She turned it over. There was also no name on the outside. Curiosity got the better of her, and she broke the fold.
Two nights from now. My house. Come after eleven. We have a list to discuss. Tell no one.
It had no signature, either, but none was required. She folded it back along its crease before her expression could do anything impolitic.
We have a list to discuss.
The weight in her chest did not exactly lift, but something inside it shifted, like a window opened in a closed room.
She slipped the note into her reticule and returned to her teacup.
“You are scowling at your ale,” Gideon Turner, the Marquess of Eastbell, observed with an amused grin slashed across his face. “It has done nothing to deserve it.”
“I’m not scowling.” Anthony refrained from sighing.
“You are. You’re doing the thing with your jaw.” Gideon gestured vaguely at the lower half of Anthony’s face. “The thing where you look as though you’ve bitten into something and refuse to admit it was a lemon.”
“Eastbell.” Anthony looked at him, and he was certain his tiredness was reflected in his eyes.
“I’m simply noting it.” His friend raised his own glass with perfect equanimity.
Anthony narrowed his eyes in slight warning, which his friend laughed away.
Thecur. Anthony thought, grumpily, but without any particular heat. He knew these men enough to expect such behavior from them.
The Stale Bear on St. James was not Anthony’s first choice of venue. His first choice, unexamined, would have been a boxing match; the private kind, the kind where one could do something useful with one’s hands and one’s concentration rather than sit in a well-appointed room with friends and be subjected to observations about one’s jaw. But Lewis had suggested it, and Anthony could tell by his tone that he wanted company for some reason he had not yet produced. So, Anthony had come because Lewis was his closest friend, and that was the simple end of it.
The pub had decent claret, at least. He drank some.
“I’ve been to three viewings this week,” Lewis said, arriving back from the bar with a fresh glass and dropping into his chair with the decisive air of a man resuming a subject he’d never actually left. “Painters, not houses. My wife wants something new for the east gallery. She’s very particular.”
“She has taste,” Anthony said. “A quality to be encouraged.”
“I’m notdiscouraging it.” Lewis’s expression was entirely mild. “I am merely noting that I have now spent the better part of a week looking at canvases, which is several days more than I expected the enterprise to require.”
Gideon was smiling. “What a devoted husband you are. Do you expect you’ll be awarded a medal for it?”
“Don’t start,” Lewis said as he turned his glass. “I’ve also been making inquiries. Regarding Caroline.”
Anthony’s focus swung, inevitable as a compass needle finding the north. He felt it but did not show it. He kept his face unchanged, lifted his glass, and said nothing.
“Lord Fenwick’s cousin is in town. Viscount Aldbury. He’s a reasonable man, good estate in Shropshire, no particular vice that I’ve been able to identify.” Lewis turned his glass again, a slow rotation. “And there’s young Pembrook, who has the income and the manner, though perhaps not the…”
“Presence,” Gideon offered.
“I was going to say conversation.” Lewis’s brows furrowed slightly. “But yes. Both of those.”
Anthony set his glass down. He thought about what Caroline had said, in that small receiving room two days ago, in the voice of a woman laying out facts she had looked at for a very long time.
I know that I will get married. I know what my life will become. I only want these things first, while they are still possible.
And here was Lewis, already looking for a husband, and further along in this endeavor than Anthony had understood. Which meant the Season was not simply beginning; it was already in motion, its clock already ticking, and Caroline was already running out of whatever time she’d thought she had.
This was why she had gone to the Black Boar without a chaperone. This was not only restlessness, buturgency.
Clearing his throat quietly, he picked up his glass once more.
“She’ll choose well,” Gideon said lightly and confidently, as a man who had no stakes in the outcome would.