She held his gaze for a long beat that felt like several different things at once. You remembered. Neutral, giving him nothing.
I’m sorry I didn’t remember sooner. You had no reason to. Simply stated, I was a child. Children say things.
He wanted to ask her the question directly. He wanted to say, Did you mean it? Do you still mean it? Did you come back to London because of a promise I made laughing in a corridor when you were 10 years old and I was too foolish to understand that anything I said to you might matter?
He said none of it. 40 years of composure made direct questions feel like removing armor in the middle of a battlefield. He said instead, I hope Bath was, that is, I hope it was a good 10 years.
It was. The almost smile again, more definite now, and instructive. They were interrupted, as they were always interrupted, by the arrival of other people with other purposes.
Lady Ashworth appeared with a young lord who needed introducing. The moment dispersed like smoke in an open window. But Maximilian stood in the garden for a long time after Ada had been drawn away, looking at the wisteria, thinking about the word instructive and what it meant from a woman who chose her words with the care of someone who understood that every one of them cost something.
By the first week of June, the observation had become a consensus. The Duke of Ashvale was pursuing Miss Ada Pemberton. This conclusion, accurate in its result if somewhat imprecise about its cause, generated the full range of social responses that might be expected.
The mothers of unmarried daughters were quietly disappointed. The young men who had begun to circle Ada with interest now circled with more urgency, understanding without being told that the window they had imagined was perhaps smaller than it looked.
Lady Whitmore herself moved through her days with a particular satisfaction, taking credit for a connection she had not engineered and would have been shocked to learn existed. Ada’s mother arrived from the country in the second week of June, summoned by letters from Lady Whitmore that were too carefully vague to be anything other than news.
She arrived and immediately assessed the situation with the accuracy of a woman who has been watching society for 30 years, took her daughter’s arm at the earliest opportunity, and demanded a plain account. Ada was quiet for a moment, not evasive, simply taking stock.