by Mary Balogh
“It is a pity,” Aunt Mildred said, “that your gown is too plentiful in the bodice and not plentiful enough in the skirt. Anastasia. A lower décolletage and a train or at least some flounces at the hem would have improved it nicely. But you look well enough.”
“Does not the color suit her wonderfully well, Mildred?” Cousin Althea said, beaming kindly at Anna.
“Your hair really ought to have been cut short, Anastasia,” Aunt Louise said, “though it does admittedly look less severe than it usually does. You are right, Mildred. She does look well enough, even if she could have looked so much more fashionable.”
“No jewelry and no hair plumes or anything else in your hair, Anastasia?” Anna’s grandmother asked. “I ought to have expected it and taken you to my own jeweler. I shall do so before your next ball.”
“Sometimes, Mother-in-Law,” Uncle Thomas said with a kindly smile for Anna, “a lady is a jewel in herself.” He raised the glass of sherry he was holding.
“I think you look perfectly lovely just as you are, Anna,” Elizabeth said. “Would you not agree, Alex?”
Thus appealed to, Cousin Alexander regarded Anna gravely and inclined his head. “I do indeed,” he said—but what else could he have said?
The Duke of Netherby’s fingers were curled about the handle of his quizzing glass, but he had not yet raised it to his eye. He had also refrained from comment. Unlike Alexander and the other gentlemen present, all of whom were clad in what Anna understood to be fashionable and elegant black evening clothes, he was dressed in a dull gold tailed evening coat with paler gold knee breeches, very white stockings and linen, and a white waistcoat heavily embroidered with gold thread. His neckcloth frothed beneath his chin in snowy, intricate folds and lace foamed at his wrists. His jewelry was gold, inlaid with amethysts. There were gold buckles on his dancing shoes. He looked, Anna guessed, somewhat old-fashioned and quite startlingly gorgeous. The fact that he was smaller and slighter than any of the other gentlemen was of no matter. He reduced them all to insignificance.
The judgment of her family having been passed upon her appearance, he stepped forward at last and took it upon himself to introduce Anna to the only two people she did not know—Colonel Morgan and Mr. Abelard she had met at the theater. The other two gentlemen, who made numbers even so that there would be an equal number of ladies and gentlemen at dinner, were Sir Hedley Thompson, the dowager countess’s cousin, and Mr. Rodney Thompson, his son. More relatives, Anna thought as they bowed to her.
The butler announced dinner soon after, and the duke offered Anna his arm. Now she was confused. This was not the strict order of precedence Mrs. Gray had explained to her so painstakingly and she had memorized. It seemed that he read her thoughts.
“Sometimes,” he said, for her ears only, “precedence gives place to occasion, Anna. This is the evening of your come-out, so to speak. You are the guest of honor.” His eyes regarded her from beneath lazy lids. “You have been very clever, though I doubt you realize it. You will undershine every other lady tonight.”
She was amused rather than offended. “And that is clever?” she asked.
“Indeed,” he said. “It is rather like pitching one’s voice low in a din and thus making oneself more clearly heard than everyone who is shrieking. It is a skill you know as a teacher.”
So the remark that she would undershine everyone was in a sense a compliment, was it?
“And you,” she said, “will certainly outshine every other gentleman.”
“Ah,” he said as he seated her to the right of his place at the head of the table, “one can but try.”
Oh, Anna realized in sudden surprise, she had missed him.
Fourteen
Good God, he had missed her, Avery thought. It was not a comfortable realization, the more so as he could not for the life of him understand it. Her grandmother and aunts were quite right about her appearance. Her gown was too prim and plain, her hair too sleek despite the curling tendrils, her person too bare of jewels. He had spoken the brutal truth when he had told her she would undershine everyone else at the ball. He had also meant it when he said she had been clever, though he was perfectly well aware that it had been unintentional on her part.
She looked nothing short of gorgeous.
And he was nothing short of . . . puzzled.
He could not recall when he had last hosted an evening event. Arranging dinner parties, soirees, concerts, and the like required just too much exertion, though admittedly Edwin Goddard would have done all the real work as he had for this. Avery looked along the length of the dining table to where his stepmother was seated at the foot, and was half surprised that it was large enough to seat this many. He did a quick count—fourteen persons in all, himself included. And perfectly balanced numbers, seven ladies and seven gentlemen. How very punctilious of Edwin and the duchess. Such attention to detail would have been enough to give him a headache.
But he had Anna to his right as the guest of honor for this evening and the Dowager Countess of Riverdale to his left as the lady of highest rank after his stepmother. He set about entertaining them, dividing his attention roughly equally between each. Anna had Molenor on her other side, he noted, again a clever move on his stepmother’s part, since Thomas was mild-mannered and kindly disposed and not likely to frighten Anna or tie her tongue in knots when she would need it to eat her food.
Not that he could imagine Anna frightened. She ought to have melted into a greasy pool of agony when she stepped inside this house on that very first day, but she had been as cool as her name. He would guess that had been the most frightening moment of her life so far. He must ask her. He was conversing with the dowager when the thought popped into his head. Or perhaps it was yesterday’s presentation to the queen, at which she had acquitted herself well, according to his stepmother.
“It is to be hoped,” he said a few minutes later when the dowager turned toward Alex Westcott on her other side and Molenor turned toward Lady Matilda on his, “that you have exhausted all there is to say about the weather we have been having and may hope to have in the near future, Anna. I may be able to make a few more observations on the subject if I must, but I doubt any of them would be original, and I hate not to be original.”
“The subject is exhausted,” she said.
“I am delighted to hear it,” he said. “Tell me, Anna. What has been the most frightening moment of your entire life so far?”
She stared at him for a short while, her fork suspended above her plate. “Where did that question come from?” she asked him.
“From my brain,” he said, “via my mouth.”
The corners of her mouth quirked into a near smile, and her brow furrowed in thought. Her fork remained suspended. “I think,” she said, “it must be something I do not remember with my conscious mind, though my whole body recoils with a nameless dread when I try to recall what it was like.”
Ah. It was too bad of him to have assumed she would choose one of the two moments he had imagined. Now what had he stirred up?
“I think it must be the day I was left at the orphanage,” she said. “The man who took me there was gruff and impatient with me, I believe, but at least I must have known who he was and what connection he had with me. But then—the sheer terror of abandonment and the unknown when I had experienced security and happiness up to that point. Perhaps it was not so at all. Perhaps I was quite happy to arrive at a place where there were other children to play with. Certainly I have no really bad memories of my life there. Perhaps that almost-memory is not a memory at all.”
And perhaps it was. Well, this was wonderful conversation for a festive evening.
“Eat your dinner, Anna,” he said, and the fork finally found its way to her mouth.
“And what was yours?” she asked him. “The most frightening moment of your life, that is.”
He considered a flippant an
swer and decided upon honesty. “Similar to yours in a way,” he said. “When I was taken up to the dormitory I was to share with seven other boys on my first day of school when I was eleven, it was to find that I was last to arrive and the only boy who had not been there before. The hush that fell on the room was deafening. And then one of the boys said, Oh, look, Paddy. Your father has sent your baby sister to join you. And they all cackled like hens—or like budding cockerels, I suppose. That night they kept me awake as I cowered beneath the bedcovers with unexpected bangs and ghost noises and muffled laughter. But it was not ghosts I feared. It was them.”
She was gazing intently at him. “Oh, poor little boy,” she said. “When did you change?”
“Avery,” the dowager said from his left, “I have been told that you are a severe disappointment to the ladies at every ball you attend. Apparently you dance two or three times with the prettiest girls and then disappear to the card room or off the premises entirely. I hope the card room does not see more of you tonight than the ballroom does.”
He turned his attention back to her, and Anna resumed her meal and was soon conversing with Molenor again. He never, Avery mused, talked about his childhood and boyhood with anyone. But he had just done so.
“I have new dancing shoes,” he said. “And though my valet has worked tirelessly upon them, they need to be properly broken in. I shall dance every set even if have to go to bed with ten blistered toes and two blistered heels.”
* * *
The ball that followed was so far beyond anything Anna had experienced before that she only wished she could sit on the sidelines as some mothers and chaperones did, simply observing it all. But it was all for her, and she was very much the focus of attention.
The ballroom itself took her breath away. It seemed enormous, though it was probably not much larger than the ballroom at Westcott House. It was decked with banks and pots and hanging baskets of pink, peach, and white blossoms and green ferns and was fragrant with their scents. Gilded chairs upholstered with dark green velvet were arranged side by side around the perimeter. The wooden floor had been polished to a high gloss. The coved, painted ceiling was hung with three large crystal chandeliers, all of them fully fitted with lit candles. A pianoforte and other instruments on the dais at one end of the room awaited the orchestra. Double doors at the other end were thrown back to reveal a square chamber set with white-clothed tables, silver urns, crystal decanters, and empty space that would soon hold trays of dainties for the refreshment of the guests. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined one long wall, doubling the light and effect of the floral displays. Along the wall opposite, French windows had been opened onto a wide, lantern-lit stone balcony.
“And it is all in your honor, Anastasia,” Aunt Louise said. “How do you feel?”
“It is beautiful, Aunt,” she said, evading the question.
Guests started to arrive soon after and continued to stream in for longer than an hour as Anna stood inside the doors with Aunt Louise on one side and the duke on the other. She listened carefully to the majordomo as he announced each guest and tried for a while to memorize names and faces and to remember how perfect etiquette dictated she greet each one. But it was impossible. And how were so many people going to fit into the ballroom, let alone dance?
It did not take long for Anna to realize—as she had expected—that she did not look very gorgeous at all in comparison with every other lady who came through the doors. All of them glittered with jewels, their gowns marvels of frills and flounces, lace and ribbons and marvels too of the law of gravity. How could they possibly feel comfortable with bodices so low that disaster was a mere fraction of an inch away? Heads abounded with curls and ringlets and coronets and turbans and tall, waving plumes. Perfumes were almost overpowering.
And then it was time for the dancing to begin, and the duke led her onto the floor for the quadrille. She had learned the steps at school and brushed up on them with Mr. Robertson, but it had been too formal a dance to be much favored at orphanage parties. Anna danced it now with her heart in her throat, for she knew everyone was looking at her—and it was not conceit that made her believe so. The Duke of Netherby really did outshine every other gentleman present, of course, and he danced with elegance and with his sleepy eyes directed fully at her, with the result that she soon forgot to fear she would miss a step or a whole sequence of steps. She looked back at him and forgot too that she was a curiosity to all these people—the crème de la crème of polite society—and that she would be spoken of and judged tomorrow in fashionable drawing rooms and club rooms throughout London. She simply enjoyed the dance.
She enjoyed dancing the second set with Cousin Alexander too. He was a complete contrast to the duke—tall and well built, darkly handsome, immaculately and fashionably elegant, and kindly.
“I hope you do not think, Anastasia,” he said before the music began, “that Lizzie forced me into complimenting you on your appearance before dinner. I spoke the truth. Simplicity suits you. It speaks of your upbringing and yet is suited to the change in your station.”
“Thank you, Alexander.” She smiled at him.
“My family and close friends call me Alex,” he told her.
“And I am family,” she said. “Oh, how I dreamed for years and years of being able to say that to someone, Alex. And now I can say it to several people.”
He danced the steps of the country dance with careful precision when it would have suited her better to dance with more exuberance. She followed his lead.
If she had half expected that after the first two sets she would have time to relax and enjoy watching for a while, she was soon to be disabused. She found herself and Aunt Louise surrounded by gentlemen, all eager to solicit her hand for the next set. And so it continued all evening. She had partners for every set but still was not able to dance with half of those who asked. It all would have been quite dizzying had she not understood that none of them had any real interest in the Anna Snow who was herself, but only in Lady Anastasia Westcott, who was newly unleashed upon the ton as an unknown curiosity.
She danced the supper dance with Lord Egglington, a tall, gangly young man with buck teeth and eyeglasses, who seemed terrified of her until she discovered that he was mad for horses and asked a few questions that got him talking with boyish enthusiasm. He led her into supper afterward and continued talking while Anna relaxed and listened with interest. He must be several years younger than she, she guessed. He had been at school with Harry, he explained, but he flushed rosily after saying so and quickly got back to the topic of horses as though he expected she would not appreciate any mention of her brother.
She excused herself when guests were beginning to return to the ballroom and hurried off to the ladies’ withdrawing room. She was on the broad landing outside the ballroom a few minutes later, making her way back, when a gentleman stepped into her path and bowed to her.
“We have not been formally introduced, alas, Lady Anastasia,” he said. “I was late arriving this evening. Though I did once ask to be presented to you before you were ready to be exposed to the ton. I apologize for my forwardness on that occasion and beg to introduce myself now.”
“Oh,” she said, recognizing him as the gentleman the duke had snubbed so rudely at the theater. “Yes, I remember, and I would quite happily have made your acquaintance, sir. I made my displeasure known to the Duke of Netherby.”
“But I do not blame your family for being protective of you, Lady Anastasia,” he said. “They must fear that such a rare and innocent bloom will take a misstep and be scorned by the very people with whom her birth intended her to mingle.”
Perhaps, Anna thought, the duke had had some reason—though no excuse—for avoiding introducing her to this man.
“Viscount Uxbury, at your service, Lady Anastasia,” he said with another deferential bow.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Lord Uxbury,”
she said, extending her right hand. He took it and raised it to his lips.
He was a tall, good-looking man, but also, she suspected, a bit pompous. And even she knew—it was one of the points of etiquette Mrs. Gray had mentioned—that if he wished for an introduction to her he ought to have asked someone close to her, Aunt Louise, perhaps, to present him.
“Dare I hope, Lady Anastasia,” he said, “that you are free to dance the next set with me?”
She opened her mouth to reply.
“Lady Anastasia Westcott is engaged to dance the next set with someone else,” a languid voice said from behind her left shoulder, “as soon as that someone else has had an opportunity to ask. And the same applies to every other set this evening, Uxbury.”
Anna turned toward the Duke of Netherby, her eyes widening with incredulity. Inevitably, he had his gold quizzing glass raised almost to his eye.
“Someone has already asked,” she said icily, ignoring the fact that she did not really want to dance with Viscount Uxbury. “And I was about to say yes, Your Grace.”
He ignored her. “Pardon me if my memory has failed me,” he said, addressing himself to the viscount, “but were you invited, Uxbury?”
“I was,” the viscount said stiffly. “I would not have come uninvited. And pardon me, Netherby, but are you Lady Anastasia’s guardian? I was under the impression that she is not related to you and that she is anyway of age.”
Oh dear. The landing on which they stood was a very public place. It was rather crowded with guests moving in and out of the ballroom or gathered in conversational groups until the dancing resumed. The atmosphere in this little group was growing hostile. They were going to be attracting attention in a moment.
“Ah,” the duke said, “then let that be a lesson to me to scrutinize guest lists with greater care in the future and trust less to the good taste of Her Grace and my secretary. I would be obliged, Uxbury, if you would remove your person from my home.”