For one deeply inconvenient moment, Owen felt nearer to her than he ought. And because life was ill-bred enough to interrupt whenever anything threatened sincerity, a new voice entered the space between them.
Chapter 9
Charlotte Langley’s arrival put an end to whatever uncommon ease had begun to settle between them. Owen heard her voice before he fully turned.
“Why, Lord Westbridge, I had wondered where you had disappeared to.”
There was warmth in her tone, but it was the sort of warmth he had known too long to mistake for feeling. Charlotte had always known how to pitch her voice to suit her audience. As a girl, she had used that very softness to charm older ladies into indulgence and younger gentlemen into admiration. Now, she used it with greater polish, and far less innocence.
He faced her with all the civility required. “Miss Langley.”
She smiled as if the formality amused her. Charlotte was beautiful in the way fashionable women often were: perfectly arranged, perfectly self-possessed, with not a ribbon or curl out of place.
Before the war, before distance and grief and experience had altered his judgement, Owen might once have considered her exactly what his mother would have wished in a wife. Their families had long known one another. Charlotte had beauty,consequence, and every outward accomplishment society prized. There had been a time when such things had seemed enough.
Now they struck him as surfaces only. He saw too clearly what lay beneath them. Charlotte had beauty, certainly, but it was beauty sharpened by calculation. She had wit, but rarely kindness. And she moved through the world with the easy confidence of a woman who had spent her life under the shelter of her father’s name, drawing consequence from his reputation as if it were an inheritance more valuable than any fortune.
Her gaze pointed then to Aurelia. There was nothing openly rude in the look, only curiosity managed into politeness. Charlotte did not know her. That, at least, was some small mercy.
“I do not believe we have met,” she said. Then, turning back to Owen with the smoothest smile, she added, “Will you not introduce me?”
Owen felt, absurdly, an immediate reluctance. It was not that the request could be denied. In any ordinary circumstance, it would have been the simplest thing in the world. Yet there was something in Charlotte’s manner, akin to an interest too suddenly awakened, that made him wish, for the first time in his life, that social forms were less binding.
Still, he had no choice.
“Miss Langley, allow me to present Miss Finch. Miss Finch, Miss Langley.”
The two women inclined their heads. Charlotte let her eyes pass once over Aurelia, not in any way that could be faulted, not long enough to appear insolent, but with just enough delicacy to make the scrutiny more cutting than frankness would have been.
“How do you do, Miss Finch,” she chirped. “There is something very refreshing in a lady who does not trouble herself to compete with the rest of the room. One sees so little confidence in plainness these days.”
The insult was so artfully veiled that anyone standing a few feet away would have heard only civility. Yet Owen heard it at once for what it was.
Aurelia’s entire appearance was marked by that quiet, good taste which Charlotte, in her worship of show, would never know how to value. The remark was meant to place her outside the bright contest of fashionable women while pretending to admire her for it.
Owen found, with surprising force, that he disliked Charlotte intensely in that moment.
Aurelia, however, did not so much as blink. “How do you do, Miss Langley,” she replied. “I have always thought it best not to alarm people by too much ornament.”
Charlotte smiled, though the smile sharpened at the edges. “How sensible. Excess can be so unfortunate in the wrong circumstances.”
Owen spoke before she could carry the cruelty any further. “Miss Finch has the advantage of not requiring artificial improvement.”
Charlotte turned her gaze on him, amused now, though not pleased. “You are very ready to defend taste tonight, Lord Westbridge.”
“No,” he said coolly. “Only to recognize it.”
For a brief instant Charlotte’s expression thinned. Then she laughed lightly, as though everything between them had been no more than easy social play.
There had been a time, Owen thought, when he might have mistaken her for charming. Now he saw only the quick instinct to diminish another woman for the crime of not dressing like an ornamented fool and the easy confidence of someone who had never had to consider whether her place in the world was secure.
Charlotte, sensing perhaps that she had not produced the effect she wanted, turned her smile back upon him. “I shall not interrupt longer. Mama has been in search of me these ten minutes, and I should not like to be thought neglectful.”
“Perish the thought,” said Owen.
She laughed as though he had amused her, curtsied to Aurelia with perfect surface grace, and moved away.
Owen looked after her for a moment, then back at Aurelia. The old military matter, the Finches, the weight of his own unasked questions … it all seemed suddenly too near.
