"Do bees have heads to lift?"
"She said they did." Isabel smiled in the dark. "She said a great many things. She said you must never stand in front of the hive door, because you are standing in their road home. You stand to the side and you keep still, and they will forgive you almost anything. And you must always put stones in their water, or they drown."
He looked down at the bee on its leaf. The music changed inside.
Then he said, in that low, rough voice of his, as though each word had to be fetched from a long way down, "Will you dance with me, Miss Renbury?"
She thought at first that she had misheard him. Then she thought he was being kind, and it made her angry, and the anger made her honest. "I am a companion, Your Grace. I don't dance."
"Neither do I," he said. "It seems we have that in common."
He took a card and a pencil out of his waistcoat. It was a blank dance card from the pile on the table in the hall. He wrote a single name on it and gave it to her. It was his own. Then he offered her his arm, and she found, to her own great surprise, that she had put her hand on it, and that they were walking back in through the long window into the light.
It was a waltz. Half the county still thought the waltz was fast, and the other half had been practicing it in secret all spring. The floor was full, and then as they came onto it, the floor was not so full, because people were stopping to look. She felt them look: she felt it the way you feel heat from a fire on one side of your face.
The Duke put his hand at her back and she put her hand in his, and he looked down at her as though there were nobody else in the room at all. She had not waltzed since she was a girl in a schoolroom with a chair. She thought she would stumble. She did not stumble.
He was a good dancer, as it turned out, for a man who never danced. He held her lightly and firmly and turned her as easily as a page. Neither of them said a word from beginning to end. There did not seem to be anything that needed saying. She looked at his waistcoat buttons, and then, because she could not help it, at his face—and he was already looking at hers.