Lord Peverell

You kept her notes.

All of them. They're in the back of your father's copy of Montaigne, the one with the cracked spine nobody else would ever pick up, folded small, the lavender wax still clinging to the edges. You read them again in the morning before anyone is awake, sitting on the floor of the back parlour with your knees drawn up, and you still don't know what to make of the last one, the one she wrote after you'd answered the first and she'd answered yours and the candle had burned down to a stub.

You're thinking about it now, in Mrs. Sowden's crowded drawing room in Hill Street, at half past ten at night, which is the wrong place to be thinking about anything.

"Shoulders, Ava," murmurs a voice at your elbow.

You drop them. Yseult glides past, not stopping, in a gown of silver-grey gauze over lavender silk that has made three separate women in this room put their hands to their own necklines in despair. She doesn't look at you. That's the rule, for tonight: she is your teacher, not your chaperone, and the ton is not to see her hovering.

Three lessons, since the waltz. Thursday, Saturday, Monday. How to enter a room (as if you've just remembered something amusing). How to end a conversation before it dies (always leave them wanting the next sentence). How to accept a compliment (say thank you and nothing else; anything else is an argument). Each time, an hour in the Mount Street library with the carpet rolled back and Mrs. Tuke humming, and each time Yseult careful, light, funny, and three feet away.

She hasn't stopped a dance again. She hasn't let one get far enough to need stopping.

"Miss Lidcote."

You turn. Lord Peverell is standing in front of you.

He's tall and fair and good-looking in the way of men who've been told so since the nursery: a Roman nose, a cleft chin, blue eyes that crinkle when he smiles, which he is doing now, with a touch of uncertainty that's almost endearing. Three weeks ago he took you in to supper at the Mortlakes' and talked to you about his estates in Wiltshire, and you talked to him about the Roman villa somebody had dug up near them, and he said By Jove, you know a great deal, and then didn't call. Then he was at Clarissa Thornbury's side at the Opera, and that was that.

"Lord Peverell," you say. You don't curtsey too low. A little less than you think you should, Yseult said. Let him wonder why.

"I hoped I might... That is, are you engaged for the next set?"

You look at him. Not the way you'd usually look at him, eyes on his cravat pin, waiting to be released. You look at him the way you were taught, in a high-perch phaeton in Hyde Park: steady, unhurried, as if you've found something in the room you might keep.

Lord Peverell's ears go pink.

"No," you say. "I'm not."

It works.

That's the thing you can't get over, afterwards. It all works. You go down the set with him and you don't count. When he makes a joke about Mrs. Sowden's turban you laugh where people can see it, and three heads turn. When he asks about the Roman villa you tell him about the mosaic floor, the dolphins and the four seasons, and you stop halfway through and say, "But you don't want to hear about mosaics," and he says, "I do, rather, by Jove," and seems surprised by it.

He asks you for a second dance. Two dances, with the same man, at a rout where everybody counts. Your mother, by the card tables, has the expression of a general watching the enemy's flank collapse.

"Miss Lidcote," Lord Peverell says, at the end of it, a little out of breath and very earnest. "May I call tomorrow? In Half Moon Street?"

"You may," you say, and say nothing else, because anything else is an argument.

He bows over your hand. He goes to fetch you a glass of ratafia you don't want. You stand alone for a moment at the edge of the room, breathless, flushed, astonished at yourself.

And you look for her.

You don't mean to. You've been not looking for her all night; it's the rule. But your eyes go straight across the crowded room as if they've been pulled on a thread, past the turbans and the candles and the card tables, to the archway into the music room where she's standing with a glass in her hand, talking to old General Bracegirdle.

No. Not talking.

She's looking at you. She must have been looking for some time. Her fan, which is always moving, which she uses like a second voice, a flick for nonsense and a slow sweep for go on, has gone completely still against her collarbone.

You smile at her. You can't help it. Look, the smile says. Look what you taught me.

She doesn't smile back.

For one moment her face is entirely undefended. You've never seen it like that. There's no joke held in reserve. There's nothing in it at all but something that looks, impossibly, like pain.

Then General Bracegirdle says something, and she turns to him and laughs, and the fan starts moving again.

When Lord Peverell comes back with the ratafia, she's gone.

"Lady Yseult left early," Mrs. Sowden tells your mother, at the door, when you're waiting for your cloaks. "A headache, she said. She never has headaches. I expect she was bored."

"I expect so," your mother says, very pleased, and takes your arm.

You don't sleep much. You're up early, dressed in your best sprigged muslin before your mother's even rung for chocolate, and you sit in the drawing room with a book you don't read, and you listen for the knocker.

At eleven it comes.

It's not Lord Peverell. It's his footman, with a note.

Lord Peverell presents his compliments to Mrs. and Miss Lidcote and regrets that an unexpected engagement prevents him from calling today, as he had hoped.

Nothing else. No another day. No at your convenience. Your mother reads it twice and sets it down very carefully on the table, as if it might go off.

"Unexpected," she says.

"It might be true, Mama."

"It might, Ava." She doesn't believe it. Neither do you.

That afternoon you walk to Bond Street with Sukey to change a book at the library, because you can't bear the drawing room any longer, and because if you walk fast enough you might stop feeling like a fool. The way home takes you along Clarges Street. You don't choose it. You don't think about whose house is halfway down on the left, cream stone, black railings, the knocker shaped like a lion's head.

There's a curricle standing outside it.

Yellow wheels. A pair of matched chestnuts. A tiger in blue livery holding their heads and yawning.

You know that curricle. You stood beside it outside the Mortlakes' three weeks ago while its owner told you, by Jove, that you knew a great deal.

It's Lord Peverell's. And it's waiting outside the Thornbury house.