Page 34 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“My Lord.”

“Miss Wharton.”

He had, she saw — only now, when she had to look at him — a trace of high colour along the cheekbone that had not been there at the door. His own face was perfectly composed. It was the cheekbone that betrayed him. She did not look at his cheekbone for more than the instant it took to register it.

“If your Lordship will count.”

“I will count.”

He did not move. She understood, after a half-second in which she did not understand at all, that he was waiting for her to put her hand on his sleeve, because she was the one who had to give the permission. She lifted her left hand, in its plain white cotton — she did not own gloves she could waltz in, and would not have worn them in a schoolroom if she had — and laid it on his sleeve.

His right hand came to her waist.

It came lightly. It came at the exact place it ought to come, no higher and no lower, with the precise unhurried propriety of a man who had been taught to dance at twelve and had not, in eighteen years, forgotten any of it. There was a layer of grey kerseymere and a layer of stays and a layer of linen between his hand and her skin, and through all three of them she felt, as clearly as though there had been nothing at all, the warmth and the weight and the steadiness of his palm.

Their hands — her right, his left — met in the air beside them.

His fingers closed, very lightly, around hers.

“One,” he said.

His voice was not the voice that had been counting for Lady Sophia.

It was lower, and steadier, and pitched, with the careful art of a man who knew a room had two other people in it, at exactly the volume that would carry across the floor.

“Two. Three. One, two, three.”

She moved with him.

She had not waltzed in four years. She had thought, in the moments at the piano, that she might have forgotten how. She had not forgotten. Her feet found the step, her body found the slight lean against his hand that the waltz required, and they made, in the cleared space between the schoolroom table and the hearth, the first quarter-turn of the figure as though they had been doing it together for a Season.

“Look, Sophy,” the Marquess said, without looking at his sister. “Watch Miss Wharton’s feet. Along. Not bouncing up and down.”

“I am watching.”

“One, two, three.”

A second quarter-turn. A third. The Hummel was still in Madeleine’s head, and her body was keeping time to it without the help of the piano. She kept her eyes lowered — she kept them, by a great act of professional discipline, on the third button of his waistcoat — and she felt, as one feels weather, the look that he was not giving her. He was looking over her head at his sister. He was counting. He was doing, with absolute correctness, exactly what he had been asked to do.

And his hand at her waist, which had not moved, was steady in a way that was not the steadiness of indifference.

“Along, Sophy. Look. There. Along.”

“I see.”

“One, two, three. One —”

She looked up.

She did not mean to.

She had promised herself, in the moments between rising from the piano stool and putting her hand on his sleeve, that she would not. It was the one thing that she had promised herself, yet she broke the promise without warning, and looked up.

His eyes were already on her.

He had been, she understood with a tiny clear shock, looking down at the top of her head while he had been counting; and her looking up had caught him, and he had not had time to look away, and for the space of one count — two — and another — three — they were looking at one another at the distance of a waltz, which is not a distance at all.

His face did not change. Hers, she hoped with a hope that was not faith, did not change either. Neither of them faltered in the step. The hand at her waist did not tighten. The fingers around hers did not press. Nothing happened that anyone in the room — anyone, that is, who was twelve and watching a pair of feet — could have seen.