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A laugh rose in her throat, and though she caught it, he saw the catching. She bent to the holly to be out of the way of his eyes.

“There is the ivy,” she said. “It needs sorting into lengths, and it is tedious, and it sheds.”

“And no one will thank me for it, I suppose?”

“Not a soul. It is the most thankless work in the room.”

“Then it will suit me,” he said. “I have been thanked a great deal in my life, and mostly for nothing.”

She looked up at that before she could stop herself, and found him quite serious, and made herself look down again at the wire. He came round the end of the table — to her side, where the ivy happened to be — and her heart gave a small leap. Then he took up a tangle of it and began, with no notion of how it was done, to sort it.

“Shall I find you an apron as well, my lord?”

“If you can find one to fit me, I shall wear it, and gladly.”

No apron was fetched, and none had been meant, and he went back to the ivy and went on sorting it wrong. She bore it for as long as she was able, which was not quite half a minute.

“Like so,” she said. “The long lengths here, for the swags, and the short for the bough, where they want to bend. You are making one heap of everything.”

“Am I?”

“I wonder that Lady Marchwood’s dinner ever came right, if this is how you sort.”

“I did not seat that table. That was you.”

“It was no one. These things have a way of coming right.”

“They do not.” He shook his head, quietly, and let the words rest there.

She gave him a length of ivy to break the moment, meaning only to pass it across and draw back her hand. But he did not take it cleanly. His hand came to it slowly, his fingers closing over the stem before hers had let go, and for the space of a breath they both held the ivy, neither of them looking at it at all.

Her breath caught, and warmth ran up her arm from the place where his fingers had so nearly touched her own. At the Ashcombes’, in the crush, his hand had come to her arm before either of them willed it. This was nothing of the kind. This was a man who had chosen to be slow.

“Thank you,” he said, of the ivy, and took it, and the moment passed. She bound her holly slowly, thinking about her hands for the first time in her life.

“You sort it the way you read a room,” he said after a moment, and he was not looking at the ivy either. “Quickly. Without seeming to. I have watched you do both.”

“I do not read rooms, my lord. I sort ivy, and I sweep floors, and it is the same skill put to humbler use.”

“It is not the same skill, and it is not humble.” He laid a length down among its fellows, neat now, learning. “A great many people in this room are working on the greens this afternoon.” He straightened. “One of them came in, saw what needed doing, and set to it before the cart was unloaded.”

“That is called housekeeping, my lord.”

“It is called more than that,” he said. “She found a broom, and then the wire, and then a trick for Miss Phoebe that the girl did not know she wanted.” He set the sprig down. “And she has not once stood still to be admired for any of it. I am not speaking of ivy.”

Heat swept up her cheeks, and she could do nothing about it, so she kept her eyes upon the wire, which asked nothing of her.

“You make a great deal of an afternoon’s decorating,” she said.

“I have learned not to call a thing nothing merely because you do.”

He had said something very near it before, by another wall, on another evening, and she remembered it whether she wished to or not. She did not know what to say to a man who carried the words of one evening so carefully into the next. So she said nothing.

And he did not fill the silence either. He stood at her side with a length of ivy in his hand and let the quiet be — a beat longer than politeness, long enough to be a thing chosen.

It was Phoebe who broke it in the end, without knowing there was anything to break.

“Lady Rosalind! Oh, I beg your pardon.” Phoebe arrived at the table’s end with a swag held up in triumph and a young man at her shoulder with eyes only for the swag. “Look! I made another, and it held!” She caught herself there, the brightness running ahead of her, and gathered it back. “That is, Mr. Danforth was kind enough to say it was well done.”