The misery of a ball gone wrong is the more acute for the expectation of pleasure that preceded it.
—The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London
Until Harriet stood on the threshold of Lady Hardwicke’s ballroom and heard her old name announced, she did not fully realize the folly of saying yes to Wynford. She had told herself she would dance the two dances permitted and that in such a crowd at such a gathering no one would remark on the minor impropriety of a governess waltzing with a viscount. She had further convinced herself that a little vigilance on her part was all that was needed to protect Octavia from the missteps a girl might make at her first grand ball. She saw instantly that she was wrong on both counts.
At the decidedly spinsterish age of twenty-six, this was her first ball as much as it was Octavia’s. Lady Luxborough, in deference to Harriet’s scruples, had never asked her to attend a ball with Anne or Camille. Harriet’s knowledge of dancing came from serving as partner to each of her charges as they learned their steps, or playing for all of them at impromptu dance parties in the country. Now she saw she was as green as Octavia, as susceptible to the excitement and wretchedness a ball could produce.
And this was not any ball. Lady Hardwicke’s theatrical disposition was apparent at once. The ballroom was a play of light and dark with bright pools under the great chandeliers and shadowy recesses along the walls and under the great gallery for clandestine meetings. At each open door on the terrace side of the room stood small green groves of potted yew and fir trees scenting the air and beckoning guests to escape constraint in the darkness beyond. Enough mistletoe and holly hung from the chandeliers and wall sconces to satisfy a horde of ancient Druids gathered to celebrate the solstice. A dozen musicians played from a dais at one end of the grand room. Guests leaned together on benches in the shadows under the open gallery above. Ladies’ fans fluttered in a heated atmosphere of restless extravagance. Gowns were cut low, laughter was raucous, and champagne flowed. Proper conduct hadn’t a prayer. She clung to the arm Wynford offered her as they stood waiting to enter, and he leaned down to say in her ear, his breath disturbing her curls, “I see that I didn’t need to bring my mistletoe.”
A shiver went down her spine, and they stepped into the ballroom.
They stood just long enough for Harriet to lament her lack of acquaintance among Lady Hardwicke’s guests when the marchioness approached. In a dark green gown, the woman looked as if she had emerged from one of the groves of potted trees. Accompanying her was a young man in a scarlet-and-gold regimental jacket. Introductions were made.
Captain Fanshaw had the confident air of a man aware of his personal advantages: height, broad shoulders, abundant golden hair, and pleasing symmetry of his features marred only by a slight bruising on one cheek near his nose. Octavia beamed her entire satisfaction at his handsome appearance, while at Harriet’s side Wynford stood in frowning silence.
“Oh dear,” the marchioness said, casting a wry glance at Wynford’s waistcoat. “Purple?”
“Heliotrope,” replied Wynford with a smile that did not reach his eyes.
The marchioness raised a brow. “Octavia, you’d best keep apart from your brother lest he ruin the effect of your gown.”
“I doubt anyone will notice Wynford’s waistcoat,” said Fanshaw, “when he may look upon Miss Davenham’s dress.” He offered her a besotted gaze as if no one else existed.
Octavia cast him a doubting look in return. “Dear marchioness,” she said, “I trust you and Lady Harriet to keep my brother company.”
An expression of disdain crossed the marchioness’s face at the use of Harriet’s title, and the conversation grew awkward, as Captain Fanshaw offered Octavia compliments and Octavia tried to deflect his flattery. He seemed to have a low estimate of female intelligence, and at last Octavia simply suggested that they dance.
Their movement broke up the small party, as Harriet knew it must. Wynford, in his heliotrope waistcoat, turned to follow the marchioness. Harriet turned to find a place near Lady Hardwicke when her hand was seized and Wynford whispered, “Do not forget. You owe me a waltz.”
* * * *
Harriet did not know how the time passed until Wynford came for her. He bowed and led her into the circle of dancers forming in the center of the room. Harriet’s drawing room dances with her charges as they learned their steps had not prepared her for placing her left hand on Wynford’s right arm and feeling his arm slide around her. With each touch she yielded her arms, her waist, her hands. She could not deny the energy that passed between them as their gloved palms met, closing them in position, her skirts swishing up against his trousers like the foam of a wave touching a shore.
The musicians took preliminary passes at their strings, and there seemed to be no way to hold her head that did not invite intimacy, Wynford looking down into her eyes, his mouth inches from her lips, his breath against her curls.
He raised his left brow in the tiniest question. She realized that his face, so often controlled, was open to her in its smallest changes.
“What?” he asked.
“I was merely thinking about Faraday and electromagnetism.” She would think of science and steady her racing pulse. In her head she could see a diagram of Faraday’s theory of the flow of energy between magnets.
“Are we poles that repel or attract?” he asked.
She laughed. “I am being foolish about this, aren’t I? Agreeing to dance with you is...a mere nothing, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s everything.”
Then the music started. Her grip tightened on his arm as he sent her back into the dipping motion of the dance. Up they came, turning, moving together. With a hand at her waist he assumed control, sending them into a world apart, governed by the music until the room around them disappeared in a whirling blur and there was only Wynford. She smiled and laughed up at him with a kind of freedom she had never known.
As the dance came to an end, he whirled her into a corner of the ballroom where the candles in the sconces had not been lit. The music stopped. He did not release her, but pulled her close against him in the dark. Her head rested on his chest. His heart beat under her ear.
They stood that way until a wry laugh shook him, as if there were some joke. “Will you marry me, Harry?” he asked.
She pulled back in his arms and lifted her gaze to his, ready to question his sanity, but he laid a finger on her lips.
“Does it seem mad to you? A man in a purple waistcoat asking for your hand? Then don’t answer yet,” he said solemnly. He reached up and broke off a sprig of mistletoe hanging from the darkened wall sconce. “If you find that you can say yes, wear this in your hair.”
He handed her the sprig and leaned down to kiss her, their lips meeting in the lightest touch that changed instantly to a desperate clinging of mouths. He pulled her closer against his sinewy length. Her hands slid around his shoulders, reaching up to hold his head to hers. Her body strained against the barriers of linen, silk, and whalebone, the lightest and most absolute of barriers, like propriety itself. Her heart began a glad hammering. Shooting stars of sensation went streaking through her, and she was lost in the kiss, falling upward into the depths of the night sky, when she thought she heard a voice calling from a great distance.
“Wynford.”
She pulled back in his arms.
“Perry?” Wynford replied, his gaze still on Harriet, his hand firm on her back.
“Thank God I found you. No time to lose,” said Perry. He halted in front of them, his gaze going from one to the other. “Oh, hello, Harry. Sorry to intrude. Wynford proposing, is he? Matter of national importance. Need to borrow Wynford for a moment.”
“What is it?” Wynford asked.
“It’s Ashton. He’s in the card room. We must get to him before the marchioness does.”
“Coming, Perry.”
Wynford turned to Harriet, his face masked to her now, his thoughts elsewhere. “Find Octavia,” he said. “Stay with her.”
“Of course,” she said, a woman of sense and steadiness returning to herself from the madness of the moment.
* * * *
Perry led Charles to a card room where gentlemen not inclined to dance had gathered around five green baize tables intent on various forms of play. Ashton, in black evening clothes, lounged back in his chair, a glass of claret in hand, apparently bored with the play at his table. He was well past forty, but his hair remained thick and dark. From the straining of his white damask waistcoat over his middle and the blurring of the features of his once-handsome face, he appeared to be a man given to indulgence. The folds of his chin met the folds of his neckcloth.
Perry stepped up behind him and spoke a discreet word in his ear.
The man looked up under heavy lids, his gaze catching Charles standing opposite.
“May we have a word?” Charles asked.
Ashton threw his cards on the table. “I’m out, gentlemen,” he told his friends. He drew himself to his feet and followed Perry to a sideboard laden with glasses and decanters of spirits.
“What’s this about?” he asked Charles, filling his glass.
“Ten years ago in Paris there was a scandal—”
“I say,” protested Ashton, stiffening. “Ancient history. You can’t bring Paris up against a fellow now, besides—” He fell silent, looking aggrieved.
Charles began again. Ashton had slipped. He made no denial. “Besides what?”
“Who are you? How do you know about Paris? It was all concealed.”
“Never mind who we are.”
Ashton’s eyes narrowed, almost disappearing in his puffy face. “Hah! You’re government, aren’t you? Sent to plague a man. Listen, I’m an old married man now. What’s past is past.”
“You think that if it comforts you, Ashton,” Charles said. “Besides what?”
“The girl was willing, you know. Her damned Cossack father was the problem. Sent her into a decline, or she became ill. I don’t know. I told you, ancient history.”
“And the father came after you?” Charles would have gone after him, after any man who carelessly ruined a girl.
Ashton shook his head. “Not the father, the sister. She was a madwoman. She tried to shoot me at the Hotel Breteuil on the Rue de Rivoli.” He spoke like a man offended by a breach of good manners.
“The sister?”
“Sophia, the mad one.” He shuddered. “Irina died.”
Charles might not know the full story, but he had heard enough to understand Sophia Dashkova’s resentment against Ashton and perhaps against England. “Are you armed, Ashton?”
“Armed?”
“Yes. You’ll be interested to know that Sophia is here tonight.”
Ashton’s pasty face blanched. “Here?” His gaze darted for the door. He looked around for somewhere to put his glass.
“Does she know about me? Does she know I’m here?”
“It would not surprise me in the least, Major,” Charles said, and he knew it was true. Whatever her mission was, Sophia Dashkova was ready to make her move.
“Gentlemen, you must excuse me,” Ashton announced.
“Very wise, Ashton. I’d leave at once, if I were you.”
As Ashton hurried off, Charles and Perry turned back toward the ballroom. Charles’s mind ranged over the danger. The marchioness, or Dashkova as he must now think of her, had bided her time, appearing harmless, making arrangements, and now he had no doubt she would act.
“Perry, I’ve got to find Octavia. Can you find that footman of mine, Wilde?”
“The fellow whose ears stick out?”
“Yes. He should be near the cloakroom. I need him to take an urgent message.”
“Will you unmask the marchioness here?” Perry asked.
“I have to find Octavia first,” Charles replied grimly. And Harriet. He had no doubt that Harriet would protect his sister from anyone who offered Octavia harm.
They parted at the stairs, Perry hurrying downward, Charles turning back to the ballroom.
* * * *
While Harriet clutched her sprig of mistletoe, Octavia danced a quadrille with a raffish officer friend of Captain Fanshaw’s who hardly looked at her. Fanshaw, after his early attentions to Octavia, had disappeared. Harriet gathered that the girl had discouraged his heavy-handed flattery. The marchioness was nowhere to be seen. Somehow in Lady Hardwicke’s wooded ballroom everything had become confused. Octavia, who desperately wanted a husband, had no prospects. Harriet, who had never dreamed of a proposal, had a husband if she wanted him.
Standing absently at the edge of the dance, she kept her gaze on Octavia, but she could think only of Wynford. He was not who he appeared to be—the idle, foppish man of fashion with a taste for colorful waistcoats. He was a man on a government mission. His sister had called him a spy for looking at her post, but it occurred to Harriet that he might, in fact, be another sort of spy, and not the man she thought she knew at all. He had not intended his proposal. He was careful, but he was also dangerous. His mind was on the marchioness—and even Octavia, the sister he meant to protect, had been forgotten in the spy business that consumed him.
The moment the thought occurred, someone trod on Harriet’s skirts. She glanced down at her rolled satin hem drooping on the floor and gathered a fistful of fabric in one gloved hand. Looking up again, she saw Octavia, white-faced and rigid with emotion, embroiled in a conversation in the center of the room, attracting the attention of dancers who had perforce to navigate around her and the couple with whom she spoke. Her partner had apparently abandoned her.
The couple were a young gentleman in black and his tall, elegant-looking partner glittering in a champagne silk gown with gold braid trim, a triple strand of pearls looped around her neck, and a white ostrich feather curling down around fair golden curls and haughty face. Harriet clutched her skirts and her mistletoe and picked her way to them through the movement of the dance.
“You,” she heard Octavia say. “Why are you here?”
“You invited me, you ninny,” answered the young man.
“Invited you?”
“In your letter a sennight ago, as Miss Burrell can confirm.” He smiled at his companion.
“You had a letter from me?” Octavia demanded. “And you showed it to her? You must be mad.”
“Well, I’m not mad. As my fiancée, Miss Burrell shares all my concerns. You are the one behaving like a hoyden, boasting of your conquests in London and daring me to show my face here.”
Octavia’s face went a shade whiter.
Harriet broke in. “I beg your pardon, mister...? Might we take this conversation where we do not have to share it with the whole room?”
The young man turned on her. “I’m Gresham. Who are you?” he demanded.
Harriet drew herself up. “Lady Harriet Swanley,” she said quietly. “Miss Davenham is with me and her brother this evening. Again, may I suggest that we take our conversation off the dance floor?”
Something in Harriet’s voice or manner made Gresham swallow whatever intemperate remark he had been about to make.
“Come, Caroline,” he said to his companion, turning his back on Octavia.
Harriet put herself between Octavia and the many pairs of eyes watching them, and the group reassembled at the side of the room under one of the mistletoe-bedecked wall sconces. They stood a little sheltered from the crowd’s notice by a stand of yew and fir. A breath of icy air from an open terrace door swirled around their ankles.
Gresham and Octavia glared at each other, but Harriet gave the edge to Gresham. He had his fiancée’s hand tucked protectively in the crook of his arm. If Octavia had been capable of laughing at his stance of outraged male dignity, she could regain the advantage, but Octavia looked close to tears.
“Horace Gresham,” she said in a quavering voice. “I never wrote to you. Whatever your opinion of me, I have done nothing improper. Furthermore, as Lady Harriet can tell you, I have been so wholly engaged at balls and parties and lectures and the theater, that I have had no time to think of...old childhood friends. You are mistaken.”
“Mistaken? Don’t I know your hand? Didn’t we take lessons together from the vicar? And don’t I know you? You ride neck or nothing, you skate like a boy, and you’re capable of freaks and starts, like haring off to London on the stage with that silly book my mother gave you. Next thing I know, you write me that you have a husband in your pocket and dare me to come and see him. Well, I’m here. Where’s this husband you’ve bagged?”
The question, delivered as a taunt, seemed to strike Octavia as a blow, but she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “You gave me that book. It’s not silly, and I never, never wrote to you. You don’t know me at all.”
“But there’s no husband, is there? Hah,” he said.
For a moment Octavia appeared to hold her ground. Then tears welled up, and she broke and ran stumbling out onto the dance floor. Checked by the whirl of dancers, she turned and slipped into the artificial grove that led to the terrace. Harriet ached for her. Across the room, leaning down from the upper gallery, was the marchioness, her icy gaze observing them closely.
“I knew it was a fool’s errand to come here tonight,” said Gresham.
Harriet felt a strong desire to take him by his fashionable lapels and shake him, but she merely said, “You’re wrong, you know, Mr. Gresham. Octavia never wrote you that letter. You’ve been duped.”
“By whom?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. What did the letter say?”
As Gresham began to explain, Harriet saw Captain Fanshaw pass through the terrace doors. She cut off Gresham’s explanation and hurried after Octavia. The girl would be at her most vulnerable, and Harriet had no doubt that the marchioness wanted it that way.
As she stepped into the little grove at the entrance to the terrace, cold air hit her and she stumbled over her torn hem. A hand gripped her arm, jerking her back into the ballroom.
“Where are you off to?” snarled a voice.
Steadying herself, she turned to meet her brother’s gaze. “Where I go is none of your concern, Lionel.”
He glared at her, but she stared him down until he dropped her hand. They had not spoken in ten years. His face, in feature so like her own, shocked her. It was diffused with dull anger, the dark brows lowered, the mouth cruel and sullen, the gray eyes unsmiling.
“What do you think you are doing here?” he asked. “You have no right to bring yourself to the notice of the fashionable world.”
“Is that what you imagine I was doing?”
“What else? Need a husband? Tired of feeding at the Luxborough trough?”
Harriet refused to rise to the attempt to goad her. Octavia was out on the terrace, where Captain Fanshaw would surely find her. “Excuse me, Lionel.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You’ll hear me out. You ruined your chances in the world long ago when you refused to do your duty to obey your brother and marry advantageously for your family’s sake.”
“It was never my duty to marry a cruel and unprincipled man.”
“Don’t think you can have Wynford now. He turned you down flat. He left that shooting party without even taking a look. You’ve been sunk for so long, you have no idea how odd an appearance you make.”
“How I appear doesn’t matter to you, Lionel. You washed your hands of me long ago. Now, I have a duty to perform.” She turned and stepped out onto the terrace.
She shivered with the cold, standing for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. Then she gripped her torn skirts firmly in one fist and began her search. Torches flared from several brackets along the wall, giving a dim light. The cold seemed to have discouraged all but the most amorous, or perhaps the most drunken, of Lady Hardwicke’s guests from lingering. Those who did clung to one another. But she saw no scarlet coat or poppy-colored gown.
Harriet stepped back inside the ballroom, hit at once by its warmth after the chill of the night. Another waltz was in progress, and, more anxious now, she began to work her way around the edge of the room toward the benches in the shadows under the gallery.
As she reached the darkened stretch, a man’s foot sprawled in her path. She glanced at him to ask for help, but his eyes stared at her unseeing. His body listed to the right against a cushion.
A dreadful suspicion crossed her mind. She reached out to touch him. “Are you well, sir?” she asked.
At her touch, his shoulders slid sideways down the wall. His head hit the seat cushion, and a trickle of blood escaped his unmoving lips.