He walked away. He did not look back. Theodora sat down very carefully on the gold damask chair, and found that her mother had arrived beside her in a rustle of puce satin, gripping her arm with a hand like a gin trap, saying in a fierce, delighted, disbelieving whisper, "Theodora. Theodora. What did you say to him?"
"We spoke about a staircase, Mama."
"A staircase!"
"It has mismatched balusters," said Theodora, and closed her eyes.
The Ivers family had taken a house in Half Moon Street for the Season, which was to say that they had taken the two lower floors of a narrow house whose upper floors belonged to an elderly Member for somewhere in Lincolnshire, and whose kitchen they shared with him on a system of mutual resentment. It was the best address Lady Ivers could afford and rather better than she could afford, and she spoke of it as "our little house in town" in a voice that dared anyone to ask what it cost.
Piers was at the breakfast table when Theodora came down, eating toast with the methodical attention of a boy of thirteen who has been growing two inches a year and expects to be hungry for the rest of his life. He looked up as she came in, and his hands, which were never entirely still, flew into the shapes of their private alphabet, the two-handed alphabet that half the deaf children in England learned from someone, somehow, and that the Ivers children had pieced together from an old book of their grandfather's, and from a groom at Coldharbour whose mother had been deaf, and from their own invention.
D-I-D Y-O-U D-A-N-C-E, he spelled, and then, without waiting, a sign of his own: a fluttering hand like a heart beating, which in the Ivers language meant gossip, scandal, excitement, Mama in a state.
Theodora sat down across from him and took a piece of toast. "Once," she said, and shaped it on her fingers as well, so that he had it twice. "With a duke."
Piers's eyebrows went up into his hair. He made the sign they used for their mother, which was a hand pressed flat to the chest with the fingers spread, like a woman about to faint, and then made it again, larger.
"Yes," said Theodora. "Very much so."
He laughed. He had a big laugh, a little too loud because he could not hear it, and Theodora loved it more than any music the Cressingham gallery had ever produced. From the stairs came the sound of Lady Ivers's door, and her quick step, and Piers's hands went still at once and dropped to his lap, and his face went quiet and obedient, and he picked up his toast.