He took her hand. She glanced up, startled, but his eyes were on the Chesters. “Come with me.”
“Nicholas?”
“You needn’t say a word to them.”
She peeked at him, cheeks flushing, and he caught a glimpse of relief in her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He merely nodded, leading her toward the exit. Every few steps, someone stopped them to exchange a word or bid them farewell. Nicholas did the talking, although Isadora lit up for everyone except her aunt, who fluttered an imperious hand from the crush.
“Isadora?” she called, the command in her voice grating along Nicholas’s skin. “A moment? Surely you are not too busy to spare a moment for your aunt, after everything we did for you?”
Schooling his expression with a sigh, Nicholas turned and set himself between them. “Thank you, but we were just leaving.”
“Your Grace.” Isadora’s aunt smiled uncertainly. “You have certainly been very busy these past weeks. But surely you can tell Isadora to visit her family once in a while. We miss her, you know!”
“Do you?” Nicholas said blandly. “I had understood you found her an inconvenience before she married well. However, I shall be sure to pass the message along. Shall we, Isadora?”
Without waiting for an answer, he left the ballroom, practically pulling her after him in his wake.
CHAPTER TWELVE
To Isadora’s surprise, they came back to Winchester early morning to a house lit up like Twelfth Night. Servants who ought to have been in their beds an hour since were criss-crossing the hall, and candlelight showed gold in half the windows of the east front.
Beside her, Nicholas was silent as he took it all in, and more terrifyingly silent still as they opened the door to a flustered butler, whose ordinarily calm composure had come apart at the seams.
“Well?” Nicholas pressed, hunting around as though he could immediately spy the source of the problem. “What is it?”
The housekeeper came bustling up to Gregson’s rescue, and Isadora watched relief sluice the poor man’s face clean.
“It’s Lady Sophia, Your Grace,” Mrs. Perry said with a calm that was so clearly practiced, it lifted the fine hairs on Isadora’snape. “She was… rather upset to have been left behind tonight, and when Nurse was getting her ready for bed, she slipped away and went into hiding. No one can find her. We have the whole household looking.”
She looked as though she expected Nicholas’s wrath. Isadora felt the way he tensed, every muscle wound as though he was about to sprint through the house himself.
“What time was this?” he asked in an awful, quiet voice.
“Shortly after you left, Your Grace.”
“She has been missing all this time, and I wasn’t sent for?”
“We…” the older woman chewed her lip, “we hoped to find her before you returned.”
Isadora stepped between them. “It is all right,” she chimed, and gave the woman a reassuring smile. “We have all been eight. She is hiding. Children hide. She will be under a bed, or behind a curtain, or asleep in the linen press, and when we find her she will be perfectly cross about it.” Peeling off her gloves, she handed them to the housekeeper. “How many rooms have you done? I still have some energy; we can join the search.”
“We left the East wing to last.” The housekeeper accepted her gloves and bobbed a curtsy.
Nicholas turned to her, eyes flat. “You seem very certain of the outcome.”
“Well…” Isadora wasn’t as certain as she pretended to be, but she could hardly admit that to Nicholas, who seemed on the verge of ripping the heads off everyone in their vicinity before tearing the rest of the place down in search of her. So, she licked her lips, choosing her words carefully. “Sophia is a child, and thus impetuous, but she is not a fool.”
“But if she ventured outside and is lost—”
“Let us eliminate the possibility that she is inside first. I’m sure”—shehoped— “Sophia would not have gone outside in the dark. This is a cry for attention, not a real attempt at escape.”
She walked through into the drawing room, thinking through what Sophia might have been feeling. When she was a girl, sometimes she would hide. The curse of the middle child was to always be invisible, and when her mother was still alive, she had tried to attract attention to herself by making everyone hunt for her whenever she felt down.
Of course, her mother had quietly spoken to her and explained why she couldn’t keep doing that, but she understood how it felt to be so empty, so deprived of attention, that she would grasp at anything to find it.
“Shewantsus to find her,” she murmured to Nicholas, who was shrugging out of his coat. “That’s the entire point of this display, even if she doesn’t know it herself yet…”
