“It would be churlish to decline,” she pointed out. “Particularly when your return has already been noted.
Harrow grinned. “It will do you good.”
“How?” Owen snorted.
“To be among people. To remember what it is to live in the world, rather than merely observe it.”
Owen leaned back again, studying him. “And you think a ballroom will accomplish that.”
“I think,” Harrow corrected, “that it is a beginning.”
A beginning.
Owen was not certain he wanted one. But he could feel the weight of their expectations pressing in: his mother’s certainty, Harrow’s quiet insistence, and the unspoken understanding that he could not remain as he was.
“Very well,” he said feeling the words drawn from him more by inevitability than agreement. “I will attend.”
His mother’s expression brightened at once. “I am pleased to hear it.”
Owen raised a hand slightly. “I make no promises beyond that.”
“Of course not,” she chirped back. “One cannot force such things.”
Harrow’s smile widened. “Though one may certainly encourage them.”
Owen ignored him.
“The matter of marriage,” he continued, “remains entirely out of the question.”
His mother said nothing to that. She only inclined her head in a way that made him immediately suspicious. He knew that look. He had seen it before. And it rarely boded well.
Still, he had agreed. That, it seemed, was enough for now.
Owen reached for his glass once more, his thoughts already turning ahead with a faint sense of resignation.
A ballroom, music, conversation, expectation … it was all a different kind of battlefield.
And one, he suspected, for which he was far less prepared.
Chapter 3
Aurelia expected the apartment to be smaller. Not elegant, perhaps, because Aunt Louisa was too prudent a woman to indulge in needless expense, even where comfort was concerned.
Yet as the hackney drew up before the narrow brick house in a respectable street just off the greater bustle of town, and the maid admitted them into a neat little hall with a black-and-white floor and a staircase that turned away with modest consequence, Aurelia could not deny that her aunt had managed the thing very well. There was taste in it. There was even, in its quiet way, a kind of welcome.
Clara, however, did not pause to observe any of this with moderation.
“Oh! Is it all ours?” she cried, turning full upon the maid before Aurelia could ask a single sensible question regarding their trunks, fires, or tea. “Every room? Entirely ours?”
“For the present, miss, yes,” said the woman, smiling despite herself.
Clara gave a delighted laugh and flew first to the drawing room, then to the little dining parlor, then back again, unable to choose which deserved her rapture first.
“Aurelia, do come and look! There is a pianoforte, and the curtains are blue, and there is a looking glass over the mantel, and such a charming chair by the window that I am resolved it shall be mine whenever I wish to dream!”
“You have claimed it very quickly,” Aurelia mused, removing her gloves with greater care than was necessary.
Clara spun round in the middle of the carpet, her bonnet hanging by its ribbons down her back. “Because no one has ever allowed me to claim anything before. Mama always says, ‘Do not sit there, Clara,’ or ‘Do not speak so loud, Clara,’ or ‘You must not look out of the window at the gentlemen, Clara,’ which I never did, except once by accident. But here,” she spread her arms wide, as if unfurling her wings, “here I feel as if my life is beginning.”
