Page 23

Turning back, Julian waited as Miss Trent bit her lip, then nodded and stepped closer to take his arm. When her fingers settled on his, an unmistakable shift went through him — a thing he could not name, that made him smile down at her as she returned a faint smile of her own. “The country dance, then.”

As they moved to the center of the room, the murmurs around them seemed to swell. Julian did not need to look to know every eye had turned, that the whispers were fixed on them now. Miss Trent felt it too — her fingers tightened on his arm. He gave her a smile as they took their places and she dropped into her curtsy, and then the dance brought her to him.

“You are aware,” she said quietly, as they moved through the first steps, “that everyone will speak of this?”

“Let them.” His voice was low, for her alone. “They have spoken since the will was read. Avoiding this moment would not stop them.”

Her eyes searched his, but the line between her brows softened. “You have a keen sense of society and its ways, I think.”

“I have.” He grimaced. “I have never been its subject, I confess, but I have always disliked the whispering at the heart of the ton. It is needless, and it can do real harm.”

Her expression softened further, her lips curving. “I am told society spoke poorly of my father when he first lost his wealth,” she said, not looking away, as if she had decided she might speak plainly with him. “This is the first time it has spoken of me.”

“It is unpleasant. But you must not let it push you into the shadows.” His voice was firm. “You have your place in the ton, Miss Trent. There is no need to shy from it.”

The figures parted them then — she away down the line of ladies, he down the gentlemen — and Julian discovered that a country dance was a long series of small losses. Each time the pattern returned her, her hand came back to his as though it had never been away. Each time it took her again, he marked the measures till it gave her back. Once, somewhere down the set, a stout gentleman turned left where the dance went right, and when she came back to Julian she was biting down on a laugh, her eyes brimming with it, and looked up at him to share it before she had thought whether she ought. He kept that look. He could not have said why, only that he put it away somewhere careful.

Her smile this time was warm, and it sent a dart of awareness clean into his chest. The longer they danced, the more aware of her he grew — even the warmth of her hand through her glove each time he took it. When the dance ended, he found a strange reluctance in himself to release her fingers and let her step away. The brief while in her company had been far too short to satisfy him.

“Would you permit me a turn about the room?” he asked, and her eyes widened, a soft pink in her cheeks. “It will give the gossips more to chew upon — but at least they will not have to invent it.”

For a heartbeat she looked at him uncertainly. Then she smiled and nodded, the blush deepening as she took his offered arm. “If you insist upon feeding the whispers, I suppose I must submit to it.”

A quiet, unmistakable pleasure bloomed in him, and he smiled as they began their slow circuit of the room. He kept the talk light and easy — of her sister and her sister’s husband, of how often they met when she was at home. She answered, her words coming more freely the longer they walked, until she seemed to forget how many watched and wondered at them.

They had made half the circuit when a lady detached herself from a knot of matrons and bore down upon them with the cheerful, unstoppable sweep of a ship under full sail.

“Miss Trent! There you are — I have been laying siege to three separate card tables trying to reach you.” Lady Cordelia Asher. Julian knew her as one knew everyone: a duke’s daughter who had married her plain Mr. Asher and told the world, gaily and often, that she had got much the best of the bargain. She pressed Miss Trent’s free hand in both her own as though they were the oldest of friends. “You danced! I saw every moment of it, and so did every mama in the room — they will all be re-drawing their lists tonight.” Her eyes went to Julian, bright with mischief, and she dipped him exactly as much curtsy as the moment required. “Lord Carrington. How good of you to be useful.”

“Lady Cordelia.” He bowed, biting down on a smile. “I do my poor best.”

“You must both come to me on Thursday — a small supper, nothing grand, only the people worth feeding.” She said it to them together, easily, as though pairing their names cost nothing, and Julian watched the kindness of it land: not the invitation itself, but the plain, public fact of a duke’s daughter standing with her hand through Miss Trent’s arm in the sight of the whole room. “And you are not to answer now, Miss Trent, because you will only think of reasons to refuse. I shall call on you and extract it properly.”

She swept off as she had come. Miss Trent watched her go with a look Julian was learning to read — surprise, still, that anyone should trouble themselves on her account, chased by a warmth that had nowhere yet to put itself.

“She called on me at Stoneleigh,” she said, half to herself. “I had thought it only politeness.”

“Lady Cordelia has never in her life called on anyone from politeness.” Julian said it with perfect confidence, and was rewarded with her laugh — low and quick, gone almost before it sounded, and his to keep all the same. She had a champion now, chosen freely and freely choosing, who owed nothing to family duty or a dead woman’s will. He found the thought sat very well with him. His heart thudded as he understood, all at once, that he was enjoying her company rather than enduring it for duty’s sake. To his astonishment, this small thing, to walk with Miss Trent on his arm, left him happier by the minute. The house was nowhere in his thoughts. The frustration and confusion of the past weeks had gone clean out of him.

In their place was only a slowly rising joy, and that, Julian feared, might be more dangerous than anything he had felt yet.

CHAPTER 10

The morning light fell soft through the tall windows of Stoneleigh House as Viola broke her fast, alone, the great house quiet around her. She had risen earlier than she meant to, her sleep cut short by the lingering strangeness of her new home. It still felt as if she were only a guest here for a short while, as if the house were not hers at all, but belonged to someone else.

She had taken her chocolate in the small breakfast room, the least of the house’s many rooms, and even it was grander than any chamber she had known at home. The table might have seated a dozen. The silver ranged along the sideboard alone — the coffee-pot, the chafing dishes, the little covered things whose uses she did not entirely know — would have settled her father’s debts twice over and left enough to spare. Sunlight moved across a carpet so deep her slippers made no sound upon it, and warmed the gilt frame of a landscape she had not yet dared to ask the name of. Everywhere she looked there was more — more light, more space, more quiet wealth standing about as though it meant nothing at all.

She thought of her father’s study at home: the single candle he carried from room to room, the fire laid small and let die early, the careful economy of a man who had learned the cost of every lump of coal. She had grown up counting. It had been the habit of her whole life, to know what a thing was worth and to do without it — and now she sat in a house where no one counted anything, and she did not know how to become the woman these rooms seemed to expect of her. Down the corridor lay Lady Warrington’s study, its door still closed — Viola had not yet found the courage to open it, half certain she would find the lady herself seated within, looking up to ask what Miss Trent imagined she was doing in such a house as this.

She sipped her tea and sat back, thinking over all that had passed. Her dance with Lord Carrington the night before had been a very pleasant one, and had led to a good many others, though none so delightful as that first. The other gentlemen had wanted her company for one reason only: Stoneleigh House. Every one of them had spoken to her of it. Not one, as Lord Carrington had, had asked about her family, her life, herself. They wished to know only what she had, never who she was.

It was rather tiring.

And yet she had enjoyed the evening. His lingering presence had been a comfort, and she had found herself drawn to him in a way she had not looked for. It was as if, in deciding to work together, a faint trust had grown up between them — a trust she prayed would only deepen.

A letter from her father had come with the morning’s post, and she had propped it against the chocolate-pot to read once more as she ate. His hand was as she remembered it, a little crabbed, sparing of the paper. He was glad, he wrote — so very glad — and begged her not to spend a single thought on him, but to enjoy every ball and every kindness the Season might offer her. He asked after Hannah. He asked whether London was much changed. He did not, in the whole page, ask for anything at all.

That was the part that undid her. Twenty thousand pounds sat somewhere in Mr. Braithwaite’s careful keeping — more money than her father had seen in all his life — and she had already settled in her mind how the first of it must go: quietly, to clear what remained of his debts, and to see the roof at home mended before the winter, whether his pride liked it or no. She would find some way to manage it so gently that he could not refuse. She owed him that. She owed him a great deal more besides.