It was true. Effie used to like nothing more than a party, a ball, a musicale. Somewhere to see and be seen. Flowers, music, wine. He used to consider it all food for the senses.
“And he used to be off to Vauxhall at least weekly,” Archie said.
“What happened?” Clementine asked.
What happened was that he started staying home to write letters. Or reread letters. Or wait for letters to arrive. His focus had shifted from outward to inward. He had substituted ink for champagne.
“Nothing happened,” Effie said blithely, “except that I suppose my tastes have changed.”
“Well, you are going to be the star of this ball,” Clementine said.
“Am I? Why?”
“I think what my sister is trying to say,” Olive said, “is that you’re an unmarried heir to an earl.”
“And a handsome one at that,” Clementine said.
“I wouldn’t have said ‘handsome,’” Olive said with a wink. “Especially with that ghastly haircut.”
Olive was teasing, but she was right, about his popularity at least—Effie had no opinion on his own beauty or lack thereof—for he was mobbed from the moment he stepped in. Meddling mamas, mostly, and before he knew it, his name had been scrawled on more dance cards than he could count. He was struggling to put eyes on the gentlemen Sarah wanted him to observe.
“I think I have made a strategic error,” he said to Archie a few hours in, when he had a blessed break in his dancing duties and stood by a punch bowl panting. “Perhaps more than one.”
“Have you?” Archie said. Olive merely smirked.
“Yes, the first was in coming at all. The second was in not working in to conversation the lie that I won’t be home the rest of the week. I fear I may be as mobbed by callers as I have been by the mothers of prospective dance partners.” At least the Lansing siblings had not been in attendance.
In some ways, though, he was glad he’d come and had a miserable time. It had taken this ball to show him, once and for all, that he wasn’t the man he used to be. Brighton had changed him.
“I say,” Archie said, “have you decided what you want to do with the broken printing press that is still in my library?”
“Oh, dear.” Effie had forgotten about poor Hamlet. “You may dispose of it.”
“Are you certain?” Archie searched Effie’s eyes in a way Effie struggled not to find annoying.
“I am certain. I have no further use for it.”
Brighton had changed him, but it hadn’t changed Julianna.
* * *
Mrs. Moyer knocked on Effie’s bedchamber door a week later.
“I told you, I am not at home to callers,” he called through the closed door. “I am not at home to callers unless it’s Miss Olive Morgan,” he clarified when Mrs. Moyer popped her head in. He had been trying—unfruitfully—Julianna’s method of stage-directing his dreams, and he wanted to see what Olive made of it all, so he had invited her to call.
“It is Mr. Nancarrow, my lord,” Mrs. Moyer said.
Effie’s skin tightened. “Is my father with him?”
“He is not.”
Hmm. Effie couldn’t begin to think what Mr. Nancarrow wanted with him.
“Mr. Nancarrow,” Effie said, joining him in the drawing room he’d been stashed in. “I am surprised to see you in Town when my parents aren’t.” He paused. “They are not, are they?”
“Your parents are still in Campagna.”
Effie relaxed somewhat.
