Page 3

“It is sensible,” she said. “Truly, Aunt. I am past being brought out, and the expense of a Season is no small thing.”

“Sensible? Sensible for whom, pray?” Augusta said it without heat, which somehow made it worse. “You are six-and-twenty, Rosalind, not six-and-sixty. Do not let that woman age you to suit her arithmetic. The expense of you would be a few gowns and a chair at a dinner table, and she has spent more on Cassandra’s gloves. No. The expense was never the matter, and you are too clever not to know it.”

Rosalind looked down into her cup, her throat grown tight.

“I am of use here,” she said, low. “That is all I meant. If I can be of use to you, Aunt, on the road, or in the house in Town, or in any way at all, then of course I will come, and gladly. You have only to say what you would have me do, for I should not wish to be a burden to you. I know what a Season costs, and I would not have you put to any trouble on my...”

“Stop.”

It was not loud, for Augusta did not raise her voice. Her people never did, the Ashby women, when they meant a thing. But it stopped Rosalind clean.

Her aunt leaned forward, put her hand over both of Rosalind’s around the cup, and left it there for a long moment. It was not the touch of a woman comforting a guest. It was the touch of a woman laying claim to her own blood.

“Listen to me,” Augusta said. “You are not coming to London to be of use to me. I do not want a housekeeper. I have a perfectly good one in Wimpole Street, who would be most affronted to find you doing her work, and then I should be obliged to give you the blue room and the housekeeper’s both, and where would we be then?” The dry line came and went, though her eyes did not waver. “You are not a housekeeper, Rosalind. You are my sister’s daughter. I want your company. That is reason enough for me.”

Rosalind could not speak. Her aunt’s words settled in the middle of her chest, and her eyes burned with sudden tears. She blinked hard and looked down at the cup. What was she to say?

“I do not know how,” she began, and could not finish.

“No,” Augusta agreed gently. “I daresay you do not, for you have had no practice.” She sat back, released Rosalind’s hands, and looked into the fire for a moment. “Your mother had the same trick of it, you know. Cecily. She would do a kindness for a whole household and then thank them for letting her, as though the doing of it had been a favor to herself.”

And there her aunt’s voice changed.

It was the smallest thing. Her voice went quiet on the name, and a little lower, while her gaze moved from the fire to some point past Rosalind’s shoulder, to something that was not in the room at all. Her hand went to the ring on her other hand and turned it once.

“She would have laughed to see you fussing with that strap this morning,” Augusta said at last, and the dryness came back into her voice like a curtain drawn over a window. “And then she would have boxed your father’s ears for letting you, which is more than I was ever able to do, being only the sister and not the wife. Well.” She poured herself more tea that she did not want. “It is a long-standing complaint of mine, and I shall not bore you with it.”

Rosalind sat very still, for she had heard her mother’s name spoken aloud in this house perhaps a dozen times in eleven years. There was grief in her aunt’s face, and something else Rosalind could not name. She wanted to ask, but Augusta had already reached for the teapot again.

“You will come with me,” Augusta said, and it was not a question now. “I shall write to Selina tonight and tell her that the arrangement is altered, since I have a fancy for my niece’s company over Christmas, and the house may be shut up and trusted to Hodges, who is, I have it on the authority of the niece in question, perfectly steady. She will not like it. She may go to the devil. I am a widow with my own house and my own carriage and no husband to consult, and that, my dear, is the one good thing they do not tell girls about being left a widow. One may at last do precisely as one pleases, and I please to do this.”

“She will be very angry,” Rosalind said faintly. “You know that she will, do you not?”

“She will,” Augusta agreed, with evident satisfaction. “And your father will agree to whatever she lets pass — and she will let this pass, whatever face she puts on it. So it is settled. You are coming to London.”

Rosalind set down her cup, for her hands had begun to tremble a little.

She was not to stay. I am going to London, she thought, and could scarcely believe it.

Only an hour ago, she had expected to spend Christmas at Marbury Hall. Now her aunt meant to carry her into the middle of the Season, and Rosalind had no notion what she was supposed to do there.

“I do not know what I am to do there,” she said at last.

Her aunt looked at her across the fire, steady and dry and unhurried, and did not pretend to misunderstand.

“You are to be looked at,” Augusta said, “by people who are not your family. We shall see what they make of you. I have a notion already.”

Chapter Two

Lord Dover had found his way out of the room before he had been ten minutes in it.

His way out was the second door, half-hidden behind a swag of greenery and ribbon that some industrious hand had pinned up that afternoon. It opened onto the back stair rather than the crowded hall, so a man might slip through it without troubling anyone. Dover liked to know his path out of a room before he was well into it. Having found it, he took up his usual place near the wall, holding a glass of claret he did not mean to finish.

“You have the look,” said a voice at his elbow, “of a man counting the spoons.”

“I had got as far as the candles,” Dover said. “Wax, not tallow. I confess that is more generous than I expected of her.”

Westcott laughed, easy and unguarded, as he settled his shoulder against the same stretch of wall. He had come up on Dover’s blind side with the comfortable insolence of long acquaintance, and he surveyed the company far more warmly than Dover could.