancée, Miss Burrell shares all my concerns. You are the one behaving like a hoyden, boasting of your conquests in London and daring me to show my face here.”

Octavia’s face went a shade whiter.

Harriet broke in. “I beg your pardon, mister...? Might we take this conversation where we do not have to share it with the whole room?”

The young man turned on her. “I’m Gresham. Who are you?” he demanded.

Harriet drew herself up. “Lady Harriet Swanley,” she said quietly. “Miss Davenham is with me and her brother this evening. Again, may I suggest that we take our conversation off the dance floor?”

Something in Harriet’s voice or manner made Gresham swallow whatever intemperate remark he had been about to make.

“Come, Caroline,” he said to his companion, turning his back on Octavia.

Harriet put herself between Octavia and the many pairs of eyes watching them, and the group reassembled at the side of the room under one of the mistletoe-bedecked wall sconces. They stood a little sheltered from the crowd’s notice by a stand of yew and fir. A breath of icy air from an open terrace door swirled around their ankles.

Gresham and Octavia glared at each other, but Harriet gave the edge to Gresham. He had his fiancée’s hand tucked protectively in the crook of his arm. If Octavia had been capable of laughing at his stance of outraged male dignity, she could regain the advantage, but Octavia looked close to tears.

“Horace Gresham,” she said in a quavering voice. “I never wrote to you. Whatever your opinion of me, I have done nothing improper. Furthermore, as Lady Harriet can tell you, I have been so wholly engaged at balls and parties and lectures and the theater, that I have had no time to think of...old childhood friends. You are mistaken.”

“Mistaken? Don’t I know your hand? Didn’t we take lessons together from the vicar? And don’t I know you? You ride neck or nothing, you skate like a boy, and you’re capable of freaks and starts, like haring off to London on the stage with that silly book my mother gave you. Next thing I know, you write me that you have a husband in your pocket and dare me to come and see him. Well, I’m here. Where’s this husband you’ve bagged?”

The question, delivered as a taunt, seemed to strike Octavia as a blow, but she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “You gave me that book. It’s not silly, and I never, never wrote to you. You don’t know me at all.”

“But there’s no husband, is there? Hah,” he said.

For a moment Octavia appeared to hold her ground. Then tears welled up, and she broke and ran stumbling out onto the dance floor. Checked by the whirl of dancers, she turned and slipped into the artificial grove that led to the terrace. Harriet ached for her. Across the room, leaning down from the upper gallery, was the marchioness, her icy gaze observing them closely.

“I knew it was a fool’s errand to come here tonight,” said Gresham.

Harriet felt a strong desire to take him by his fashionable lapels and shake him, but she merely said, “You’re wrong, you know, Mr. Gresham. Octavia never wrote you that letter. You’ve been duped.”

“By whom?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter. What did the letter say?”

As Gresham began to explain, Harriet saw Captain Fanshaw pass through the terrace doors. She cut off Gresham’s explanation and hurried after Octavia. The girl would be at her most vulnerable, and Harriet had no doubt that the marchioness wanted it that way.

As she stepped into the little grove at the entrance to the terrace, cold air hit her and she stumbled over her torn hem. A hand gripped her arm, jerking her back into the ballroom.

“Where are you off to?” snarled a voice.