Society, as a collective organism, observed that the Duke of Ashvale, the man who had declared himself too old and too finished to begin anything, was appearing with suspicious regularity wherever a certain Miss Pemberton happened to be. Society found this tremendously entertaining, which it always does.
Ada, for her part, gave him very little to work with. This was, he was slowly realizing, entirely deliberate. She was warm in the way an intelligent woman chooses to be warm, present, engaged, genuinely interested in what was being said, but she offered him no extra measure of anything, no additional softness, no performance of availability, no meaningful glances calculated to encourage.
She treated him with absolute consistency as exactly what he was, a man she had met at a dinner party, nothing more, nothing that acknowledged the particular quality of attention he kept bringing into rooms and directing at her. He found this intolerable in a way he couldn’t entirely explain.
It was at the Ashvale musicale, the 14th of May, that he finally managed to put himself beside her long enough for a real conversation. The musicale was the kind of event where the music serves primarily as excuse, a reason for 50 people to sit in one room and communicate sideways with their eyes while pretending to listen to a soprano.
He had positioned himself on the aisle seat beside her before she noticed, which gave him a small and probably unworthy satisfaction. You don’t look like a man who enjoys music. Softly, without looking at him.
The soprano was in the middle of an introduction. I enjoy certain music. Equally quiet. I find I am enjoying this evening rather more than usual.
Nothing from her in response. The soprano began Handel, something ceremonial and too slow for the room. Around them, people listened with the focused expression of those trying to look like they were listening.
You were at Miss Hartley’s in Bath, he said. 10 years. From 1800. A confirmation, not a question, and she received it as one.
I left in March 1810. He turned the number over. He had been 30 in 1800. He had attended Lady Whitmore’s dinner in October of 1800.
The corridor, the candles, a 10-year-old girl in a white nightgown with dark hair loose around her shoulders, standing at the top of the servants’ staircase. He turned to look at her. She was watching the soprano.