Caroline smiled a bit too widely, intending to unsettle Mrs. Whitmore. “It does keep one rather occupied,” she agreed, in a tone that gave nothing away whatsoever.
Mrs. Whitmore appeared satisfied with this. She turned toward Esther to make some remark about the Duchess of Talton’s card party last Thursday, and Caroline kept her expression pleasant and her eyes on the display case. She said nothing further, because nothing she wished to say was suited to the current venue.
“Indeed.” Lady Hayward’s voice, which had been entirely absent from the exchange until this moment, cut into the conversation with the cleanness of a blade finding a gap in armor. “The Season does keep one occupied…particularly when one is as sought after as my niece.”
A small silence ensued. Mrs. Whitmore turned back with a calculating expression.
“I had heard,” Lady Hayward continued, her tone as pleasant as it was utterly immovable, “that Lord Ashby called on Lady Caroline last week. A very distinguished young man…remarkably well-read, too. He is the kind of gentleman who, I have found, consistently differentiates himself over time, as opposed to those whose chief qualification is the volume of their conversations.”
Aunt Judith applied the lorgnette once more to the ribbon display, as though this observation had been no more significant than a comment on the weather.
“It is such a pleasure to have genuine prospects, rather than merely adequate ones. But then,wehave always been selective. One can afford to be when the suitors line up to call,” she finished.
Mrs. Whitmore’s smile had undergone a minor structural adjustment. “Of course,” she said, with a tight smile. “One must be careful.”
“Mm.” Lady Hayward turned a spool of ribbon over with one gloved finger. “As you said, my dear Mrs. Whitmore, the Season can keep one busy. But it would not do to rush; one must be patient. Good morning to you.”
It was a dismissal that left no room for appeal, and Mrs. Whitmore, who understood these things, took it with reasonablegrace and withdrew to the far end of the counter. From that position, she said several things to her daughter at a low volume that Caroline was grateful not to hear.
Esther materialized silently at Caroline’s left elbow, with the ribbon in her hands. Her expression was entirely composed.
“That,” she said quietly, “was remarkable.”
Caroline looked at her aunt, who had moved on to a display of walking bonnets and was regarding them like a woman whose campaign had concluded satisfactorily, and who was now attending to the actual business of the morning.
Her aunt Judith was seventy years old, iron-spined, entirely convinced that modesty was a quality to be displayed and not felt. She had, in the space of approximately ninety seconds, dismantled Mrs. Whitmore’s architecture easily, almost like she had been doing it since before Mrs. Whitmore was born.
Caroline felt something that was not quite gratitude and not quite love but contained both and was altogether too large and complicated to be addressed in a milliner’s shop.
So, she filed it away and turned back to the display.
“The ivory, I think,” she said. “For the trim.”
They left the shop forty minutes later with two bonnet boxes, a length of ivory ribbon, and a pair of gloves that LadyHayward had deemed not entirely without merit, which was the closest thing to enthusiasm she had expressed since the autumn showing at the Royal Academy, where she had admired a landscape for a full eight seconds before remarking that the light was inexact.
The carriage had been sent ahead to wait, and they were three shopfronts down when Lady Hayward spoke, without looking at Caroline directly.
“You are still walking as a woman with somewhere other than the pavement on her mind,” she said. “I note this without further commentary.”
Caroline longed for her room now, where she could allow her mind to wander and fixate on a man it had no business concentrating on, all in peace. “I am perfectly well.” She said this aloud instead, in lieu of her true feelings.
“You are perfectly functional, which is a different thing,” her aunt said. “The two states are often confused by people under thirty, who have not yet been given sufficient occasion to distinguish between them.” She tapped her cane once on the flagstone. “Whatever it is, you will address it in a timely fashion. Unaddressed issues accumulate, in my experience, and become considerably heavier than the original concerns.”
Caroline said nothing, and she was rather thankful that her aunt did not press. She was, in her way, very good at exquisitely timed silence, comments that landed and were left entirely to do their own work without assistance.
Soon, they reached the carriage. The footman handed Lady Hayward in, and then Esther and Caroline were about to follow when her eye caught a flash of movement at the far end of the street.
She did not consciously look for it. She was not, she told herself quite firmly, the sort of woman who searched crowds for a particular tall figure in a dark coat.
The Duke of Wynford.
He was perhaps thirty feet away, speaking with another gentleman, his back partially toward her. He had not seen her. He was not going to see her; he was absorbed in his conversation, and she was, to all observable purposes, simply a woman about to step into a carriage on a busy morning in Bond Street.
She told herself to get in the carriage.
He turned his head, as though he had felt something, and his gaze found her with the same instantaneous accuracy it always did and held for one still second.
And as he had done on the night of the ball, he did not bow, nor did he alter his expression. He simply looked, and in the bright, ordinary morning light of a Tuesday in Bond Street, with hatboxes and ribbon and Lady Hayward’s voice behind her telling the footman to mind the step, the look was somehow more direct and more impossible to interpret than anything thathad passed between them in a darkened library, with his hand at her waist and his mouth hovering at her neck.