Page 12

She inclined her head and turned away, the matter settled to her satisfaction. “I leave you to it. A bishop is beating me at whist, and it would be uncivil to keep a man of God waiting for his triumph.”

She went back toward the card-room. Rosalind looked after her for a long moment, plainly wishing that she might follow, then turned back, for there was nothing else for it.

“You corrected Lady Marchwood’s table,” Dover said.

She went very still.

It was not a question, and she could not treat it as one. She held her breath a beat too long before letting it carefully out, her hands still folded before her, though he would have wagered she wished for something to hold. A fan, a glass, anything at all.

“The table only needed rearranging,” she replied quickly. “When the Dowager Marchioness was announced, you understand. It was the simplest thing in the world. Anyone might have seen it!”

“No one did see it. I was in the room.”

“Then you saw a table put right, my lord. What more was there to see?”

“I watched thirty people stand very still and be glad that the trouble was not theirs.” He had not planned to say so much. “I watched one person cross the floor and mend it before the doors were opened, for no thanks at all.”

“It was nothing at all!” she protested.

“It was not nothing. You folded yourself back against the wall before the hostess had even understood that she had been saved. That was not the table, Lady Rosalind. A table does not rearrange itself. That was the lady who saw how the table should go.”

The color deepened along her cheek, yet she did not look away, and that surprised him. He had expected the eyes cast down and the quiet retreat. Instead she looked at him with something very near dismay, as though he had handed her a parcel she did not know how to carry.

“You make a great deal of a seating arrangement, my lord,” she said.

“I make exactly as much of it as it was worth. That is a good deal more than the one who did it will allow.”

And there the conversation stopped, for she had no answer ready, and he had said far more than he had any business saying. The silence lasted no more than a few bars of the song. Neither of them hurried to fill it, and he could not have said why he did not wish to.

In the end it was she who ended it.

“You were very quick to steady me, and I have not properly thanked you,” she said. “My aunt will wonder where I have got to. It was nothing, in any case. One is always being jostled in these crushes, is one not? I daresay you have caught a dozen elbows tonight.” She gave him a small inclination of the head, neat and final, a door closed very gently. “Good evening, Lord Dover.”

“Lady Rosalind.”

She went. She crossed to the card-room doorway, unhurried, her spine straight, and by the second step she had folded herself back into the unremarkable woman the room had long since decided not to see. Dover was left by the wall with a glass of wine he had quite forgotten and the warmth of her arm still, absurdly, in his hand.

It was nothing. She had said so herself. He had confirmed his curiosity, and a sensible man would now go home.

He did not leave.

* * *

The anteroom off the card parlor was cooler than the rooms behind it, the music coming muffled through the wall. Dover stood by the cold hearth and turned his wine in his hand without drinking it.

“Well?” Westcott came in after him and leaned a shoulder against the chimney-breast. “Am I to pretend I did not watch the whole of it? I saw you catch her, and I saw the aunt come and make you respectable after the fact, which was more than you deserved.”

Dover was silent, and Westcott’s smile faded a little.

“And I saw what your face did, in the half-second before you got it back under guard. Your face has not done that in two years, my friend.”

“My face did nothing.”

“Faces always do.” His voice gentled by a degree. “What did she say to you?”

“That the table only needed rearranging. That anyone might have done it. That the steadying was nothing.” The recitation came out of him flat and precise. “She gives it all away, Westcott. The table, the kindness, every bit of it. She will not keep so much as a thank-you for herself, as though being caught doing a thing well were a kind of indecency.”

“And that troubles you.”