Chapter Three

Catherine fixed her eyes on the plume merrily bobbing atop Lady Wisterberg's big, handsome head as they navigated the river of humans—London's finest—filing into Lord and Lady Clayton's grand Grosvenor Square house. Lucy, in lavender figured satin, was just ahead of her, spirals of brown hair bouncing at her temples with her every step. But Catherine had scarcely been able to do more than exchange compliments and greetings and smiles with Lucy: delighted to have a captive audience and full of high spirits, Lady Wisterberg had chattered about Lady this and Lord that, so many people and places Catherine didn't know the whole of the way there in the hack. She remembered none of it. Nerves melted all of her chaperone's words like snowflakes before they could settle into her brain.

At last, the crowd inside the ballroom came into view like jewels spilled from a pirate's chest. Splendor assailed her: bunting swooped from the ceiling, flowers and ferns exploded from urns, silk and satin gleamed on the women, and voices tumbled all over each other in shouts and laughter, competing with the sounds of a fine little orchestra.

Cat's heart fluttered like a trapped bird with excitement.

Lady Wisterberg expertly marched her charges forth through the throng, yodeling greetings and waggling her be-gloved, beringed fingers to people who turned to waggle theirs at her. It was already sultry with heat from all the bodies. Catherine was happy to have a chance to use her best silk fan, painted with a Northumberland scene.

At last they emerged into a clearing of sorts, spanned by a long table bearing enormous bowls of ratafia and rows of cups.

Lady Wisterberg made certain the three of them were served. Then: "Cheers!" she said, and tossed the whole of her cup back in a gulp.

Catherine blinked.

Lady Wisterberg filled another one. "I find it's always best to begin as you mean to go on!" She winked. And apparently she meant drinking, because she drained that one in only two gulps.

Catherine cautiously sipped at hers. Tasty enough, but nose-crinklingly strong. She knew better than to drink it quickly. She'd been too full of jittery, delighted anticipation to do much more than poke at dinner, and she'd decadently slept through breakfast, awaking to coffee and a scone surely fresh from the ovens of heaven. Thankfully Lord Kirke had not been about to further abrade her nerves; he'd clearly been off somewhere being important. He wasn't at dinner, nor had she heard him rustling about upstairs. But at intervals throughout the day she'd amused herself by muttering under her breath, I suspected cavorting, in a Welsh accent.

Lucy sipped hers, too. They shared a wry glance.

"Oh look, Lucy, isn't that Mr. Hargrove and Miss Seaver?" Lady Wisterberg waved at a young man and woman. "Such fine young people. They're your age, Miss Keating, I'll warrant you'll..."

She trailed off and went as rigid as a hunting dog flushing game.

A startling, raw yearning skittered across her expression.

Catherine whipped her head wildly about to see if anyone was watching Lady Wisterberg with similarly restrained passion.

"She heard the pop of a faro box," Lucy stage-whispered to Catherine.

"Goodness." Catherine wasn't certain what expression she ought to wear in response to this news. She tried to look supportive.

It seemed the room adjacent was scattered with little game tables. People wearing rapt expressions were collected around them.

"My dears." Lady Wisterberg's voice was tense and abstracted. Catherine realized her body had been ever so slowly rotating away from them, like a spring coiling. "I'll... I'll just be... a moment..."

And in a blur of ruby silk she bolted to the game room.

"That's the last we'll see of her this evening," Lucy said matter-of-factly.

"Oh no!" Catherine reeled.

"I'm so sorry," Lucy said, somewhat desperately. "I didn't know how to warn you! I think it would have been different if your aunt were here. They would keep each other company. But, ah, allow me to introduce Miss Bernadette Seaver and Mr. Hargrove." Her two friends had come to join them. "Come and meet my friend Miss Catherine Keating, who is visiting London from Northumberland."

Dizzied by Lady Wisterberg's potentially catastrophic defection, Cat nevertheless managed to curtsy. "How do you do?"

Miss Seaver was fair-haired and lissome in pearl-colored silk overlaid with bead-studded net; her features were as small and neat as a painted doll's. The tall Mr. Hargrove sported a swoop of chestnut hair and matching, sparkling eyes. Silver buttons winked on his waistcoat.

Something about the way Lucy and Miss Seaver at once arranged themselves around Mr. Hargrove—their bodies angled in his direction, their faces slightly tipped up—suggested they both felt a bit proprietary about him.

"The color of your dress is divine, Miss Keating." The word "divine" seemed to last a century, so elegant was Miss Seaver's drawl. Cat imagined describing it later for her father over the breakfast table when she returned home: "Papa, don't these eggs look diviiiine?"

"Thank you," she said shyly. "Your dress is so beautiful, Miss Seaver. You look like you're emerging from a mist."

This for some reason caused a surprised silence.

"What a charming thing to say," Mr. Hargrove said fervently, and smiled at her so warmly Catherine blushed.

"Yes," Lucy said almost suspiciously. As if this was a quality Cat had been deliberately disguising.

There ensued an odd little pause.

"Very daring of you to pair that color with those sleeves, Miss Keating," Miss Seaver said finally, speculatively. "Are you perhaps making a point that we ought not to have left mancherons behind in 1818?"

This sentence seemed perilous. It was as oblique as an intercepted coded message from an enemy spy. Cat had no idea what it meant.

"Thank you," she ventured, deciding to claim it as a compliment. "I suppose it might be daring," she added cautiously. "I have always thought them dashing." Mancherons were essentially little epaulet details on sleeves, and all the rage, at least at one time. Flattering to the silhouette. Or so she thought.

Perhaps they were daring? Would she be perceived as an Original in this ballroom full of slashed and puffed sleeves, which were the kind of sleeves that both Lucy and Miss Seaver were wearing? Was this a good thing? Or would people be mocking her behind their fans when she danced by? She'd thought her dress was pretty. It had two entire flounces.

She was embarrassed to ask the young ladies present for clarification, lest the depths of the things she didn't know be revealed and she find herself hurled bodily into the street amid cries of "Interloper! Fraud!"

Miss Seaver's gaze on her now seemed as cool and sharp as scissors. Lucy's was watchful, where it had been warm enough earlier.

She glanced uncertainly out over the sea of gorgeously attired people, and suddenly it seemed there were as many eyes as there were crystals in the chandelier above. Some of those eyes were aimed at her. Perhaps they thought the blue of her dress was diviiiine. Perhaps they found her sleeves shocking. Perhaps they were simply curious about her. Butterflies, some velvety, some spiky, began circulating in her stomach. In truth, she rather loved the notion of being new, after being known by everyone in her small town for so long. But she understood that people were often uncertain of newness.

Possibly many people here were nervous, just like she was. This notion cheered her.

She accidentally intercepted the gaze of a strapping young man topped in blond curls. He appeared to be gazing about the room, too. He offered a swift little smile full of white teeth before he turned away. Her heart gave a leap.

It was mortifying to think that Mr. Curly Blond would need to track a foxed Lady Wisterberg down at the game table if he decided he'd like an introduction.

Unless they somehow shared a mutual acquaintance. Lucy, for instance.

In short, she was at the absolute mercy of Lucy at the moment.

"I understand there will be Dance Espagnole this evening," Lucy said.

"Oh my. I haven't yet danced it, but I'm certain I could learn," she offered eagerly.

"It's not much more than a fancy quadrille," Mr. Hargrove assured her.

"My first two dances are taken—I promised them to Mr. Wallace and Lord Cutler when we were riding in the Row yesterday," Miss Seaver volunteered.

"As are mine, and the first waltz. The waltz is for Mr. Hargrove." Lucy smiled up at the young man, then darted a glance at Miss Seaver.

Who looked startled.

It was becoming increasingly, distressingly clear to Catherine that she would be unpartnered for the first two dances. At the very least.

And utterly alone in a crowded ballroom.

Her stomach muscles tightened.

She supposed she could always join Lady Wisterberg at the gaming table. Imagine if the silver lining of being a reluctant wallflower turned out to be gambling her way to wealth.

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," Lady Clayton 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 Palace on 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.

Farquar was lazy and afraid of many things, chiefly change and thinking. As change and thinking were famously Kirke's favorite things, Kirke scared him witless.

And what Dominic wanted to do was pass a law that would in essence deprive Farquar of his favorite cheap labor.

People were forever quoting his damned Freedom Speech at him. He'd given it a decade ago.

"It warms my heart that you've paid enough attention to my speeches to rank them, Farquar."

He sensed what was coming, and realized it was precisely the raw, red meat his feral mood craved.

"Doesn't look as though your lot will ever get the votes." Farquar shook his head with mock sympathy. "Your lot" meant the Whigs. "Don't you feel like the chap from Greek myth who pushes a rock up the hill over and over and never gets anywhere? Shishyfuss?"

The name exited Farquar's mouth on a fine, brandy-scented spray, a droplet of which landed on Dominic's cheek.

He stared at Farquar long enough for Farquar's amused smile to fade.

Then he delicately, slowly, and pointedly wiped his cheek with the tip of his forefinger.

"You must feel like Sisyphus every time you attempt to utter a word comprising more than two syllables, Farquar." He said this on a sympathetic hush.

The ensuing rustle of chuckles from the men around them turned Farquar's face a blotchy maroon.

"You'll get there eventually, old boy," Dominic added, with hatefully tender encouragement. "If there's anything you know I know, it's that I never, ever give up."

They stared at each other.

All of that would madden Farquar, particularly "old boy." Kirke, a baron of absolutely no pedigree, common as dirt, had been raised to the peerage by the king for years of exceptional public service. Farquar, a viscount, was the result of centuries of aristocrats with empty heads and bloated coffers mating with each other until the empathy was bred right out of them.

"Reminded me of that madman who roams Covent Garden shouting out lines from Hamlet. Blathers on and on," Farquar pressed on. "No one pays much attention to him, either." His gloating little smile was back. "Because he's mad, you see," he explained to the rest of the men. "Only a madman would do the same thing over and over with no result."

Pointing out that Farquar had clearly paid attention to his speech today was too easy. "I'll wager five pounds you can't say the word ‘soliloquy' right now," he said, taking pains to sound bored.

More laughter and calls for "Try it, Farkie! I could use a fiver!" And "Go easy on him, Kirke! We all know ‘s's' are hard!"

Farquar said nothing. With his mouth, anyway. His eyes shot poison darts.

Dominic sighed and shifted his weight to his other leg. "You know, I am aware you have a point, Farkie." So conciliatory was his tone that Farquar's demeanor relaxed by about three notches. "I do have a tendency to go on. At least I'm in relatively distinguished company when it comes to that. After all, no one was inclined to indulge the king about his divorce. And no one listened to Joseph Utley."

There were more good-natured chuckles. "If wives were that easy to get rid of, we'd all swap them out twice a year," someone mumbled.

"Who the devil is Joseph Utley?" Pangborne was smiling.

"The nine-year-old boy who died of an infection after he was whipped bloody by the foreman of Farquar's cotton mill for working too slowly."

Kirke said it almost conversationally.

Oh, how he loved precarious, loaded, dense silences. The delicious, shocked, abrupt stillness of men who had, for one moment, collectively stopped breathing. He could toy with them to his own ends. Lighten them, if he chose. Turn them into teetering monoliths that threatened to crash down upon them. Tighten the screws on the awkwardness.

He'd become an expert at disrupting complacency. It was the only thing that worked to chip away at the layers and layers of it.

His secret weapon was that he was perfectly comfortable with discomfort, his and theirs. Being common as dirt meant he knew how to, and was willing to, fight like a snarling dog in the street—both metaphorically, and quite literally—for those who didn't have a voice. But he'd learned thousands of better tactics since his more hotheaded years. Including a nearly impeccable sense of timing.

Those who crossed him often came away with the impression that he was—to quote the mistress who had hurled a lit lamp at him a day ago and nearly burned his house down—"a cold, ruthless bastard." But those who had come to know him—inasmuch as he allowed himself to be known—understood it was seldom personal. Much the way glaciers inexorably gouged out valleys and sculpted mountains over epochs, Kirke was uniquely designed—by dint of the sheer bloody-mindedness bred into him by brutal poverty, his Welsh parents, and living with his six semi-feral brothers and sisters—to reshape the English political landscape in favor of justice. He was an absolutely unstoppable force.

The so-called common people knew it. It was why he'd been elected again and again, and why they'd largely stood by him, even as the gossip pages did their best to undermine him and formidable forces were often arrayed against him.

A decade. That's how long he'd worked with like-minded others (many of whom had worked much longer than that) before they had finally passed the first laws abolishing the slave trade in 1810.

A decade. A grain of sand in the hourglass of time.

A mere eyeblink for a glacier.

Farquar hadn't a prayer against him.

The skin of Pangborne's face had gone peculiarly tight. One of the men finally shifted uneasily. All of them, in their tension, had visibly, unconsciously recoiled from Farquar.

Who was seething.

"No one listened to Joseph, either, when he sobbed for mercy," Dominic added, politely. As if the silence was a request for clarification.

He saw Pangborne's throat move in a swallow.

Several of the lords with whom he stood bothered to vote so rarely they were actually fined during the king's attempted divorce for not appearing in Parliament for the proceedings. Life was comfortable for them, whether they voted for anything or not. They didn't need to care. He genuinely liked very few of them. He didn't much care if they liked him. Liking was often beside the point in politics.

But most of them had consciences, at least a modicum of intelligence, and children. He might not ever be able to move Farquar. But he could bloody well use Farquar to move the rest of them.

It was so quiet in their little group that they could hear Farquar's audibly swift breath, sucked in and blown out of his sculpted nostrils.

"Funny," Farquar finally said, his voice pitched strangely high, "that you should show more concern for that guttersnipe than you do for your own by-blow, Kirke."

When he looked back on that moment later, Dominic was confident he didn't so much as blink.

But he went briefly as sick and airless as though he'd taken a fist to the ribs.

The blood flashed away from his skin, leaving him ice-cold.

And then nourishing, hot fury flooded in.

Suddenly the eyes of the men were fixed on him with avid curiosity.

"I'm afraid you must have confused me with someone else, Farkie," he said gently. "Or were you perhaps crossing in front of a mirror when the word ‘bastard' sprang to mind?"

Some instinct made him swiftly sidestep, and this was how he avoided taking Farquar's fist full in the mouth.

The part of him, which, of course, was causing Farkie all the upset.

But his head snapped back from the glancing blow, and all the men surged forward swiftly to seize Farquar's arms, restraining him, soothing him before he could cause a ruckus that would upset any nearby ladies.

They were prepared to restrain Kirke, too, but he held up his hand and shook his head: no need.

He touched his fingers to his mouth absently. He backed away.

And he fixed Farquar with the kind of black stare guaranteed to cause the man many, many sleepless nights wondering when he might hear from Kirke's seconds.

"If you'll excuse me, gentlemen?" he said mildly.