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“Lord Dover.”

He went, because he must, while she stood where the set had left her. Across the room, Augusta watched her over the rim of an untasted cup and said nothing at all, which from Augusta was the loudest possible remark.

* * *

The carriage was cold and dark and very welcome. Augusta let three turns pass in a silence that was its own kind of remark, then settled her cloak about her.

“Well,” she began. “That was a successful evening.”

“It was. The rooms looked very well, and the garden door held.”

“I was not speaking of the garden door, and you know it. You danced one set, with Lord Dover, and did not dance again. Neither, I observed, did he. Then you fled to the swags.” Her voice came dry out of the dark. “I shall not tease you about him. Charlotte will do that far better than I can, for it is her province rather than mine. I mean to ask you about something else.”

“What else is there?”

“A question I have carried since Hampshire, though I have waited until you were tired enough to answer it honestly.”

Rosalind turned her head in the dark. “Ask, then.”

“You speak of yourself as the plain one. The useful one. The woman meant for the back of a house rather than the front of a room.” The carriage rocked over the stones. “You say it as though somebody settled the matter for you long ago. Who settled it?”

Rosalind kept her silence.

“Someone taught you to measure yourself that way,” Augusta said. “I want to know whose judgment you have been carrying.”

The lamps went by, and Rosalind watched them rather than her aunt, which was easier in the dark, while the question settled in her chest like a stone. Usefulness offered her no way out of a question like that.

“Selina, I suppose,” she answered at last. “When she came.”

“Ah.”

“She never said that I was plain. She said that Cassandra had the looks of the family, and that I had the sense. She said it kindly, in front of people, as though it were a compliment, so that there was nothing at all to take hold of.”

“And you believed her.”

“I was four-and-twenty, and I ought to have known better. But the ground had been laid long before. I had kept the house since Mama died, and that was what Papa valued in me. Then Selina called Cassandra the looks and me the sense, and Papa said nothing.”

Her hands tightened in her lap.

“He is not unkind,” she said. “He has never said a cruel word to me.”

“No. He has only been weak where you needed him to be strong.” Augusta’s voice went cool and precise. “Selina gave an old fear a name, and your father let it stand. That does not make either of them right.”

Rosalind’s throat ached.

“I am not asking you to believe the opposite on my word,” Augusta continued. “Only stop treating their judgment as fact. Give me a fortnight.”

“A fortnight?”

“Of not being certain.”

Rosalind watched the lamps slide past the carriage window.

“I do not know that I am certain any longer,” she admitted. “That is the difficulty. I should rather be certain! It was a great deal more comfortable, being certain.”

“It generally is. Comfort and truth keep separate houses, more is the pity.” Augusta was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was lower, with a care in it that Rosalind had heard only once or twice and never understood. “Your mother was reckoned plain too, you know, when we were girls.” She paused, and the pause came near some further matter without arriving at it. “Cecily was thought the plain Ashby sister, and I the handsome one. The whole county was sure of it, and the whole county was a pack of fools. I have lived long enough to see every one of them buried still believing it.”

A small, startled laugh escaped Rosalind despite everything. “Aunt!”