“I know.” Anthony held his gaze without shifting. “Carver sent word. Tell him Wynford calls in the debt from February.”
A short silence ensued, during which the man’s eyes slowly moved to Caroline, a man taking inventory, calculating risk.
“She trouble?” he said.
“My bit of muslin,” Anthony said, with the easy, unbothered confidence of a man stating something entirely commonplace. “Lucky charm. I play better with company.”
The man’s mouth curved into the smirk of someone who had heard this particular variety of explanation before and found it both adequately convincing and faintly amusing. His eyes moved over Caroline once more with the frank, sliding assessment of a man who had just been told exactly what she was and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Caroline felt the look as a physical thing. Warmth flooded her face beneath the mask, and she said absolutely nothing, because she could not locate a single response that was adequate to the situation.
The door opened.
Anthony touched the small of her back to guide her through, and then they were inside. The door closed behind them, and he glanced at her sideways.
The corner of his mouth lifted. He leaned down, his voice warm in her ear. “You’re not scandalized, are you?”
She was. She also was not. That was the precise and deeply inconvenient truth of it.
She had been looked at before, of course; by suitors across drawing room settees, by partners across ballroom floors, by men who had assessed her dowry and her comportment and her brother’s connections and arrived at their calculations with the polished discretion of gentlemen who knew how to want things without appearing to. That she understood. That she had a language for.
This was entirely different. The man’s smirk had been without pretense, without apology, without the moderating veneer of theton— and the Duke had put her there, had placed her in that category with the careless ease of a man who had done it before and found it useful. Something about that notion was sitting in her chest in a way she could not cleanly identify as either insult or something else entirely.
She cleared her throat. “That was nothing,” she said, at what she was satisfied was a perfectly even pitch.
He did not appear perturbed. He appeared, if anything, more amused.
“Good.” He straightened, his eyes moving to the room ahead.
“Is that how they look at all the women here?” she asked.
He turned to glance at her.
“Will the others look at me like that inside?” she pressed.
His expression shifted, and the amusement was gone entirely, replaced by something she had seen only in fragments before, a flat invitation to violence.
“They may try it,” he said. “If they dare.”
He said it simply, as a statement of fact, and her heart thumped wildly. She turned toward the room ahead and said nothing further, which was, under the circumstances, the most dignified available option.
The room beyond was larger than the building’s exterior had suggested, with a ceiling that absorbed the candlelight before it could properly account for itself. The tables were arranged in the pattern of long use rather than deliberate design. The air was warm and close, threaded with tallow and tobacco and wine and something sharper beneath: the particular smell, she decided, of risk conducted indoors at intimate range.
And nearly everyone was masked.
Not all of them, really; some wore their faces plainly, through confidence or carelessness, but most woresomething. The variety of masks was extraordinary: elaborate dominoes trimmed with ribbon and feathers, plain black half-masks, functional as tools.
A woman near the far table wore a mask of deep ivory that covered her entirely from brow to chin and gave away nothing at all. She held her cards with the particular stillness of someone accustomed to being looked at and entirely uninterested in the stares.
What struck Caroline was not the masks themselves; however, it was what the masksdidto the room. There was a looseness here, a latitude, that she had encountered nowhere in a Season’s worth of drawing rooms, ballrooms, and morning calls. People sat closer to strangers than they would in any public venue. They spoke to people they would not have acknowledged on Bond Street. They laughed quickly and argued directly and looked at their cards with a focused, unguarded, wanting that her aunt’s three years of careful instruction would have trained out of every face present by the age of seventeen.
No one here was performing.
The recognition propelled a warmth in her chest that was not entirely unlike the warmth of the lecture hall; the same quality of stumbling into a room that had been kept from her and finding that she recognized it anyway, the way one recognizes a language heard only in secret and never spoken aloud.
The Duke moved beside her, his voice low. “Stay near me.”
“I intend to,” she said, and it was the truth. She could tell by the brief quality of his attention that he knew it.