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“Miss Ashcroft,” he said, offering his hand with exaggerated formality. “Would you do me the honour?”

“I suppose someone ought to,” Leonora teased. “I would be delighted.”

He led her onto the floor as the set began, and for the first several bars neither of them said anything at all, simply falling into the steps.

“You dance a great deal better than I expected,” Leonora said eventually.

“I am wounded. What did you expect?”

“I hardly know. Something stiffer, perhaps? You strike me as a man who approaches most things as a series of tasks to be completed correctly rather than enjoyed.”

“That is unkind, and also not entirely wrong.” His mouth curved, though his eyes stayed on hers as he turned her through the figure. “My mother insisted on dancing lessons well past the point of necessity. She said a man who could not dance properly could not be trusted with anything else of consequence either, which I thought at the time was a very strange philosophy, and now suspect was simply her way of keeping me occupied for an hour twice a week.”

Leonora hesitated before she answered, uncertain whether she wanted to push the matter any further. He had said that he wanted them to be friends, and she had been willing enough to try it, and so far they had managed it rather well, weeks now without any real bickering between them, nothing sharper than the usual back and forth that seemed to be simply how they spoke to each other. She did not particularly want to spoil that by prying somewhere he had not invited her to look. But Marian remembered so little of her own son these days, and what she did remember came out sideways, in fragments that never quite added up to a whole person, and Leonora found she was curious what the rest of the picture looked like.

She decided, in the end, that asking could not do much harm.

“You do not speak of your parents often.”

Anthony looked down at her then. “There is not a great deal I care to say about them.” He said it lightly, but something in his jaw had tightened, and Leonora, who had grown rather good at reading the small signs he gave away without meaning to, did not let it go.

“That sounds like there is considerably more you are not saying.”

Anthony was quiet through the next turn, and she thought for a moment he might simply refuse to answer at all.

“My parents were very much in love,” he said finally. “Passionately, extravagantly in love, in the sort of way people write songs about and very few people actually survive living beside. They argued constantly, and made up constantly, and somewhere in the whole business of loving each other so loudly, they rather forgot they had also produced a son who required occasional attention.”

Leonora felt her heart drop. “That sounds like neglect.”

“It was, though I did not have the word for it at the time. I simply knew that my father was either shouting at my mother or weeping over her, depending on the week, and that neither activity left much room for anything else. I learned to manage on my own fairly early. It was that or wait for someone to remember I existed, and I grew tired of waiting.”

Leonora considered that, and thought about it, alongside everything else she had gathered about him in the weeks since the auction. It explained a great deal. The careful distance he kept from everyone but his grandmother. The reluctance to marry, which she had assumed was simple stubbornness and now understood to be something considerably closer to fear.

Something tightened in her throat, and she blinked hard against it, disliking how easily this man had found his way past her guard tonight, when she had come here fully intending to keep the evening light.

“Is that why you do not wish to marry?” she asked, before she had properly decided whether she meant to ask it at all. “I have thought of it since the picnic, when your grandmother had us playing her question game. You told me love was an illusion, and that if you ever fell into the trap of it you would never let go of the woman you loved. I thought at the time you were only being difficult, giving me an answer designed to provoke me rather than a true one. I wonder now if you actually meant every word of it.”

Anthony did not answer at once. His hand tightened, briefly, where it rested against hers, and something moved behind his eyes, gone again before she could study it properly.

“Perhaps I did,” he said finally. “Or perhaps I have simply told it to myself so often that I no longer know the difference between the two.”

He did not elaborate, and Leonora did not press him for more, sensing that she had already asked for further than he was comfortable giving in the middle of a crowded ballroom. Instead he turned the question back on her.

“What about you?” he asked. “What did your own parents’ love teach you?”

Leonora hesitated. She did not, as a rule, care to speak of her family at all, and had spent years perfecting the particular art of steering a conversation gently away from the subject before anyone noticed she had done it. But he had given her something honest tonight, however reluctantly, however little he had wanted to give it, and it seemed a poor sort of friendship to take that and offer nothing of her own in return.

“Not a great deal, if I am honest,” she said. “My parents loved each other well enough. I remember my father used to bring my mother a single flower from the garden every morning, whatever was in bloom that week, and she kept every one of them pressed in a book long after they had lost their colour. It was a fond sort of love. But it was never the kind that consumed everything else in the house the way yours did. I had their attention. I was not raised in the shadow of it.” She paused, choosing her next words more carefully than she had chosen the ones before them. “So it is not their example that keeps me from wanting a husband, if that is what you are asking. I could not tell you precisely what it is. Only that I have never wanted one, and have never found a reason to want one since.”

“What if you did want one,” Anthony said. “If love simply arrived, uninvited, and declined to be reasoned with. Would your convictions hold against it, do you think, or would they crumble the moment they were actually tested?”

The question sat there between them, considerably heavier than the tone in which he had asked it.

“I do not know,” Leonora admitted struggling to keep looking in his eyes. “I have built my convictions on a great deal of reading and very little practical experience, which is, I am told, the surest way to have convictions no one else takes seriously. Mary Wollstonecraft argues that a marriage founded only on passion is a poor sort of foundation, since passion has a way of wearing thin with time, and that friendship and reason make a far sturdier match than infatuation ever could. I have always found the argument persuasive on paper. Whether I would find it equally persuasive in the middle of actually falling in love with someone, I truly could not tell you. I have never had occasion to test it.”

Anthony looked at her for a long moment, something in his expression she could not entirely place. “You have read Wollstonecraft.”

“I have read a great deal of Wollstonecraft. She is one of my favourite authors, though I rarely admit as much in company, since it tends to end conversations rather than start them.”