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“We are to have your father at last,” Augusta had said in the carriage, drawing her gloves smooth. “We shall meet him on neutral ground, rather than in Grosvenor Street, where the carpet is theirs. Brierley is a fool, but she keeps a good table and she asks everyone, which means she asks us.” She had settled back against the squabs. “Your father will be there, because Selina goes wherever she may be seen. Chin where I showed you, and the green does the rest.”

Lady Brierley’s house in Hill Street was lit from the area railings to the attics, and the dinner was a large one. Four-and-twenty would sit down to table, and Rosalind knew it the moment she came in, because her eye had counted the chairs before she had even given up her cloak. New gown or no, some habits did not know how to stop.

She came into the drawing-room in the green, on her aunt’s arm, and something happened that had never once happened to her in all her life. People looked at her, though there was no vulgar turning of heads. A dowager glanced at her and then glanced again, and a young man by the fire looked twice. Here and there the attention of the company caught on the new face in holly-green and held for half a second before it passed. Rosalind felt it land, and the strangeness of it nearly took her feet from under her.

They were looking at her. At her.

She fixed her mind hard upon the chairs again, only to steady herself, and it was then that she saw her father standing by the second window.

She saw him before he saw her, as she saw most things. He stood a little apart from a knot of gentlemen, holding a glass he did not drink from. He wore the look she knew best of all the looks he owned. A man at a party he would rather have left an hour ago, his face governed into pleasantness, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. Lord Marbury was older this winter than she had let herself notice in the country, grayer at the temple, and a little stooped at the shoulder where he had used to stand straight. Her chest tightened at the sight of him, a small painful squeeze that came only for him. She had stopped trying to find a name for it years ago.

She went to him, because that was what one did, and because going to him was the one old reflex she had never managed to break.

“Papa,” she said, and her voice came out smaller than she had meant it to.

He turned and saw her. Surprise crossed his face, followed by something Rosalind could not read before his usual company pleasantness returned.

“Rosalind,” he said, and his voice was warm and vague and pleased, the voice he used for everyone. “Well, here you are. Your aunt has... yes. You have come up to Town.”

“I have, Papa, and Aunt Augusta was very good to bring me.” She gave him her courtesy exactly, and placed it where it belonged. “I hope I find you well? The roads were filthy when we came up, and I worried for you on them. The journey was not too hard, I hope?” He did not answer at once, and she filled the pause as she had always filled pauses. “If there is anything at all you want while you are in Town, you have only to send. Aunt’s house is only in Wimpole Street, and that is no distance, so I should be very glad to come.”

“No, no, you are not to trouble yourself.” He patted the air between them, gently, as though to quiet a subject he had no wish to discuss. “We do very well, for Selina has it all in hand. She has a head for these things, and I never need think of a single one of them. You have been troubling yourself all your life, I think. You ought to...” His eye went past her shoulder to the safe middle distance of the room, and the rest of the sentence never came. “Well, you look very well, and that is a good color on you.”

His hand rose an inch from his side and turned toward her green sleeve. Rosalind caught the movement at the edge of her vision and half-turned, thinking for one foolish instant that he meant to touch her.

His hand found the snuffbox in his waistcoat pocket instead, turned it once, and came to rest.

“It is one of the new ones,” she said of the gown, because the silence had to be filled, and she had always been the one who filled silences. “Aunt insisted upon it, and it is a great extravagance, but she is not to be argued with. You know how she is.” She stopped short, her heart lurching, for she had been about to say, you know how she was with Mama. The name had come up to the very edge of the talk, and she saw her father see it coming, and she saw the thing happen to his face that always happened.

His gaze slid off her and fixed on the dark glass and the December street beyond, which he could not have been seeing. The pleasant vagueness went out of him, and something far more tired came in beneath it.

“Augusta was always...” he began, and could not finish that either. “Yes, she is a great manager. Cecily. Your mother,” he said, and stopped there too, while the snuffbox turned again, once. “It was a long time ago now.”

“Yes, Papa,” she said, softly. “It was a long time ago.”

“A long time indeed.” He came back from the window by degrees, governing his face into its company pleasantness once more, like a man climbing carefully out of a place he had not meant to go. “Well, you will want to be introduced about.” Already the small drift had begun that ended every conversation he did not want, the quarter-turn toward the rest of the room. “It is good that you came up. Yes, it is good.”

And there had been something he meant to say. She felt it go past her and die, as such things always died with him, and he had given her a good color on you instead. She had wondered all her life what stopped him, and had never once found an answer.

“Rosalind, there you are.” Augusta had come up at her shoulder, unhurried, carrying a cup of negus that she had got from somewhere and clearly did not want. “And Marbury.” She gave Rosalind’s father her courtesy, correct in every particular, and a full degree colder than the courtesy she had given the footman who took her cloak. It was laid down so smooth and so exact that the coldness was the message itself. “You are keeping well, I hope? London suits you better than the country, I have always thought, for one may be quiet in a crowd here. It is the great convenience of Town, is it not?”

“Lady Holt.” He bowed, a shade too deep and a shade too quick, the bow of a man easing past another in a narrow passage. “Yes, I am very well. It was good of you to bring Rosalind up, very good. I had not...” He lost that as well. “That is, it is a kindness.” His eye would not settle on Augusta any more than it had settled on the window. “You will excuse me, for Brierley is signaling something. The going in, I expect, and I must see to it.”

He went, and Rosalind stood and watched her father drift off toward Lady Brierley and the comfortable middle of the room, where there was no daughter in green to be looked at. Her heart sank slow and heavy in her chest.

“Drink this,” said Augusta quietly at her side, and put the unwanted negus into her hand. “And do not watch him go, for there is nothing written on his back that you have not read a hundred times already. Look at the room instead. The room is looking at you, which is a novelty, and you may as well learn to bear it.”

“Why can he never stay?” Rosalind said, very low. “Five minutes is the most of him I have ever had at one time, and then the snuffbox turns, and the sentence trails away, and he must be somewhere else.”

“I know it well enough,” said Augusta. “Now drink, before it goes cold.”

Rosalind did as she was bid, and put her eyes on the bright, crowded, watching room instead. The gown changed what a room saw. It did not change him, and grief pressed up hard beneath her breastbone, where nobody could see it.

Across the room her stepmother stood in claret silk, with Cassandra arranged at one elbow and the dull, worthy company arranged at the other. Selina’s serene gaze moved over the gathering as it always moved, weighing and placing every person in it. Then it came to the new woman in holly-green by the window, and there it stopped, and there it held. The smile on her mouth did not move at all, but behind it something quick and cold went to work, as though a matter she had thought long settled had suddenly come undone.

“Aunt,” Rosalind said quietly. “Selina is looking at me.”