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.
He is exactly what I expected, she said at last, and nothing like what I imagined. Her mother waited. He is guarded. He has built something very careful around himself and lives inside it quite comfortably.
I don’t think he knows how to want something openly without immediately building walls around the wanting. Most men of his age don’t, her mother said practically.
I know. Ada’s voice was thoughtful. I just wonder if he’s already decided the answer is no before he’s let himself understand what the question is.
Her mother looked at her daughter, 20 years old, with 10 years of careful patience behind her, and a particular quality of resolve that had always been in her, even at 10, even in nightgowns in cold corridors, and said nothing.
Sometimes silence is its own kind of answer. Meanwhile, a young viscount named Hereford had decided to stop being cautious. Lord Edmund Hereford was 28, handsome in an uncomplicated way, with a pleasant estate in Shropshire and a temperament that could be described, charitably, as straightforward, and less charitably, as simple.
He had admired Ada from a distance for the first weeks of the season and had spent the last 2 weeks moving steadily closer. By the 9th of June, at the Greystone card party, he had made his intentions clear enough that Ada could not have misunderstood them.