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.
Her profile was composed, entirely still, giving away absolutely nothing. But there was a faint quality to her stillness, something that didn’t quite fit the word calm, that made the hair rise very slightly on his forearms.
Miss Pemberton. A pause. Have we met before this season? A beat. Not hesitation, a decision being made.
Then she turned her head and looked at him with those dark, composed, 10-years-patient eyes. Once, she said. Or a very long time ago.
And she turned back to the music. He did not sleep that night. He lay in the dark at Ashvale House in Berkeley Square, staring at the ceiling, pulling at a thread of memory he couldn’t quite catch hold of.
Something in a corridor. Candlewax. A laugh that had surprised him. A voice with too much composure in it for its age. He caught it at 4:00 in the morning.
The thread came loose all at once, and he remembered. A small girl, barefoot, with enormous gravity and dark hair down, looking up at him with the exact same quality of stillness that Ada Pemberton brought into every room she entered, saying, without a trace of self-consciousness, without the slightest awareness that it was extraordinary, When I grow up, I’m going to marry you.
And him, laughing, promising, as a joke, to wait. He lay there for a long time with that memory and what it meant. He had laughed and forgotten. She had been 10 years old and had, what, held onto it? Used it as a compass?
He had no way of knowing, because she had given him nothing. Nothing except that one word, Once, delivered with the patience of someone who had been practicing that particular restraint for a very long time.
He told himself it was nothing. Children say extraordinary things and mean them for an afternoon. He told himself this firmly, and then lay awake until dawn thinking about her hands, which had been folded very precisely in her lap during the Handel, and about the way she looked at bookshelves when she thought no one was watching.
Lady Drummond’s garden party, the 28th of May, was the kind of afternoon that English society had invented specifically to put people in proximity without giving them any excuse to be alone together. The garden was full, perhaps 80 guests moving across manicured grass under a sky that had decided, unusually for late May, to be entirely cooperative.