This surprised him considerably. He was not a man who thought about people. They encountered each other seven times in the following 3 weeks. Maximilian counted and then was annoyed at himself for counting.
The Hargreave ball on the 1st of May, the afternoon concert at Mrs. Drummond’s house on the 7th, a chance meeting at Hatchards on the 9th, where he came in for political pamphlets and found her at the far end of the fiction shelf, deep in something she didn’t set down when he entered.
He had to clear his throat. She looked up without embarrassment and asked whether he had an opinion on Fielding. He did not, particularly, but found that he was formulating one.
He began to attend events he had previously declined. He told himself this was coincidence, then that it was curiosity, then that it was simply a reasonable expansion of his social obligations, and by the third lie, he had stopped telling himself anything at all and simply showed up.
The other women of the season noticed. His mother noticed. The gentlemen in his club made remarks he deflected with the skill of a man who has had 20 years of practice at deflection.
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.