Then, Caroline had simply looked up, and he had been there, forty feet across the room, talking with a Lord she did not recognize. A particular air lingered around him, the kind that changed before a storm—something in the pressure of it, something in the temperature—and she had known, without needing to understand why, that this was going to be a very long evening.
He had not looked at her; that was the aggravating part. He had continued his conversation with apparent contentment. So, while Lewis had deposited her with Lord Aldbury, and she had begun the evening’s performance, the whole time, across the bright and crowded room, the Duke of Wynford had not looked at her even once.
Caroline decided that she was not disappointed by this slight. She was simply observing it, clinically, the way one observes weather or the behavior of inanimate objects. It was pure observation.
“—would suit you, I think,” Lord Aldbury was saying. “Derbyshire has a great deal to recommend it in the summer months. Do you prefer the country, Lady Caroline?”
“Very much so,” she said, which was true. “I have always found the countryside…”
She lost the thread entirely because the Duke of Wynford was looking at her.
It was a brief thing, a glance of perhaps three seconds long, from across a ballroom full of people and movement and the bright, sociable noise of an evening in full operation. He had turned his head in the natural course of his conversation, and his gaze had found hers. For those three seconds, he had simply looked at her with the attention she had come to recognize as precisely his, and his mouth had tilted. It was not a smile, but the mere fraction of one.
Then he looked back at his companion.
“Lady Caroline?” Lord Aldbury was watching her with polite inquiry.
“Pardon me, my lord,” she said. “The countryside. Yes. Very much.” She recovered with an ease that Lady Hayward would have found satisfying. “I was away from England for some time, and I find I have rather missed it.”
The Viscount resumed the conversation, but she could not say she was listening. On two further occasions across the next half hour, Caroline found her gaze moving across the room of its own apparent volition.
Both times, she discovered him already looking back in her direction.
Both times, the look ended before she could arrive at a reasonable interpretation of it.
On the third occasion, he was not looking at her at all. He was making his way, unhurried, along the far edge of the room, past the arrangement of chairs near the east corridor. And as he passed the entrance to the hallway that led, she knew from prior navigation of this house, to Lord Briar’s library, he paused. The Duke turned his gaze ahead whilst still deliberately avoiding meeting her eyes, before he continued walking again, and disappeared into the corridor.
Caroline stood very still for a moment.
“I…I entirely agree,” she said to whatever Lord Aldbury had just spoken, even as her curiosity pulled her towards the area the Duke had just disappeared into.
I shouldn’t go.
That was the plain, sensible, entirely obvious conclusion, and she arrived at it almost instantly, yet it kept absolutely no hold over her whatsoever.
She excused herself on the pretext of refreshing her glass and wove through the ballroom’s edges with the composure of a woman who was heading toward a perfectly ordinary destination.
She passed within a few feet of Laura, who was enduring a conversation near the refreshment table with the stoic patience of a woman who had been placed there by circumstance and had not yet identified a graceful means of escape.
Laura’s eyes caught hers across the narrow distance: one quick, sharp read, and her brow lifted a fraction. Caroline gave a small, definitive shake of her head.
Laura’s expression communicated, with the eloquence of a woman who had known her long enough to require no words:
I do not believe you, and this will be discussed later.
Caroline pressed onward.
The corridor was quieter, and the sounds of the ballroom retreated into a low hum behind her as she moved closer to thelibrary’s half-open door. Caroline pushed it further and stepped inside.
The room was dim and warm, lit only by the fire and a single branch of candles on the desk near the window. Shelves ran along every wall, and the smell of old paper and leather and woodsmoke was, in its specific way, the smell of every room she had ever been at peace inside.
The Duke of Wynford was standing near the fireplace with his hands behind his back.
“You came,” he said.
He sounded as though he had gambled on what she would choose andwon; Caroline found that she did not like the implications of that.
“I was merely curious,” she said as airily as she could manage, “where the corridor led, Your Grace.”