The ladies laughed merrily and moved obediently to the fireplace.
“But indeed,” Mrs. Tate confided to Claire, “I have no favorite. Well, perhaps one, but then who would not favor him in any company? But Florence has chosen her gentlemen guests well, would you not agree, Miss Ward? They are all personable.”
“Yes,” Claire said.
“One can only hope,” Miss Garnett said with a titter, “that the gentlemen feel the same way about us, Frances.”
“I have no doubt of it,” Mrs. Tate said, looking about at the group. “I do believe Florence has chosen us carefully too, if I may be pardoned for the vanity.”
“Poor Hetty,” Lady Pollard said. “It is a shame she had to cry off at the last moment. She would have enjoyed nothing better than Florence’s little entertainment.” Then she glanced at Claire and looked uncomfortable. She spread her heavily ringed hands to the blaze. “There is nothing as cozy as a large fire in a morning room, is there?”
Claire smiled to herself. So she was poor Hetty’s substitute, was she? Well, she had known it, or all but the name of the absent guest anyway. But Lady Florence had sent a servant to summon the gentlemen. There was no time to dwell on the fact. Claire’s heart began to thump, just as if she were fresh out of the schoolroom and meeting gentlemen for the first time in her life, she thought in disgust.
“You are each in turn to choose a valentine from the table,” Lady Florence told the gentlemen after they had arrived. Her cheeks were glowing and she had her hands clasped to her bosom. She was throughly enjoying herself. “You must not turn it over until everyone has chosen. Then you will all turn over the valentines together, add your own name beneath the lady’s, and pin the valentine to her bosom, as I explained last night. There are pins on the table. Are there any questions?”
There were not. Claire seated herself on the chair just vacated by Lady Pollard. She wished heartily that she could fade out of sight altogether.
“Very well, then,” Lady Florence said. “Gerard, will you make the first choice?”
“Me first?” he said in the rather bored drawl Claire had noticed the night before during the few occasions when he had spoken. “Ah, the choice is overwhelming, Florence. And all quite identical?”
“But not the ladies whose names are written beneath, Gerard,” Lady Pollard said.
He stood at one corner of the table for a long time—all the gentlemen did when their turn came except Mr. Mullins, who was last and had no choice at all—before finally picking up the heart closest to him. It must have taken ten minutes for all the hearts to be chosen, though why it took so long Claire did not know. Since the hearts were identical and there was no knowing which belonged to whom, there seemed little point in pondering the choice. She could only conclude that the gentlemen were enjoying and savoring the game as the ladies clearly were. Her own heart was beating in her chest like a hammer.
“Now,” Lady Florence said, her voice so bereft of the gay excitement with which she had set the game in motion ten minutes before that Claire looked at her in some surprise, “you may turn your hearts over, gentlemen, and discover the identity of your valentine. Add your own names, please.”
Not one of the gentlemen as he read the name of his valentine either looked at her or spoke her name. Another five minutes passed—or it seemed like five to Claire, though perhaps it was not quite so long— before Percival Mullins, the first to use the pen, picked up a pin and crossed the room to Lady Florence.
“Ah, Percy,” she said, her smile not quite reaching her eyes, “how charming.”
“My pleasure, Florence,” he said. “I hope I do not prick you with the pin.” Lady Florence had an ample bosom.
And then Sir Charles Horsefield was bowing before Olga Garnett and Lord Mingay was approaching Frances Tate. Rufus Tucker had some difficulty writing on silk with the quill pen. There was a delay before he turned to locate Lady Pollard with a smile.
Claire felt quite sick. She and Lucy Sterns were left. The Duke of Langford was bent over the table, the pen in his hand. Maurice Shrimpton waited behind him.
“The suspense is killing,” Miss Sterns murmured, leaning toward Claire. Claire could only swallow.
And then the Duke of Langford straightened up, handed the pen to the remaining gentleman, took what seemed like half a minute to pick up a pin, and turned to walk toward the fireplace. Lucy Sterns smiled. But his eyes were directed downward to the chair when he came up to them and he reached out a hand to Claire.
No, there is some mistake,she almost said foolishly.Miss Sterns is standing beside me.But she did not say it. Instead she set her hand in his—she did not realize until his closed about it how cold her own was—and raised her eyes to his. He was looking at her steadily from beneath lazy eyelids. She got to her feet.
“Ah, Maurice,” Miss Sterns was saying beside her with warm enthusiasm. “How wonderful.”
In fact, the whole room was buzzing with exclamations and laughter. And yet it all seemed to Claire to come from a long distance away. She was wearing a high-necked wool dress. She watched as he pinned the heart just above her left breast, felt the heat of his fingers burn through to her flesh—they were long, well-manicured fingers—and read his name upside down as it had been scrawled in bold strokes beneath the small neatness of her own name. “Langford,” he had written.
She looked up when he had finished to find his eyes gazing directly into hers—keen dark eyes despite the sleepy eyelids. She was too close to the fire again, too far from air, she thought. His eyes were not smiling or his close-pressed lips either. He was displeased, she thought. Of course he was displeased. She fought back the impulse to apologize to him.
And then someone took her right hand in a warm clasp—but of course, she thought in some confusion as her hand was raised between them, who else would have taken it? He touched his lips to the backs of her fingers, and Claire felt the sensation of their touch all along her arm and down into her breasts and all the way down to her toes.
“Well,” someone said heartily—it was Mr. Tucker, Claire realized with a start—and laughed, “may the party now begin, Florence?”
The party was to begin with a ride to Chelmsford Castle, six miles away.
“We will all ride together,” Lady Florence said. “There is a remarkably well-preserved castle to explore and a river before and a forest behind. I am sure that we will find six separate ways to go.” She smiled about at the company.
But not at him, the Duke of Langford noticed. Florence was displeased. Furiously angry if he was not mistaken. He would be willing to wager that in the private word she had had with the other gentlemen, Mullins excepted, she had mentioned only the fact that the valentine at the bottom left of the table belonged to Miss Ward. He did not doubt that only he had been favored with the seemingly unconscious remark that Miss Ward’s valentine was as far from her own as it was possible to be.
