He led her out. The waltz was still new enough that half the couples moved through it as though crossing ice, but the Duke danced it the way he seemed to do everything, with a kind of grave and impatient competence. His hand at her waist was correct. His eyes were not; they did not leave her face.
"You have the advantage of me," he said, after the first turn. "You know my name and my mother, and something I do not. I know only that you dislike balls, admire pillars, and are acquainted with Miss Prestwick."
"Miss Prestwick is a kind girl. Kinder than she is given credit for."
"I did not say otherwise."
"Your mother hopes you will marry her."
His mouth tightened. "My mother hopes a great many things. Who are you?"
They turned beneath the chandelier. The light broke over them in pieces. Honora found that her heart was beating hard and slow, like a drum at a funeral, and she was annoyed with it.
"Do you remember the steward's house at Hartsmere?" she said. "The grey one, by the beck, with the walnut tree?"
Something shifted in his face—not recognition, but the beginning of it, like a figure seen through fog. "Lisle's house," he said slowly. "Mr. Lisle. He taught me to tickle trout under the footbridge. My father thought it was beneath me." A pause; another turn. "He was dismissed. There were irregularities in the accounts. I was at school."
"Yes," said Honora. "You were at school."
"Lisle had a daughter." He was looking at her now as if he could peel back twelve years with his eyes. "A small solemn thing. She found a wren's nest in the yew hedge and would not let me near it, because she said I would put my thumb on the eggs to see if they were warm."
"You would have."
"I was fourteen. I would have." He nearly smiled; the smile did not arrive. "Miss Lisle."
"Honora Lisle."
"And what is it that you know, Miss Honora Lisle, that every mother in this room does not?"
She could have told him then, in the middle of the floor, with the violins sawing sweetly overhead and the Dowager's gaze on the back of her neck like a cold hand. She had imagined it a hundred times—in the schoolroom in Laura Place, in the narrow room over the milliner's in Westgate Buildings where her mother had coughed through the winters, beside the bed in February when her mother had at last stopped coughing. She had imagined saying it to the Duchess. She had never once imagined saying it to him.