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“It does not trouble me. It is merely...” He stopped, for the next words out of him were going to be a question, and he could not get out of its way. “What is it that she imagines she gains by it?”
The question hung there, sounding a good deal worse in the open air than it had in his head. Heat crept up the back of his neck.
“Nothing,” Westcott said mildly. “Perhaps she gains nothing at all.”
Dover turned his glass and said nothing.
Westcott watched him. “You are looking for the trick because once before there was one.”
“You need not bring Lady Letitia into this.”
“I am not comparing them. I am reminding you that she was one woman.”
“So I am aware.”
“Good. That is all the wisdom I have in me tonight.” Westcott straightened from the chimney-breast. “Come and lose some money with me.”
He went off toward the card tables.
Dover remained by the cold hearth a moment longer. Through the wall, the soprano achieved her great note at last. Lady Rosalind had refused his compliment as readily as she had refused credit for the dinner. If there was a scheme in it, he had yet to find one.
Beyond the doorway, the company had loosened with the end of the song. Lady Marbury sat magnificent and untroubled among them, her two daughters arranged about her like well-chosen ornaments, her gaze moving over the room with the serene assurance of a woman certain of her evening. It passed across the doorway where her stepdaughter had stood a quarter of an hour before, and it did not pause there for so much as a moment.
A stepmother’s gaze, going over her own stepdaughter as though she were not there at all. Dover marked it, though he could not yet say what it meant, and let it go.
It was well past his hour, and the carriage would be waiting. A sensible man, his curiosity confirmed and his civility discharged, would already be in it and halfway home.
Dover set his untouched wine upon the supper table. Then, instead of turning toward the door, he turned back toward the warmth and the music and the plain woman in the wine-colored gown. A man might surely take his leave of his hostess before he went. That was all it was.
He went back to find her.
Chapter Five
“The gowns have come, my lady!”
Hannah’s voice sailed up the staircase, and behind her came two of Madame Levasseur’s girls with their arms full of parcels. Rosalind was out on the landing before she remembered that this was not her house to protect.
“There!” Augusta called from the door of the morning-room below. “You see how it troubles you. You may come down and watch, or you may go and dust a shelf somewhere out of my sight. What you may not do is stand upon my stairs looking as though a delivery of muslin were a thing that needed managing. Muslin does not need managing. It needs admiring, which is a different business altogether, and one you are sadly out of practice in.”
“Have I not admired a great many of Cassandra’s gowns?”
“You have pinned a great many of Cassandra’s gowns, which is not the same thing at all, whatever you have been told.” Augusta turned back into the room. “Come down, then, or must the gowns go up to you? They are yours, and a person ought to be present when her own things arrive in the world.”
Rosalind went down, her heart beating rather more quickly than the occasion could explain.
In the morning-room the girls turned back the holland wrappings, and the gowns came out one by one into the gray light: a walking-dress of deep russet, a dinner-gown of dove gray nothing like the gray she had worn for years, and last of all, from the bottom of the pile, the green.
“Oh, my lady,” Hannah breathed. “Have you ever seen such a color?”
It was the color of holly with the light behind it, deep and quiet, and Rosalind looked at it and said nothing, for nothing in her life had taught her what a person was meant to say to such a gown.
“Well,” said Augusta, “that is the one. Did I not say it would be the green, the very moment the pattern-book was opened?”
“It is a great deal of green,” Rosalind managed.
“It is exactly the right quantity of green, for Levasseur does not waste cloth. She is far too French for that.” Augusta nodded the girls toward the table where the chocolate stood, a kindness Rosalind marked, and the girls went to it gratefully. “You will try it on before they go, so that anything that needs taking in can be pinned now and not at the eleventh hour, when we are all of us cross. Go up with Hannah. I shall sit here and be of no use whatever, which I find I do very well indeed.”
Rosalind did not move, though Hannah was already waiting at the foot of the stairs.
