“Another?” The barman set a fresh bottle at Anthony’s elbow without waiting for an answer, which was either attentiveness or presumption.
Anthony was not interested in the distinction.
“Leave it,” he said, his tone without much excitement.
The man left it, and Anthony busied himself with the mundane task of pouring the drink.
Ravenswood’s on a Tuesday was not the most demanding environment a man could find himself in, which was precisely why he had chosen it. The crowd was thin: a dice game in the far corner conducting itself at low volume, two older men at the window playing chess with the patience of people who had nowhere pressing to be, and a table of young merchants who had arrived with ambitions and were now in the philosophical stage of their evening. The fire was adequate, the claret wasbetter than average, and the company required nothing of him whatsoever.
It was, by every measurable account, exactly what he had wanted.
He stared at the candle on his table and thought about that.
The evening at his house had concluded exactly as it was meant to. He had arranged dinner; Caroline had come; they had discussed the terms of their arrangement and came to an agreement. It had been efficient, orderly, and even. The whole exercise had been conducted with the kind of clean, forward momentum that he applied to business matters and had always found entirely sufficient.
Until he decided to seal the deal by feeding her dessert, and paid far more attention to her lips, her tongue, and her eyes than was proper or suitable.
He had spent the rest of the night looking at his correspondence and had finally gone to bed by one.
Though he had not slept. Not with the image of Caroline’s lips embedded in his mind.
Now, he poured another glass, using the distraction the amber liquid offered to avoid examining why.
“You look,” said a voice at his left shoulder, warm and practiced, “as though someone has stolen something from you.”
He turned. Margot was standing at a discreet distance, her expression arranged into the specific combination of concern and availability that she had, on prior occasions, deployed to considerable effect. She was fair, light-eyed, and dressed in deep green that she wore with the ease of a woman who understood her own assets and had made a practical arrangement with them.
He had spoken with her here twice before, on evenings that now seemed, in retrospect, to have occurred at a different time entirely.
“Margot,” he said, that tiredness he’d done his best to restrict to his sore eyes melting into his voice.
He supposed she was right, in a way. Someone had indeed stolen something from him: his sleep, and his peace of mind, and the most annoying part of the matter was that he could not particularly call her to account for it.
“Your Grace.” She moved slightly closer and tipped her head charmingly. “Shall I sit?”
Anthony looked at her and realized that the prospect of her company stirred no response in him at all. There was simply nothing, as though a room had been unlocked to reveal it had already been emptied.
This was certainly new information to him, and he was not certain he welcomed it.
“Not tonight,” he said, and he was smooth about it, entirely without cruelty. “Another time.”
She read his expression with pragmatic efficiency, nodded once, and withdrew.
He did not watch her go.
He looked at the candle again and thought, against every reasonable instruction to himself to the contrary, about a pair of hazel eyes regarding him across a candlelit table.
Those eyes were entirely disconcertingly direct.
And he quickly found that he did not very much appreciate the frequency with which they haunted his dreaming and waking hours.
He drained his glass.
You are Lewis’s closest friend, he reminded himself, hoping to hold on to some measure of decorum.She is his sister. She is twenty-one years old, entering her first Season, and she requires a husband of good standing. What she does not require is?—
Below his feet, the floor moved. He had been sitting still long enough for his attention to sharpen past the noise of the room, and what he now registered, through the boards beneath his chair, was rhythm. It was the pulse of a crowd in close quarters, and beneath it the percussive report of fists against leather, and the single drawn-out bellow of a man calling odds.
Anthony knew the sound the way he knew his own heartbeat: with the bone-deep recognition of something that had been part of him long before he had thought to name it.