Owen did not answer at once. Dull was the very last word he would have chosen.
Nothing in her had struck him as dull.
Reserved, certainly. Guarded, yes.
But there had been intelligence in every glance she gave, wit in every reply, and a steadiness he had not encountered in any of the evening’s brighter ornaments.
He turned back to his mother. “You still didn’t tell me her name.”
His mother gave the smallest sigh of impatience. “It was… something Finch.”
The name landed at once in his mind.
Finch.
He knew it. Not well, not clearly, but enough for the memory of some old murmur to stir. He could not at once place the details, only the impression. He remembered disgrace, whispered about with relish by those whom it had not touched.
Miss Finch, then.
He repeated the surname inwardly and found it suited her less poorly than he would have expected. He wondered what her Christian name might be, and was immediately irritated with himself for caring.
“Pray do not look so thoughtful over it, Owen,” his mother’s voice brought him back to the present moment. “There are twenty more suitable women in this room alone.”
He almost smiled at that, though without amusement. If there were twenty more suitable women in the room, he had already been presented to half of them and had found none worthy even of memory. Miss Finch, by contrast, had occupied his thoughts since the previous evening armed with nothing but a dry tongue and an unwillingness to flatter him.
That fact should have warned him off. Instead, it made him want to know more.
Chapter 6
Aurelia had not expected to see either of them again so soon.
When Clara had first exclaimed over Captain Harrow’s presence in the drawing room before dinner, Aurelia’s surprise had been sincere enough. But the greater surprise had followed almost immediately, when her eyes moved almost without her consent through the crowd, only to find the other man standing some little distance away.
He had come, then.
For a gentleman who had spoken with such dry indifference of London pleasures, he seemed remarkably diligent in attending them. One assembly might be explained away as duty, maternal coercion, or simply bad luck. Two in succession suggested either a weak character or a more complicated one than Aurelia had first supposed.
She had decided, after watching him for only a quarter of an hour, that the latter was far more likely.
Indeed, she had been more amused than she ought to have by observing him before dinner. His mother, who appeared to be a beautiful, stately woman with all the authority of long practice in governing a fashionable household, had been doing her utmostto present him with one young lady after another, as though she were exhibiting items before a purchaser who could not be trusted to choose sensibly for himself.
Aurelia had watched from across the room while one elegant beauty in pink satin replaced another in pale blue, then another in soft yellow, until the whole procession began to look less like society and more like a parade of carefully dressed ambition.
The young ladies were all very fine. There could be no denying it. They were polished, accomplished, admirably arranged, and so alert to his notice that Aurelia had once been obliged to look away lest her own expression betray her.
For he was plainly bored. He would never show it outright, of course. She didn’t know much of him, but she knew that he was either too well-bred or too disciplined for rudeness.
“You are fortunate to be seated where you are,” said the lady beside Aurelia, as the first course was served.
Aurelia turned. Mrs. Dalrymple, a plump, lively widow with bright eyes and an inexhaustible appetite for observation, smiled at her over the rim of her wineglass.
“Am I?” Aurelia asked.
“Certainly. Lady Mortimer has been talking of her digestion since we sat down, and Miss Gresham knows only two subjects: ribbons and her own complexion. I am therefore determined that you and I shall save one another.”
Aurelia smiled. “You are very obliging.”
“Oh, no. I am very selfish, my dear. There is a difference.”
