Page 24

It was a country dance, which is all meeting and parting. The figure carried the couples together for a turn and a word, then cast them off down the line to wait and watch and come together again, so that any conversation arrived in pieces, a phrase at the meeting and a silence at the parting. Rosalind had stood up in such sets at Marbury a hundred times, partnering whichever gentleman the numbers required, though the figure had always seemed merely steps to be got right. Tonight it became something that brought him to her, took him away, and brought him back.

“You have danced this before,” he observed at the first meeting, his hand to hers, its warmth reaching her through two thicknesses of kid.

“A great many times! There was always a set short at home, and someone must make up the numbers.” She kept her voice light. “I am a very serviceable partner, my lord. I keep my place, and I do not tread.”

“You undervalue yourself in the one art where it cannot be hid.”

The figure took him away down the line, leaving her to wait and watch, her empty hands a torment for which she had no name. Then he was before her again.

“A person dances as they are,” he told her. “You may take your name off a swag. You cannot take it off the way you cross a floor.”

“And how do I cross a floor?”

“As though you had it perfectly in hand, and would rather no one looked.”

The parting came again, and this time the line carried her off, three couples down, where she went through the figure faultlessly while her whole mind stayed upon the place he had left. When they met once more, he spoke low, under the music.

“You are doing it now. You have not put a foot wrong, and you have spent every minute of it wishing the floor would swallow you.”

“My lord, really.”

“Forgive me. I only mean that you do a thing beautifully and then look as though you hope nobody saw.”

A deflection ought to have come, for she always had a deflection ready, yet with her hands empty and her eyes given nowhere to rest but his, the words refused to assemble. Whatever she could manage with a sprig of holly between her fingers deserted her when her fingers held only air.

“You should not say such things in a set,” she managed. “There is no holly here to attend to.”

“No, there is not. I had marked that.” Something warmed in his face. “This is the first conversation I have had with you in which your hands had nothing to do. I believe I have been waiting for it without knowing that I waited.”

The figure cast them apart, and she stood at her place in the line, three couples off, watching him take the turn with the lady opposite, correct and unhurried, before coming round the set toward her again. Longing rose up in her so suddenly, and so entirely without permission, that she had to lift her chin as Augusta had taught her, simply to keep her feet beneath her. The gown had nothing to do with it, nor the eyes of the room. It was the meeting and the parting and the meeting again, a man who crossed a floor toward her, said what he meant, and refused to be put off it. When the figure took him from her, she wanted him kept. And when it brings him back, she thought, with something very near panic, I do not want the bringing back to be the last.

The room went on around them all the while, and she remained aware of it as she was aware of every room, in its parts and its needs. The matron by the door wore feathers that threatened every near neighbor, the débutante two couples down was counting her steps under her breath, and by the second window a candle had just begun to gutter, for the wedged door had admitted a thread of draft after all. A week ago she would have gone to that candle. Tonight she stayed in the dance and let someone else mend it.

They met, and his hand found hers. “Tell me a thing,” he asked, “and I shall not name you for it. I only ask. Why do you take your name off the work?”

The figure held them a beat longer than it ought, or so she felt, as the music turned them together still.

“Because a thing with my name on it can be refused,” she said.

It was out before she had weighed it. Her heart pounded hard enough to shake her voice. She had never said the words aloud, not even to Charlotte or Augusta.

Now she had said them to him, in the middle of a ballroom, and she could not call them back.

True to his word, he let the confession pass without remark. He held her hand for the half-beat the figure allowed, his stillness turning gentle, and then the dance cast them apart for the last figure, which put an end to everything said in pieces.

They came back together at the end, bowed and curtsied, and it was over. “Thank you for the set,” he said.

“You are welcome to it.” Her breath needed governing, and she governed it. “It was very correct, was it not? I told you that I do not tread.”

“You do not.”

His hand kept hers a moment past the bow. A second dance was out of the question, as they both knew, for a gentleman and a lady who stood up twice together set the whole room counting. So this was the end of it, the giving back of her hand, and for one second they both left it undone. The set was breaking apart around them into the next, while they stood in the middle of it, her hand still in his glove, the music beginning again for other people. Rosalind, who knew to the very minute when a moment ought to end, wished this one to continue past every rule she knew.

Let the evening go no further than this, she thought. Let me only stand here, in a broken set, with my hand in his.

She wanted it so much, with so little left to stand behind, that for one moment speech would have been beyond her had her life depended upon it. Then his hand opened, slowly, as it had once closed upon that length of ivy among the Danforths’ greenery, gave hers back, and the room came rushing in again with all its noise.

“Lady Rosalind.” He bowed, a viscount in a ballroom once more, correct and apart.