She took the parcel and the mask. She did not say anything further, because she did not entirely trust her voice at this particular moment, and she was not prepared to grant him that.
The anteroom was lit by a single lamp, and the dress, when she unwrapped it, was nothing like anything she had worn to a ball. It was made of garnet silk, simply cut, without any of the elaborate ornamentation that identified a woman of thetonat twenty paces. Despite the color, it was the dress of a woman who wished to pass through a room without announcing herself, and to look well enough while doing so that no one thought to ask questions.
It also fit…which was a fortunate guess, she assumed.
Or the result of a very particular kind of attention, a voice in her mind whispered.
She emerged eight minutes later, mask in hand.
The Duke was where she had left him, coat on, hat in hand. He looked at her in the way he always did with that level, unhurried attention. He said nothing long enough that she became acutely aware of the warmth of the garnet silk and the considerably more exposed décolletage than her usual evening dress afforded.
“Well?” she prompted, not quite sure what she wanted him to say…whatshe wantedto hear him say.
“The mask.” He reached over and took it from her without asking and settled it on her face.
His fingers were deft, barely grazing the sides of her face. The warmth of them was brief and entirely present, but she kept stilland looked at a fixed point over his shoulder until he stepped back.
“There,” he said.
Caroline cleared her throat once. “You are not wearing one,” she observed.
“No,” he replied, and did not supply anymore information as to why.
Caroline narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that wise?” She asked. “Will this not make me stand out even more?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But many of the women come in masks, so if you’re going to blend in, you must do as the Romans do.” He opened the door. “Come.”
She could not argue with that. She went with him, the anticipation now crystallizing into pure adrenaline that rushed through her system.
The carriage traveled east and then south, into streets she did not recognize. The fashionable geometry of Mayfair dissolved gradually into the older, uneven character of a London that had not been rebuilt for anyone’s comfort. Lampposts grew further apart. The noise changed; it became more immediate, strippedof the polished resonance of wide streets and replaced with something flatter, closer, more honest.
She did not speak, and neither did he.
He had taken the seat beside her rather than across, which he had done once before in a carriage, and for which he had offered no explanation then or now. The fact that his shoulder rested only a few inches from hers was a point upon which she was very carefully not dwelling.
Through the window, the city resolved into something more anonymous with every turning: a narrow lane, then another, a row of dark-fronted buildings that gave nothing to the street.
She thought, briefly and against her will, of the silence at breakfast. Of the way Lewis’s footsteps had paused outside her door that morning and then continued, as they had every morning since the argument that had not ended so much as calcified into a new shape of living.
She thought of Esther’s carefully neutral expression over the teacups, and the way the house had rearranged itself around the two of them like water finding a new course around an obstruction.
She turned her attention back to the window and kept it there until the carriage rolled to a stop.
The street was unremarkable to a degree that was itself remarkable: a short row of narrow buildings, one with a brass lamp burning low above an unmarked door.
No signage. No indication whatsoever that anything of interest lay beyond.
“Here?” she asked.
“Here.” He stepped out and waited.
A man stood to one side of the entrance, still enough that she had not initially registered him as a person rather than a shadow. He met the Duke’s gaze and exchanged something small and wordless before stepping aside. The door opened.
A narrow stone corridor led to a second door, guarded by another man. This one was older, with the settled, unruffled manner of someone who had assessed every person through this entrance for many years and found very few of them worth remarking upon.
The older man looked at Anthony with the flat, assessing patience of someone whose entire occupation was the accurate reading of strangers.
“Password’s changed,” he said.