He smiled. He danced once per evening, usually with the hostess or her eldest daughter, whoever would be most gratified and least encouraged. He left before midnight, every year the same. An impeccable performance of participation that had gradually become indistinguishable from indifference.
Lady Whitmore’s spring dinner, the 22nd of April, was the 14th such occasion Maximilian had attended at that house. He arrived, was surrounded, endured it, and had excused himself to the library for a moment of peace somewhere between the soup and the fish when the butler appeared in the doorway.
Miss Ada Pemberton, the man announced, apparently to the room at large, as two young women followed him in from the corridor. And Miss Clara Pemberton, nieces of Lady Whitmore, recently returned from Bath.
Maximilian looked up from the title page of a book he hadn’t opened. She was the one on the left, dark hair, dressed now, not loose, and something in the angle of her jaw, in the quality of her stillness, that struck him with the peculiar sensation of a word he knew he recognized but couldn’t quite place.
She was 20 years old, composed in the way that only women who have spent years learning to be are composed, and she was not looking at him. She was looking at the bookshelves. He found this almost comically disarming.
Every person he had encountered in a decade of seasons turned toward him the moment he entered a room, as if drawn by some invisible current. This woman had walked into a room he was already in with full awareness that he was there, the butler had seen to that, and had chosen to look at the bookshelves instead.
He watched her scan the spines with genuine interest. He watched the slight movement of her lips as she read titles silently. He watched her tilt her head at one particular volume as though it had said something worth considering.
Her sister murmured something to her. She turned then, gracefully, without hurry, and her gaze moved across the room and landed on him with neither the flutter nor the performance he expected. Simply, recognition. Or something that looked very much like it.
Your Grace. A greeting so perfectly measured it contained both courtesy and nothing else. He inclined his head. Miss Pemberton, you have recently returned from Bath, I understand.
10 years in Bath. A beat. Yes. Something snagged in him. 10 years. Pemberton, Lady Whitmore’s niece.
He turned the arithmetic over in his mind the way you turn a key that almost fits, feeling the resistance, the near catch of tumblers that haven’t quite aligned yet. He didn’t get there. Not yet.
Instead, he simply stood in the library of Whitmore House holding an unopened book while Ada Pemberton looked at him with 20-year-old eyes that seemed to be waiting for something he hadn’t yet understood he owed her. He thought about her for 3 days after that dinner.