“Don’t,” Anthony said, not even looking his way.
“I haven’t said a word.” Gideon smiled and moved toward Lady Hayward. Anthony took his seat.
The soup arrived. Powell spoke to Lewis about his Wiltshire estate at considerable length, and Anthony listened with the attention of a man cataloging the frequency with which management appeared when money did not.
Across and two seats left, Caroline smiled pleasantly and was entirely and precisely what she was not. He watched Powell watch her proprietarily, as though she already belonged to him and he was simply awaiting collection, and felt something in his chest he declined to name.
Powell addressed a question to Caroline about the spring weather and received a response about Latin that he processed, smiled at, and set aside. Anthony revised his earlier self-assessment: he was not being irrational. He was in possession of accurate information, and remaining civil about it was a considerable exercise in restraint.
“You have been to Wiltshire, Wynford?”
“Once. The terrain is flat.” He tried his best to keep his tone cool, despite the burn expanding in his chest.
Gideon produced a sound beside him that was technically a cough.
After dinner, the party withdrew. Anthony stationed himself at the drawing room window, doing nothing in particular, and he found himself wondering if he would have been better served not attending at all.
Across the room, Powell was working the crowd: the easy laugh, the attentive nod, the comfortable assurance of a man whose presentation had, until very recently, gone entirely unchallenged.
Anthony watched him and felt very calm about it. He heard her before she reached him. The particular sound of her shoes, which he had become, without any intention, capable of distinguishing.
“You have been staring at Lord Powell,” she said, low enough for only him, “with the expression of a man deciding whether to shoot him or merely frighten him.”
He turned. She was close. The pale dress and the lamp behind her produced an effect he was not going to acknowledge. “I have been perfectly pleasant.”
“The terrain is flat.”
“It is flat.” He could not help the twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“What is wrong with you tonight?”
He glanced across the room where Powell was laughing with Lewis, broad and easy, thoroughly at home in a drawing room he was in the process of deciding he deserved.
“Nothing,” Anthony said. “I simply understand better now why you made the list. Because Powell will make you thoroughly miserable. He is the most boring man I have encountered in recent memory, and I attend the House of Lords.”
Her chin came up. “He is steady. And respectable.”
“He thinks Latin is tedious.” He tilted his head fractionally. “He looked at you when you mentioned painting with the expression of a man revising a ledger entry.”
“You are being?—”
“Accurate.” He held her gaze. “You know I am. That is why you are angry.”
“I am not angry,” she said, in the voice of a woman who was.
“You have spent the entire dinner being precisely everything this room expects of you,” he said, quieter now, “and it is exactly as exhausting to observe as it must be to perform.”
The window was cold at his back, and she was warm, and the drawing room behind her held everyone with any legitimate claim on either of their attentions, and none of that was producing the intended effect.
He lowered his voice. “Come to me tomorrow night.”
She looked at him. The beat that followed was the particular one she produced when she was telling herself no, and the rest of her was declining to cooperate. He held the distance and said nothing else because he had found that silence, in these particular moments, did more work than words.
“I should tell you no,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
The lamplight caught the edge of her profile and the careful set of her expression. The thing beneath it that she had, at this proximity, stopped bothering to perform over.