But, like saying “bloody,” singing bawdy songs in public, smoking cigars, and marching up to young men to ask them to dance, gambling was yet another thing young, unmarried ladies weren’t supposed to do.
“Miss Keating, if I may be so bold... if you haven’t yet a partner for the third reel, I should be honored if you would stand up with me,” Mr. Hargrove said.
Lucy’s and Miss Seaver’s heads whipped toward him.
Cat’s heart lifted. Lovely! She was going to dance with a handsome young gentleman she’d only just met. She could hardly refuse; moreover, she wouldn’t dream of it, even if her presence seemed to complicate somewhat a story already in progress involving Miss Seaver and Lucy. She didn’t feel as though her season in London would begin officially until she danced.
“I should be honored, Mr. Hargrove, thank you.”
Moments later, her three companions were compelled to the floor by the start of the music for the first quadrille.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucy mouthed over her shoulder as her partner collected her, and she did look sorry. But not sorry enough to take pity on her and forego the dance. “I’ll find you here after this dance?”
Catherine nodded. And even though her stomach knotted, she honestly couldn’t blame Lucy one bit, and would not have dreamed of asking her to stay by her side.
Well.
She was not yet prepared to call the night a disaster. After all, one could not always predict the outcome of a story from a single event.
Nevertheless, it was undeniably disorienting to feel so alone when hundreds of people were milling about. She supposed it was yet another new experience, like encountering a sardonically furious, disheveled Whig politician in the hallway of her boardinghouse.
For a mad moment, it occurred to her that this—alone in a huge crowd—was what the world would feel like when the people who knew and loved her best were no longer in it. Everyone a stranger.
Tiny, icy fingers flicked her heart.
She took a bracing breath and scorned the impulse to hide. But she could hardly stand about alone, like a looby.
Several pots of lush ferns propped up on pillars formed a sort of grotto in the corner, behind which a cluster of staid, important-looking older gentlemen were talking amongst themselves. They seemed unlikely to notice her. Something about the green, growing things made her feel more at home. It was like finding a little bit of countryside in the middle of a ballroom.
So that’s where she tucked herself: in among the ferns.
She settled in to find things to enjoy about the dancing—the dresses, the music, the movement—until her reverie was interrupted by a voice: the same beautiful, resonant timbre that had nearly singed her eyebrows off with disapproval last night because he’d suspected cavorting.
“It’s just that it’s rather stirring to see him out of the corner of one’s eye in a crowded room,” LadyClayton had explained to her husband, who was fortunately secure in her affections, when she was compiling her guest list for the ball. “Like the Alps. He hasn’t an unappealing angle.”
(And one rather wanted to climb him, too, despite the risks, but she was wise enough not to say that aloud to her husband.)
Nor could Lord Kirke’s manners generally be faulted; after all, he’d learned them with the meticulousness with which one might learn another language. But one got the sense that he would swiftly strip out of them like a suit of clothes if it served his purposes. In fact, Lord Dominic Kirke always brought with him into the ballroom the faintest whiff of danger, the way one carried the scent of a stormy night in with them on their coat when they came in from the cold. He had not been raised among them. He had done things and gone places their blue-blooded friends would shudder to do or go. His mere presence was often enough to raise blushes in women and hackles in men, and in conversation, he was as likely to captivate as he was to unsettle. But he did it with a panache that even his enemies begrudgingly admired.
And if rumors were his constant invisible entourage—well, he was a veritable fortress of discretion. He did not engage in frivolous flirtations. There was not, in fact, a frivolous bone in his body. His liaisons were initiated with a carnal frankness and conducted with the same single-minded conviction with which he conducted everything else. They ended much the same way. And perhaps for that reason, not always well. Or quietly.
And he’d only shot the one man that one time. But then, he’d been challenged.
He was the frisson of delicious notoriety every aristocratic hostess wanted at her event and nowhere near their young daughters.
Which was fine, as everyone knew Lord Dominic Kirke never danced at balls.
Oh, but I’ve done that, he’d say, charmingly, self-deprecatingly, when asked about it. As though it was a rite of passage that could never be repeated, like going to Eton, or losing one’s virginity.
Tonight he stood on the periphery of the ballroom while that bloodthirsty mating ritual known as The Season played out on the dance floor. He held a snifter of brandy just to hold it. His smoldering mood required only a little prod to burst into flames. Too little sleep, and too much thinking, and the uncharacteristically unexceptional speech he’d managed to give on the floor of the Commons—despite these impediments and the general shambles of his life—had left him feeling as though a cue ball was lodged between his eyes.
He’d left his temporary boardinghouse home before anyone but the maids were stirring this morning and he hadn’t yet returned. He’d brought his evening clothes with him to the Commons. He’d only just remembered he needed to return by the eleven o’clock curfew. Last night he’d been handed a card featuring seven little commandments for living at the boardinghouse, and while he would have agreed to anything last night, he’d looked at them again this morning with more than a little alarm.
The curfew struck him as both ridiculous and, perversely, not unwelcome. As though it was the penance he deserved.
He was thinking about the unobjectionably excellent pillow in his little room at The Grand Palaceon the Thames and hoping the female in the room below him wouldn’t take it into her head to warble tonight when Lord Farquar, who was very drunk, said, “Heard your speech today, Kirke. About the sad urchins. Wasn’t quite the Freedom Speech, was it?”
Farquar, who owed his fortune in part to the orphans he harvested from workhouses and deceived into working near to death in his textile mills, was part of the circle of a half dozen or so fellow MPs with whom Dominic stood. They were somewhat obscured by large pots of riotously healthy ferns supported on pillars. None of the others had been present for his speech. It was a surprise to learn that Farquar had been.