"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Pelling," she said. "I could not help overhearing. His Grace is teasing you, I think, or else he heard the question as I did, which was whether the Duchess would ever part with her staircase, and everybody knows the answer to that is yes, very much so, she would part with it tomorrow if she could only get the other stair rail to match." She was speaking clearly, not loudly, giving each word its full shape, the way she spoke to Piers when he was tired. "My mother says it has been a grief to the family for twenty years. The balusters were carved by two different men, and one of them drank."
There was a pause.
It was entirely invented. Theodora had never seen the staircase at Calderwood House. She had no idea whether its balusters matched or whether anyone who had carved them drank. But it had the great merit, in a ballroom, of being both dull and specific, and Mrs. Pelling, who could live on scandal for a week but could not abide being made to look foolish for a minute, saw at once that the conversation had been taken out of her hands and replaced with something she could not use.
"A staircase," she said.
"Yes," said Theodora. "I believe it is very fine otherwise."
Mrs. Pelling looked at her as one might look at a small dog that has unexpectedly said something in French. Then she looked at the Duke, who had not moved. Then she said, "How very interesting, Miss — Ivers, is it?" in the tone of a woman making a note, and went away toward the supper room to find someone more rewarding.
Theodora found that she was shaking slightly. She clasped her hands together and made herself look up.
The Duke of Calderwood was looking at her. He was not handsome in the way the Cressingham ballroom generally admired; his face was too spare for that, too much bone and too little indulgence, and there was a thin white mark through his left eyebrow that some sabre or splinter had put there. But his eyes were very dark and very steady, and they were fixed, she realised, not on her eyes, but on her mouth. Waiting. As if he expected her to go on speaking, and meant not to miss a word of it.
She knew that look too.
"You needn't say anything, your Grace," she said, in the same careful way. "I am going back to my chair. I only thought the staircase deserved a defence."
And she went back to her chair, and sat down in it, and arranged her skirts, and looked at the musicians' gallery with great attention, and felt the heat climb from her collarbone to her hairline and stay there.