Neville exhaled. “Nothing less than my life, Harris.”
He meant every word of that pledge.
After all, what was his life to him if he did not succeed? With Millicent in danger, his very heart was at stake.
*
As the theater’slights brightened, the men around Millie stirred. Millie rose in unison with Lord Willard, who turned first to Lady Eltenham. The lady opened her eyes, blinking and frowning, then shook her head, as if disoriented.
“Bunch of butcher’s dogs we are,” murmured a young man behind Millie in the box.
“And so we are,” one added with a chuckle. “At least for now.”
Butcher’s…dogs? Millie stiffened. What did that mean?
A butcher’s dog would… She wasn’t sure.
Watch men slice things up? Guard meat they were never to eat?
That seemed the more likely of the two interpretations.
“Just be content to view the dairy,” the buck behind her said.
“The flat cockdoeshoist some pretty nice heavers,” the first man replied, in low tones that suggested agreement.
Willard sent the man a warning look—the first time she’d ever seen him don even the slightest of frowns all evening.
Millie stiffened. She’d no idea what they’d just said, but she was certain Willard’s friends had been talking about her. And, despite the word “nice,” she didn’t think she wanted to understand the compliment. She gripped her elbow.
Lady Eltenham nodded at her son as he helped her to her feet. At least her chaperone was not, as Millie had feared during the play’s first act, about to slip into eternal rest.
“Out with you, lads,” Willard said. “The coffee room’s quite fine, and the ladies need peace.”
Well, that had been thoughtful. More aligned with how he’d acted last night at Almack’s. Reassured, she let her gaze wander about the theater. Since they’d come late, she hadn’t had a chance to study much of the inside, excepting the stage.
The room was a horseshoe shape, with four tiers of grand boxes, all painted white, and prettily bordered with gold and green, except for one on her side, which, from what little she could see from this angle, was more elaborately decorated.
The royal box.
She glanced down. The pit below was slightly wider than deep and fitted with tiered benches. One man in a terrible rush had just made his way to the end of a row near the front. He looked like the one who’d caught her eye when they’d first arrived, the one who’d engaged in shocking flirtations with his companion.
She searched the bench for the distinctive blonde curls she’d seen resting on his shoulder.Oh! How rude!He’d left his “lady” behind and was hurrying away, the cad.
He shifted fluidly from side to side as he moved along the pit’s edge toward the orchestra, coming close to but never quite trampling those in his path. She frowned.
What made him seem familiar?
Certainly not his clothes. That shade of green! She shuddered.
His walk, perhaps? The shoulders that stretched the seams of his garish coat? The broad chest he displayed, each time he turned?
Despite moving in haste, he was not holding himself rigid, the way Lenora had done the other night, in a demonstration of Willard’s posture.
Millie slid a surreptitious glance to Willard, now guiding his mother toward the back of the box. Willardwasrigid. She judged Lenora’s mimicry of him more accurate with each passing moment.
She turned back to the pit. The man she’d been watching hesitated for a moment, running his hand through his graying locks. Even though that hair suggested a more advanced age, he called to mind the man she’d seen outside her window last night, the man she had thought might be Neville.
That was it! Like the man last night, he had shoulders similar to Neville’s.