Page 27

For a long moment Dover said nothing. He turned the claret in his glass without drinking it, and as his eyes traveled the rooms once more, he found that Westcott had it exactly right. The name was joined. The room was quietly delighted with something it had decided to find charming.

And the discovery did not frighten him as it ought.

Why did it not? A month past, the knowledge that a room had joined his name to a woman’s would have sent him straight to the door with a clear conscience. He waited for the old instinct to rise and carry him out, and it did not come. What came instead was something very near gladness, though a colder truth lay underneath it. A thing the room had seen could not now be unseen, and a man who had let himself be watched at a lady’s side had given away something he could never take back.

“You have gone quiet again,” Westcott observed. “I am learning to read it, you know. That was not the quiet of a man dismayed.”

“Was it not?”

“No. That was the quiet of a man weighing something he had not meant to weigh tonight.”

“Then I am weighing it now.”

“And does it come out to your liking?”

“It comes out the wrong way, I confess, for a man who likes his exits clear.” Dover looked across the room, where Charlotte had claimed Rosalind’s arm and was steering her, laughing, toward the warmer end of the floor with no chance of refusal. “If I withdrew now and went down to the country tomorrow, as I have done every year of my life, the room would mark the going as surely as it has marked the staying. It would have a name for that as well. It always has a name.”

“It always does,” Westcott agreed.

“A month ago I could have walked out of any room in London and left nothing behind me but a closed door.” He set his glass down with more care than the thing required. “I cannot do that here, for I have left something in this room that will be remarked upon if I take it away. That is new, Westcott. I was never before a man who left things in rooms.”

Westcott looked at him, and for a moment the easy humor left his face entirely.

“No,” he said. “You were not.” Then the ease came back over him, as though he had shrugged into a familiar coat. “Well! I have told you so once, and I shall not say it again above once a quarter-hour. Drink your claret. You are committed past the point of a graceful exit, my friend, and that is the first interesting thing your calendar has produced in all the years I have known you.”

Across the floor the bronze gown turned, and for half a second her eyes found his. His breath caught. Neither of them owned the glance, and she turned away again almost at once, while Dover stood with his back to the pier-glass and let the truth of it settle over him. He had let it be true in front of everyone, and there was no taking it back now.

Ought that to alarm him? It ought, and somehow it did not. He found, on the whole, that he did not wish to take it back at all.

* * *

He came upon Lady Marbury without meaning to, and that was its own kind of warning, for a man does not stumble upon a thing unless some part of him has been tracking it all along.

She stood near the second window in claret silk, for she favored claret, being a woman who meant to be seen to outrank every room she entered. Her elder daughter stood beside her, dressed at great expense, while the countess smiled her warm smile at a little knot of company. Dover had been reading faces for his living since he was twenty, and he knew within a moment that something beneath that smile had gone wrong.

The smile itself held perfectly. It never reached her eyes, though it never had, and he had marked that weeks ago. What had changed tonight was where those eyes were going. Again and again they traveled the same line, from her own daughters to the bronze gown by the card-room door and back again, measuring first one and then the other, and each time the comparison displeased her more.

She has seen what the room has seen. Dover watched the countess struggle to master her own countenance, and no schooling in the world can hide such a discovery for long.

She had never once considered her stepdaughter a rival. He would have wagered his best horse upon that. The plain one, the useful one, no threat at all to her own girls. Yet now she stood in the Harcourts’ ballroom watching that judgment prove false in front of her, for Rosalind had a viscount’s attention, and the room had joined her name to his, while Cassandra, at her mother’s side in pale rose which had cost twice as much as the bronze, had no name joined to anything at all.

“Cassandra, of course, as the eldest of my girls,” the countess was saying, and the name came down with a little too much weight, like a coin she expected the company to count. “She has always been admired, I am sure, wherever we have gone.”

“She is a great credit to you,” murmured one of the ladies.

“Lady Rosalind has done so very well for herself this Season, has she not?” Lady Marbury went on, warmly, though her glance traveled toward the card-room door without quite arriving there. “Quite the little success. One is so pleased to see a girl of no especial expectations make her way.”

Dover went very still.

The title had come out a half-degree too heavy. Dover heard the edge without understanding it. Lady Marbury’s glance went from Rosalind to Cassandra and back again, and the comparison plainly displeased her.

The surface of it was easy enough to read. A second wife, a stepdaughter risen past all expectation, a careful plan come unstuck. That was reason enough for resentment without his inventing another.

Lady Holt’s coldness whenever Lord Marbury came near certain subjects crossed his mind, followed at once by Westcott’s advice at White’s: leave it unsaid. Dover meant to.

He looked once more at Lady Marbury. Whatever troubled her, Rosalind’s doing well had made it worse. That much he could see. The rest belonged to the family.

He turned away from the second window and went to find a quieter corner.