“I was not aware I had concealed it so poorly.”
His mother cast him a sharp look which would once, perhaps, have inspired greater alarm. “You are impossible.”
He was spared the necessity of answering by the approach of Lady March, who had with her a daughter of such studied delicacy that Owen suspected she had been arranged by artful hands not ten minutes earlier.
“Lady March,” his mother greeted her warmly. “How very pleased I am to see you.”
Lady March curtsied. Her daughter, Miss Virginia March, lowered her eyes with the exact degree of modesty calculated to attract notice to the rest of her.
“My lord,” said Lady March in a voice that was the embodiment of maternal sweetness. “We have heard so much of your return. It must be a great adjustment after so long abroad.”
“It is an adjustment,” said Owen.
Miss March glanced up. “I should think London must seem charming after so much hardship.”
Owen looked at her. He had no doubt she meant to be agreeable, yet the remark struck him with the same odd flatness as so many others he had heard since his return.
Charming.
It was the sort of word used by those to whom difficulty was chiefly weather-related.
“It is certainly different,” he agreed.
Miss March smiled as though she had drawn him into confidence. Lady March pressed closer, speaking to his mother of routs, assemblies, opera nights, and the various solemn trivialities by which a season justified its existence. Before Owen could be led deeper into that current, Harrow appeared at his shoulder.
“Why, Westbridge,” his friend spoke silently, in a tone meant only for Owen, “you look as though you are weighing the advantages of escape by the window.”
Owen sighed. “I had not yet decided whether the drop would kill me.”
Harrow took a glass from a passing servant. “If it did not, your mother would.”
“That,” said Owen, “is the only persuasive argument against it.”
His mother heard enough of this to turn and fix them both with disapproval. “Captain Harrow, I depend upon you to improve my son, not encourage him.”
Harrow bowed with admirable gravity. “I improve him constantly, madam. He is merely resistant to treatment.”
“Then you must persevere,” she smiled.
“I always do.”
She swept away then, and at length, he found himself hemmed in by three women at once: a widow eager to recall his father’s virtues, her daughter eager to display her pianoforte opinions, and a second girl, whose aunt had clearly instructed her to appear thoughtful, for she said very little but looked at him as if silence itself were a distinction.
Owen answered where he had to and bowed when required, but his thoughts slipped away entirely. They returned, against his better judgment, to the woman from the previous evening.
He had not learned her name. That omission ought to have placed the matter beyond further reflection, and yet it did not. He could still hear the dry steadiness with which she had told him that broad declarations about youth belonged properly to men of at least fifty. He could still see the quick intelligence in her face when she had looked at him, the wariness that never quite left her, and the laugh he had drawn from her only after some effort.
It had not been an easy laugh. That, perhaps, was why he remembered it.
She had spoken of France without embellishment and without invitation. She had not offered confidence, yet neither had she tried to dress reserve in charm. When he had mentioned the army, she had listened differently from other women, without the shallow eagerness for tales of danger that London so often mistook for understanding. She had listened as if war meant what it ought to mean: not a spectacle, but consequence.
He had not imagined that. He was certain of it.
And because of that certainty, the contrast between her and every woman his mother now wished him to admire becamemore marked by the minute. The women around him were, for the most part, very accomplished. No doubt they danced well, sang prettily, and knew how to conduct themselves in every room to which they might be brought. Yet their ease in such scenes only made them seem to him more entirely formed by them. Nothing in them suggested distance, thought, or pain. Nothing suggested the world beyond the room.
The woman from last night had suggested all three.
He had the distinct impression, though he could not have said why, that she knew how cruel life could be. That impression unsettled him more than it ought.
