“The Earl of Powell,” he said instead, because it was a subject he could address honestly. “What do you actually know about him, my friend?”
Lewis frowned, thinking as he spoke. “Enough. Good family…he earns respectable income. But his conduct is…” He trailed off. “Roguish.”
At that, Anthony arched a brow, the sudden urge to tease his friend overtaking him. “And, by that, I take it that you mean he is brothers-in-arms with my type?”
Lewis’s scowl only escalated at the joke. “Maybe if you stopped sleeping around, you would not need to fall prey to such cheap shots, whatever directions they may come from.”
Anthony and Gideon both laughed at that.
“Not all of us will get to marry the loves of our lives, Lewis,” Anthony replied.
He did not think it prudent to inform Lewis on how many nights had passed since he had shared a bed with a woman.
It was something he was not quite sure he wanted to inform himself of, even.
“Unremarkable, if slightly roguish, conduct and having a good family are not the same thing as possessing a good character,” he added.
“No.” Lewis sighed, then his eyes sharpened slightly, as though he’d just realized something. “Do you know something I don’t?”
“Nothing specific,” Anthony responded, and it was the truth, as far as Lord Powell was concerned. “I simply find him plain, as you say, and wonder whether that is sufficient.”
Lewis studied him for a moment longer than was comfortable. Anthony returned the look with the flat composure he had spent the better part of his adult life perfecting.
And yet, he felt guilty. He felt it like a physical sensation, a specific pressure behind the sternum, which he identified with cold clarity. That was the cost of sitting across from a man who trusted him absolutely while knowing what he knew.
He had stood behind Lewis’s sister in a darkened library four nights ago. He had nearly put his mouth to her neck. He had listened to the sound she made and had wanted, with a completeness that was entirely unlike his ordinary transactions with willing women, to turn her around and find out what was underneath all of it. What was underneath the composure, the performance, the careful architecture of a woman who had learned to contain herself in rooms that could not accommodate what she actually was.
It was by sheer force of will that he had not. He’d managed to step away and send her back to the ballroom.
“Powell can wait,” Gideon said, with the air of a man steering the conversation toward calmer water before anyone capsized anything. “The Season is not over. Something better may yet present itself.”
Lewis considered this, looked as though he wanted to argue with it, and then apparently decided that Gideon was, for once, producing something adjacent to useful.
“Perhaps,” he conceded. He drained his glass, set it down with the decisiveness of a man concluding his evening. “I should go. Esther is waiting for me.”
He rose, clapped Anthony once on the shoulder with unceremonious warmth, and took his leave. Anthony found that the envy for his friend’s successful marriage grew more and more now with every time Lewis spoke so unashamedly of his wife.
Today again, he found himself suppressing the emotion.
The door opened, admitting a brief blade of frigid air before closing again.
A silence followed, and Anthony kept his eyes on his glass.
“The Royal Institution,” Gideon said with a lilt. “Thursday last.”
Anthony’s hand twitched, and he tried with every fiber of his being not to give anything else away.
“What about it?” Anthony’s reply was flat, unassuming, as though he had no idea about what his friend was talking about.
“An acquaintance of mine… Alderton, a chemist, lectures there on occasion.” Gideon settled back in his chair with the unhurried ease of a man with nowhere pressing to be. “He tells me he gave a private lecture last week. It was invitation only, you know, with a very small audience.” A pause of such deliberate calibration that it constituted its own sentence ensued. “He mentioned a familiar figure. A duke. Who sat at the back with a companion.”
Anthony looked at the candle on the table. The flame was entirely still.
“The companion interested him more, as it happens,” Gideon continued. “He described a rather slight young man with a grasp of analytical chemistry that had no business appearing in someone who had apparently wandered in off the street. Said he answered a question before the rest of the room had finished processing it.”
Gideon allowed another pause. It was not like him to do so unless he was making a point.
“He also noted that the young man had a rather… immature voice. Rather high for a man his age.”