Page 27 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

And there they were.

The same men. The same rose-walk crowd who had stood in a circle and watched her go down into the mud without one of them troubling to help her up.

Rosaline’s stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Look at him as though there is no other soul on this earth.

She did not let herself think. If she did, she would freeze. So she turned to the nearest of them, a Lord Bracewell, and lowered her lashes and lifted her eyes slowly and held his gaze one beat longer than she ought to.

“Lord Bracewell.” She let the smallest smile go with it. “I had hoped you would be here tonight.”

Bracewell, who was halfway through a sentence about a horse, stopped as though he had walked into a wall.

“Had you?” he said. “Had you indeed, Lady Rosaline? I—Yes.”

It was working.

Her astonishment nearly undid the whole performance. The man had gone pink to the ears and lost his words entirely. Two other heads in the circle had turned toward her, and for the first time in three Seasons, Rosaline was not the furniture in the room.

“I confess I had hoped to hear your opinion of the performance.” She lowered her lashes and let him find her eyes again. “One never knows quite what to think until one has heard it from someone who truly understands music.”

“Well.” Bracewell swelled to nearly twice his size. “As it happens, I am something of a devotee. That final piece, for instance. Pure Mozart. You hear it in the drama of the thing, the storm of it, the sheer Romantic fire of the man. Nobody but Mozart ever wrote a thunderclap into a pianoforte like that. A wild spirit. Untamed.”

“That,” Beatrice corrected, “was Beethoven.”

The circle went quiet.

“It was the Tempest sonata,” Beatrice continued, entirely unstoppable, “published in 1802, which is some eleven years after Mozart had the poor taste to die, so unless the man was composing from beyond the⁠—”

“But how clever of you, My Lord.”

Rosaline stepped into the gap without knowing she meant to and turned the full weight of her lowered lashes on Bracewell. She watched his collapsing face stop halfway down and begin cautiously to rebuild itself.

“To hear Mozart in Beethoven,” she said. “That is exactly the connection the critics are forever making, is it not? That Beethoven learned his fire at Mozart’s feet, and that one cannot properly hear the pupil without hearing the master alive in him.” She held his eyes one beat longer than she should. “It is a discerning ear that catches it, My Lord. I would never have put it so well myself.”

Bracewell, who had been one heartbeat from ruin, expanded like a sail taking wind.

“Just so, Lady Rosaline. Just so. The master in the pupil. That was precisely my meaning, and I am glad to find one person in this room quick enough to follow it.” He beamed at the circle, restored, magnificent. “You have a remarkably fine understanding, if I may say.”

“You may say anything you like, My Lord.”

Beside her, Beatrice made a small sound. And on her other side, Rosaline felt their brother go still.

She turned her head to find Samuel staring at her. Not with fury. Not with that weary, familiar disappointment she had lived beneath for three years, but with something she had never once in her life seen him aim in her direction: a startled, rapid recalculation, the look of a man who had been on the point of throwing out a chair and had just discovered it was worth money.

“Well…” he murmured.

Across the hall, at the very edge of everything, a large Scot she was being extremely careful not to look at raised his glass by half an inch and drank.

CHAPTER 12

“And so I said to him, Your Grace, that if the man wants my mare, he may have her at four hundred and not a penny under, and do you know what he had the gall to say to me?”

“Mm.”

“He offered three fifty.” Lord Harold Pike waited for the outrage this deserved. “Three fifty, Your Grace. For a mare out of Selim.”

“Aye,” Magnus uttered. “Scandalous.”