I.
The roses had been brought up from Kent that morning, and by eleven o'clock they had begun, very slightly, to droop.
Honora Lisle noticed this because she noticed everything at Lady Wexcombe's ball that did not require her to be noticed in return. She stood beside the third of the golden columns that ran the length of the ballroom, where the fluting caught the light of the chandeliers and threw it back in long bright ribs, and she watched the pink and white blooms bow their heads a fraction in the heat of six hundred candles. It seemed to her a sensible response to the evening. Everyone else was holding their heads up far too high.
The quartet in the musicians' gallery had moved from a country dance into something slower. Below them the dancers turned in their sets—muslin and silk, cream and rose and primrose, the dark coats of the gentlemen cutting through the colour like the lines of an engraving. A girl in white laughed too loudly at something her partner said and then looked about to see who had heard her. A matron in purple feathers counted the couples with her lips moving. Near the doors to the card room, three young men were pretending to discuss a horse while watching the far side of the room, where the Duke of Hartsmere stood talking to no one.
Honora did not look at the Duke of Hartsmere. She had decided, on the stairs, that she would not, and she was a young woman who generally did what she had decided.
She wore sage green, an empire gown with short puffed sleeves that had been her mother's best silk and had been turned and re-cut twice, so cleverly that only another woman in straitened circumstances would have known. Her gloves were long and white and very clean, because she had washed them herself in Mrs. Fairleigh's basin that afternoon. Her dark hair had been dressed high by her godmother's maid, who had threaded it through with small black beads and seed pearls that had also belonged to her mother, and every time she turned her head she felt them, cool and slight, against her scalp. In her gloved hands she held a small cream reticule that contained a handkerchief, a pencil, two shillings, and a folded card on which she had written, in her clearest hand, a name.
She had come to London for the name. She had not come to dance.
"Miss Lisle! It is you. I told Mamma it was, and she said nonsense, Miss Lisle is in Bath teaching the use of the globes to little girls, but I said I know that neck, I should know it anywhere."
Honora turned. Lavinia Prestwick was coming towards her through the press with the cheerful determination of a well-fed spaniel, which was not unkind; Honora had always liked spaniels. She had brown hair worn in a cascade of ringlets, pearls wound through them, and a peach silk gown that must have cost what Honora's whole wardrobe had cost over ten years. She carried an enormous fan of white feathers, which she used less to cool herself than to clear a path. Her smile was warm, and it reached all the way up into her eyes, which was rarer in that room than diamonds.
Six years ago, at Miss Tuttle's seminary in Laura Place, Lavinia had been a pupil of fourteen and Honora a pupil-teacher of sixteen, paying for her own education by drilling the younger girls in French verbs. Lavinia had been hopeless at French. She had been, Honora remembered now with some surprise, extraordinarily good at arithmetic, and had been scolded for it, since a young lady who could do long division in her head was thought to be showing off.
"Miss Prestwick." Honora let the faint, dry smile she kept for such evenings settle on her mouth. "How fortunate. I might enjoy the evening."
"Oh, you need not be wicked. I know you think balls are a sort of cattle market." Lavinia lowered her fan and her voice together. "Who brought you? You are not here alone?"
"Mrs. Fairleigh. My godmother. She is in the card room, losing to an admiral."
"And you are standing by a pillar as if it might ask you to dance."
"It is the most reliable gentleman in the room. It has not moved all evening."