He backed up a few steps so that he didn’t have to crane his neck quite so dreadfully to look at her.
“Good evening, Miss Iris. Should you not be in your bed?”
He was not an expert in childminding, obviously, but it was half past eleven. That seemed far too late for a four-year-old girl to be up and about. Indeed, the girl was in her nightdress, her bare toes pressing into the plush carpeting.
“Hermes had a question,” Iris said, as though this were both possible and entirely reasonable.
“Hermes did?” he asked wryly.
Iris nodded solemnly.
“And where is Hermes?” he asked.
“In bed,” she said, with no apparent awareness of how this contradicted her story.
Ezra bit back a smile, hiding it behind a nod of understanding. “Of course. And what was Hermes’ question?”
Iris blinked down at him.
“Are you my uncle?” she asked.
Ezra didn’t think he would have been more surprised if she’d pulled out a pistol and shot him. The effect might have been much the same.
“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. Should he have lied? Maybe he should have lied. “I am trying to find out, though.” He paused before he added, “Would you like me to be your uncle?”
Unlike him, Iris didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” she said.
He swallowed against the lump in his throat.
“Well, then,” he said. “If you would like to call me ‘Uncle Ezra,’ that would be all right with me.”
“Yes,” she said again, smiling.
“Well, good,” he said. “That’s good. But for now, Miss Iris, I think you should be getting yourself back to bed. Miss Knightley will fret if she finds that you’ve gone.”
Iris nodded, and her little face disappeared from the slats on the banister. Ezra would have thought this was the end of it, except a tiny voice called down a moment later.
“Good night, Uncle Ezra.”
* * *
Ezra was rubbing his chest as he boarded his waiting carriage, his determination for the night’s mission even more intensified than it had been before speaking with Iris.
Normally, Ezra avoided Society events unless he had a specific reason to attend them. It wasn’t the dancing he objected to, though he generally found it a great deal more fun to dance at the routs held by thedemimondethan the stuffy postures they deployed attonballs. He didn’t even mind the debutantes, though God knew the poor dears had not ever been allowed to do or say anything interesting. Frankly, he didn’t even bear any ill will toward the matchmaking mothers, though they could be deeply annoying. But they were only playing the role they’d been assigned by the world in which they’d been raised.
What he hated were thecrowds.
He understood, conceptually, why a hostess might want her ball to be a crush. It showed that she was popular enough to draw everyone in.
But Lord above, it made it bloodyintolerableinside.
Ezra stifled a sigh as he dodged his umpteenth set of swirling silk skirts. He’d come here tonight to track down one more piece of information about Iris, about where she might have come from. This new revelation that she might have been descended from a Lightholder was…
Unsettling. Distressingly plausible.
To find out more, he needed to speak with one of the women in the family.
Information about business, investments, and land holdings—that would have traveled through his uncles and his grandfather. But information about who was unhappy, about which husband might have strayed?
