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Chapter Sixteen

“Chin up, my dear,” Augusta murmured as they came up the great staircase together, into the noise and the heat and the blaze of the Stamfords’ Christmas candles. “You are doing very well indeed at the one thing you have never once practiced.”

“Standing still,” Rosalind said, though her heart was beating exceedingly fast beneath the green silk.

“Standing still. And doing it very prettily, I must say.”

“There is a footman by the door who has loaded his salver badly,” Rosalind murmured. “He will spill it within the hour. And the candles by the second window want a screen drawn against the draft.”

“I am sure they do.” Augusta sounded entirely placid. “You will leave them both alone.”

“I have promised myself as much. It is harder than I imagined.”

“Most worthwhile things are.” Augusta drew her a half-step further into the room. “Charlotte is by the long windows. She has held that ground for you this past hour, I am sure, and looked handsome doing it. Go and be seen with her. I shall be precisely where you can find me.”

Rosalind went, and it cost her something with every step. She had come to be looked at, not to be useful, and she had never learned how not to see.

The room was as full as a Season’s whole consequence could make it, with the greenery dark and glossy along the cornices. This room knew her now. Faces turned toward the green gown as she passed, and she was glad beyond all speaking to reach Charlotte at the long windows.

“There you are!” Charlotte took her hand and did not let it go, angling herself so that the whole room might see whose hand she held. “Lady Calder has been telling me of her conservatory this quarter-hour. Stay by me, will you not?”

“With all my heart,” Rosalind replied, laughing, “though I must warn you that I know nothing whatever of orchids.”

“You need not. You are a great deal more interesting than orchids.”

For half an hour, the evening went on just as pleasantly as that. Then it did not.

Rosalind could never say afterward what the first sign had been. She only knew that a coldness crept through the room, as though a window had been opened somewhere out of sight.

“Rosalind.” Charlotte’s fingers tightened upon hers. “Your stepmother has been speaking with the Dowager Marchioness of Stillingbourne this past minute, and I do not like the look of it.”

“I saw.” Rosalind kept her voice steady. “She has looked at me three times this hour. I thought it was only the usual spite.”

She had thought wrong, and she understood it one beat too late.

Lady Marbury stood across the floor in dark figured silk, with Cassandra at her elbow and Phoebe half a pace behind, her eyes fixed anywhere but upon the company. A knot of the worthier guests had gathered about her, and she talked quietly, as she always talked, never once raising the heat. Now she bent her head and said something, low, behind a fan that did not quite hide her mouth. Her gaze drifted toward the dancers all the while, deniable to the last. And the Dowager Marchioness listened. Her drawing-room set the opinion of half the Season, and she had never once kept back a thing worth the telling.

What had Selina said? Rosalind did not need to hear the words, for she knew what her stepmother carried, and she knew the shape it would take in that practiced mouth. It would be a question, never a charge. A question of that kind asks nothing it can be made to answer for, though it ruins as surely as an oath. One does wonder, with that coloring, where the girl truly comes from.

The Dowager’s face turned, found Rosalind by the windows, and went carefully blank. From that one blank face, the cold traveled outward. The Dowager leaned toward Lady Pelham, and Lady Pelham bent her head to it with the stillness of a woman hearing confirmed a thing she had hoped was idle. Then Lady Pelham murmured to the woman at her own shoulder. Mouth to ear to mouth, the whisper went across the bright floor by the surest road any ballroom owned.

“What is happening?” The brightness had gone out of Charlotte entirely. “Rosalind, what is it?”

“It has begun,” Rosalind said quietly.

“What has? You are frightening me.”

“Watch Lady Pelham, and you will see.”

Lady Pelham was already coming toward them, an old friend of Augusta’s, or had been, a viscountess whose nod opened doors and whose turned shoulder shut them. And she had been kind to Rosalind, which was the worst of it.

“She has always liked you,” Charlotte whispered.

“She has.” Rosalind’s heart lifted upon the old reflex, whatever her head knew better. It was Lady Pelham whom she had quietly steadied out of a faint at Lady Marchwood’s table, the very first week of the Season, with no fuss and no audience and no thought of being thanked for it.

Here was someone who would be glad of her — someone who had bidden her come and find her before the first set. Her knees had already begun to bend into the curtsy.

Lady Pelham neither stopped nor nodded. For one instant something older crossed her face, and was put away. She carried her gaze deliberately clear, as one carries a clean hem past a puddle, and went on to the window. There she stood with her back half-turned, admiring the dark garden through the glass, and she did not look round.