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“It has not ended this one.” He smiled then, and it caused her to swallow. “She is a favourite of mine as well. I confess I did not expect to find common ground with you on the subject of reason over passion, given how much of our own acquaintance has run rather the other way.”

Leonora squinted her eyes. “Is that meant to be an insult?”

“It is meant to be an observation, Leonora. But you are welcome to take it however you like.” His mouth curved, and whatever gravity had settled over the last exchange lifted with it, leaving the air lighter and considerably more dangerous. “It seems we have rather more in common than either of us expected.”

Leonora was suddenly, acutely aware of how little distance remained between them, of his hand warm against hers and the other resting at her waist as the dance turned them through its next figure, and of the fact that her heart appeared to have taken up a considerably faster pace than the music called for. Her stomach had gone strange and unsteady, fluttering in a manner she did not care for in the least, and her face felt uncomfortably warm despite the coolness of the ballroom. She was thirsty too, absurdly so, and had to resist the urge to wet her lips while he was looking directly at her.

She told herself it was simply the dancing. A body did what bodies did when spun about a crowded room for the better part of an hour, quickened and warmed and grew short of breath, and there was no particular meaning to be found in any of it. She had danced a great many times before this, after all, dragged to balls across two seasons by Euphemia, who had never once accepted a refusal as final, and she had partnered any number of perfectly pleasant gentlemen without her pulse ever once behaving so badly. It occurred to her, turning the thought over as he led her through the next set of steps, that perhaps this was simply what came of actually talking to a man rather than merely dancing with one, of being asked real questions and giving real answers instead of the practiced nothings she usually exchanged across a ballroom floor. She had never spoken to any of those other gentlemen about Wollstonecraft, or fathers, or fear. Perhaps that was all it was. A stomach unused to honesty, mistaking it for something else entirely.

“Thank you for... being honest, Your Grace,” she said. “I did not know that about you,” she said.

“Anthony.” He said it plainly. “If we mean to convince my Grandmother that we are what we claim to be, it will serve us both to sound as though we actually know one another. A title between us hardly helps the case. Consider it practice, if nothing else.”

“Anthony, then.” She said and smiled.

“There. Was that so very difficult?”

“Insufferable,” Leonora said. “But not difficult, no.”

That surprised a laugh out of him and for a moment Leonora forgot entirely that they were meant to be performing for an audience of several hundred strangers, and simply enjoyed the plain fact of having made him laugh.

The set ended shortly after, and Anthony had just begun to guide her from the floor when a voice, entirely unfamiliar, spoke from just behind her shoulder.

“Forgive me for the intrusion, but I could not help noticing you across the room.”

Leonora turned to find an older gentleman regarding her with a pleasant smile. He was tall, though age had begun to soften the line of his shoulders, with brown hair gone grey at the temples and eyes that studied her face with a thoroughness she found faintly unsettling, though she could not immediately say why.

“You have the look of someone I once knew,” he continued, before she could ask his name. “A remarkable resemblance, in fact. It is rather startling, seeing it again after all this time.”

Leonora curtsied. “I am afraid you have the advantage of me, sir.”

“George Bannerman, Earl of Brighton.” He offered a bow. “You must forgive an old man his staring. You put me forcibly in mind of a woman I knew many years ago. The likeness is really quite extraordinary.”

Something in Leonora’s chest went very still. “Might I ask who?”

“A dear friend, from a very long time ago.” He smiled, easy and unbothered, though his eyes did not leave her face. “It has been a great many years. I find I would rather not say more than that, standing here in the middle of a ballroom.”

Leonora’s mind raced ahead of her regardless, filling the silence he had so deliberately left behind. A woman he had known many years ago. A resemblance extraordinary enough to stop a stranger mid-sentence across a crowded room. She thought of her mother’s face, the little of it she could still properly summon, and wondered, with a suddenness that left her almost breathless, whether this man might have known her. Whether he might, if pressed, tell her something no one else in London seemed able to.

She opened her mouth, uncertain even now what she meant to ask, when a hand settled at her waist, firm and warm, and every thought in her head scattered at once.

Anthony had come up beside her without her noticing, and the solid, steadying weight of his hand seized her breath more thoroughly than anything Lord Brighton had said. Her heart, which had been racing only a moment before, slowed at once beneath that touch, settling into a rhythm that was calmer, something that felt suspiciously like relief, and she found herself leaning back into him before she had properly decided to.

“Is there a problem here?” Anthony asked.

“None at all, Your Grace.” Lord Brighton’s smile did not waver and for some reason it bothered Leonora. “I was only remarking on a resemblance. Miss Ashcroft puts me forcibly in mind of an old friend.”

“How fortunate, that London is so full of resemblances tonight.” Anthony’s tone remained pleasant, easy, the sort of thing that would sound like nothing at all to anyone listening from a polite distance. Leonora, still leaning against the arm at her back, heard something else in it entirely.

Lord Brighton inclined his head, unhurried. “Indeed. Well, I shall not keep either of you from your evening. A pleasure, Miss Ashcroft.” He bowed once more, and turned away into the crowd with the same composure with which he had arrived, leaving Leonora staring after him with a hundred unanswered questions burning in her chest.

She wanted to go after him. She wanted to demand every detail he had, every scrap of memory, whatever he knew. She opened her mouth to say as much, and found Anthony already guiding her firmly in the opposite direction, his hand still settled at her waist.

“That was rather abrupt,” she said, once they had put some distance between themselves and the spot where Lord Brighton had stood.

“I did not care for his manner.”

“His manner seemed perfectly civil to me.”