If you stand there much longer, Your Grace, my mother may send a search party, and then neither of us will have any peace. Arthur turned at once. A woman sat on a wrought iron bench beside a large fern, her posture relaxed and her hands folded around a glass of water. She wore a gown of deep gray-blue, simple enough to almost vanish in the low light, and her dark hair had loosened slightly near one temple.
She did not rise. She did not apologize. She only looked at him as if his arrival were interesting, but not alarming. "Lady Clara," he said after a moment.
She inclined her head. "Your Grace." He knew her, though only in the thin way one knows people through family conversation. Clara Danvers, the younger daughter, not presented with the urgency attached to Eleanor, not praised for brilliance at the pianoforte or skill in drawing a guest into conversation.
Usually mentioned after a pause, as if the speaker had remembered a chair in the corner of a room. "I did not mean to intrude," Arthur said. "No," Clara replied. "I imagine you meant to escape."
The word landed too precisely. Arthur reached for the polished answer that had saved him in hundreds of conversations. "The evening is lively, and I wished to admire the conservatory. Lady Danvers has created a remarkable space."
Clara studied him over the rim of her glass. "That is a very safe sentence." He stared at her. She did not smile in triumph.
She seemed almost sorry for having named it. "I only mean that you sounded as if you had selected it from a drawer." Arthur should have been offended. He had seen men bristle over less, especially when a young unmarried woman spoke with such plainness.
But there was no insult in Clara's voice, no hunger to impress him by being daring. She had simply observed a false note and pointed to it. A faint, unwilling breath of amusement left him. "And what would have been an unsafe sentence?"
"That you were tired," she said. The conservatory became very quiet around him. Rain whispered above them, steady and close. Arthur looked back toward the glowing doors of the ballroom.
Through the glass, figures moved in color and light, bowing and turning and smiling as if none of them had ever wanted to stop. "I suppose most people tire at some point during an evening," he said. "Most people do," Clara answered. "But you looked tired before dinner ended."
By the third course, you had begun nodding without listening. He turned back to her, sharper now. "You watched me through dinner?" "I watched everyone," she said.