“He is not obligated to attend every event,” she said.
“He is not obligated to attend any event,” Helena said pleasantly. “Which he demonstrates with great consistency. I was only noting an observation.” She paused. “You have also looked at the south walk twice since we sat down.”
Annabelle cursed her own weakness in her mind. “I was watching the crowd.” This, she delivered with a haughty pomp.
But her friend saw through it completely, even arching a brow in challenge. “Oh, come now, you do not take me for a fool, even after knowing me for so long, do you? You were watching a specific crowd, in a specific direction.” Helena’s tone was the conversational kind, of course. “I mention it only in a spirit of friendship.”
“Your friendship is trying my nerves,” Annabelle said.
Helena smiled and said nothing more about it.
Two boxes along, a woman in a yellow gown laughed behind her fan. The soprano from the rotunda had moved into somethingslow and doleful, which the warm evening did not require. The air smelled of lamp-smoke and the supper being laid in the box immediately to their right, which smelled considerably better than the music sounded.
“Lady Annabelle.”
The voice came from the promenade beside their box, and she turned to find a gentleman at the rail. He was of middling height, brown-haired, with features that were pleasant and regular — the kind of face one would need to describe carefully to find again in a crowded room. His coat was well-cut; his cravat was impeccable.
“Lord Chesham.” She offered her hand over the railing.
He bowed over it and did not hurry the gesture. “I had hoped I might find you here this evening.” He straightened. “I took the liberty of leaving my card at Fairmont House earlier this week.”
“I received it.” She caught Lady Rosenhall’s approving expression in her peripheral vision and indicated the empty chair at the far end of the box. “Will you join us?”
He came round and was seated.
“The weather has been remarkably cooperative,” he said.
“Suspiciously so,” Annabelle agreed. “I begin to think it is performing.”
“For whom?”
“For all of this.” She gestured toward the lit walks, the crowded boxes, the distant soprano making her feelings known from the rotunda. “It would be embarrassing to have arranged several hundred lanterns in a thunderstorm.”
“The soprano would not appreciate it.”
“The soprano does not appear to be appreciating much this evening.”
He laughed easily, openly, with no apparent investment in maintaining restraint, and though she had not especially planned that reaction, she found that she enjoyed it a bit.
They moved easily enough to the Academy debate he had attended that week, a dispute over the classification of some Roman antiquities, which he had opinions about and gave them without belaboring them.
“A dispute over the Hadrian collection,” he said. “Whether certain pieces ought to be classified as domestic or ceremonial. The provenance was contested enough that some fellows argued for a third category altogether.”
“What did you think?”
“That the domestic argument was stronger. The household context seemed fairly clear.”
“Dio Cassius would disagree with you,” she said.
He looked at her, interest gleaming in his eyes. “Would he.”
“His account of Hadrianic household practice is rather explicit on the ritual function of those objects. The household context doesn’t settle the question, it complicates it…Though I suspect the domestic argument is also convenient for anyone hoping to move the pieces into a private collection.”
Lord Chesham was quiet for a moment. “That point was not raised at the debate.”
“Perhaps you should have raised it.”
He laughed again, and this time she had planned it, which she filed away as a small, pleasant fact.
