"I do not dance, Your Grace," Margaret said. "I have not danced in perhaps fifteen years. I expect I have forgotten how. And I have no intention of providing the ballroom with fresh material for tomorrow's gossip."
"Then dance with me out here," Sebastian said. "Where there is no one to gossip at all."
It was a foolish thing to agree to. Margaret knew that even as she set down her glass and stepped into the circle of his arms on the empty stone terrace, with only the distant, muffled strains of the orchestra to guide them. He held her at a respectful distance, his hand warm against the small of her back, and they moved slowly across the flagstones under a sky thick with stars.
And Margaret thought, with a clarity that frightened her, that she had not felt this steady, this entirely unhurried, in the whole of her adult life.
"May I call upon you, Lady Ashworth?" Sebastian asked when the music finally faded.
Margaret searched his face for the calculation she had learned to expect from every man who had ever shown her the smallest kindness, the moment where the true price of his attention revealed itself. She found none. Only a quiet, waiting patience.
"You may," she said.
He called the following afternoon, and the afternoon after that. Within a fortnight, the Duke of Ravensmere's carriage, with its unmistakable crest, had become such a fixture on Grosvenor Square that the neighbors had taken to arranging their tea schedules around it, hoping for a glimpse through the drawing-room windows.
Priscilla Denham heard of it, of course. Everyone heard of it eventually, London being what it was. And Margaret received her at the Cheapside Hospital, of all places, standing in the middle of a ward she had built with her own dogged persistence while Priscilla picked her way across the clean stone floor as though it might soil her slippers.
"Is it true?" Priscilla asked without preamble. "That the Duke of Ravensmere has been calling on you?"
"It is true," Margaret said, not looking up from the ledger she was reviewing.