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“It might yet.”

“It might.” He spoke as honestly as ever, which was the very thing she trusted in him. “A great many things might. But not this minute, and not in this room, and you have said it now. I shall not let you take it back and call it the heat of the oranges.”

“Shall you not?” Something in her wanted very much to laugh, though she could not have said where such lightness came from.

“I shall not.” The corner of his mouth lifted, gentler than his usual dryness. “I have wanted you to say it for a fortnight, and I have only just discovered that I wanted it. That appears to be the order in which I discover everything, where you are concerned.”

She kept her hands folded and her chin high, holding the ground she had taken, though holding it was the hardest thing she had done in eleven years. Running a house was easy beside it. Even being invisible had been easier, for being invisible had never required her to stand before a man with her heart spoken aloud and refuse to flinch.

“James,” she said again, choosing it this time, which was worse and better both. “I do not know how to do this. Whenever I have wanted a thing aloud, someone has taken it from me, or made me feel I had presumed in asking. I am very much afraid of you. I should like you to know that, since you have made a habit of saying the true thing. That one is mine.”

“I know it.” He stayed where he stood, and she understood that too, for keeping his distance was a kindness of a piece with the gentleness. “I am a little afraid of you myself, if it is any comfort. It is not, I suppose, but it is true, and you asked for true ones, did you not?”

From the gallery came the sound of a cup set down upon its saucer with deliberate care, and then Augusta’s voice, pitched to carry precisely as far as it needed to and not a step farther.

“Rosalind. The card-room has sent twice for its counters, and I have told them you were certainly not detained. I should hate to be made a liar over it.”

It was the chaperone’s recall, dressed as a dry joke, and perfectly timed. Her aunt had counted the minutes and the proprieties both, allowing her exactly as many as the warm room could bear. Relief ran through Rosalind’s fingers as she took up the box, for her hands had been empty too long.

“I am not detained,” she called toward the gallery, her voice level again now that she held something. “I am coming directly.”

“Lady Rosalind.” Dover bowed, a viscount in a conservatory once more, the public form drawn back over the private thing. She understood the private thing remained beneath it, and that he meant her to understand. “Thank you for the counters.”

“Lord Dover.” She made her curtsy, which was very correct.

She carried the box out through the gallery, past her aunt, who said not a single word, though something in her brow made Rosalind look quickly away. In the card-room she set the counters down among the gentlemen who had wanted them, who would never know what fetching them had cost her. Her hands stayed steady and her face stayed still.

But inside her, a single word went on sounding, a word she had now said twice in her own voice. James. It refused to be put away with the rest of the evening.

* * *

The Ainsworths’ party broke up near one o’clock, in the slow, reluctant manner of a good party. Rosalind came out into the cold of the portico ahead of her aunt, who was still within, saying the long good-nights that were a hostess’s due. She waited at the edge of the steps, just where the lamplight failed, while the street filled with departing carriages, called-up names, and the stamping of cold horses. Drawing her cloak close, she let herself be nobody at all, and was glad of it.

Two voices reached her from a few feet off, from the dark below the steps, where a knot of departing guests waited upon their own carriages. Voices carry at night, once the day’s noise has gone out of the streets, and these two carried clearly.

She knew them before she had any business knowing them, for she had spent half her life learning those two voices. Her stomach dropped. She stood very still in the shadow, since stepping forward now would announce that she had heard.

“A viscount,” Cassandra was saying, with a thinness in her voice that had been pushed past where it ought to stop. “An actual viscount, Mama, and every drawing room in Cavendish Square has joined her name to his! I have stood up four-and-twenty times this Season with nothing better than a baronet’s third son, and she⁠—”

“Lower your voice.” Selina’s reply came cool and even and unhurried, and Rosalind felt the old chill of it find her even here. “You will not stand in the open street and announce to the parish that you have been overlooked. That is precisely how a girl makes certain of it.”

“But it is not fair!”

“Fairness.” The word came back flat, and something colder crept into the even voice. “Fairness is for people with settled positions, Cassandra, which we do not have, and which you will not improve by weeping at it in a street. Lady Rosalind has done very well indeed. We must all be pleased for her.”

A pause, and the small sound of a carriage step being let down.

“She has done remarkably well, considering. One scarcely knows whom she has to thank for it. It is certainly not her father’s looks she has made her way on, for there was never much of Marbury in that face, whatever else there may be in it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean nothing by it. I never mean anything by it.” Rosalind could hear the smile come into the voice, the warm mouth closing over the cold thing beneath, as it always did. “Only that one wonders, now and again, where a girl gets a thing. Her quickness. Her coloring.”

“Her coloring?” Cassandra echoed.

“The Ashbys were always a dark family, and Cecily the darkest of them all, and there it is in the daughter, plain as print, without a thread of the Hartleys in any of it. It is a great pity her mother is not living to be asked.” Another pause. “Come in out of the cold. You will ruin your complexion standing about, and that, my girl, none of us can afford.”

A carriage drew up for them. The door opened, the step was let down, Cassandra was handed in and Selina after her, and the wheels went off over the stones into the dark. Where they had stood there was only cold flagstone again, and other people’s farewells, while Rosalind remained at the edge of the Ainsworths’ steps with the warm noise of the party at her back and a handful of words ringing in the night air.