Page 7 of Duke of Moonstone
There was a pause that lasted long enough that she was genuinely unsure, for two or three of the longest seconds of her life, which way it was going to go. Then he turned back toward the staircase, and they continued walking.
Frances discovered that it was possible to feel profound relief and profound terror simultaneously, a new experience she did not particularly wish to repeat.
The ballroom was everything Eleanor had promised, full to the point of warmth and bright with candlelight, two hundred people in costumes, and masks moving and talking and dancing. Frances let out a slow breath.
Here, at least, I am simply one person among many.
The Duke drew them to a stop just inside the doorway. He surveyed the room for a moment with the look of a man taking inventory, and then he turned to her.
“Ensure your dance card is full tonight,” he said. “I will be watching you.”
Frances looked up at him, and behind the mask, she pressed her lips together against everything she wanted to say, which was quite a lot. Instead, she curtsied and said nothing at all which she suspected was the most Eleanor-like response available to her.
He held her gaze for one more moment then moved away into the crowd, and Frances turned to face the ballroom and began the work of becoming someone else entirely.
She knew Eleanor’s circle well enough—three Seasons of shared dinners and assemblies and morning calls had seen to that—and she moved through the room with the particular confidence of someone who knew exactly which conversations to join and which to avoid.
She danced when asked, spoke when spoken to, and laughed at the right moments, and if the mask helped considerably, she was grateful for every inch of it.
It was going rather well, all things considered, until a young woman in a blue domino caught her arm with a delighted smile.
“Lady Eleanor! I had begun to fear you were not coming. Where, might I ask, is your friend Lady Frances? I did not see her arrive.”
“Indeed, I am surprised she is not here,” another young woman agreed, appearing at the first one’s elbow with the timing of someone who had been waiting for a gap in the conversation. “You two are quite inseparable.”
Frances smiled. “Lady Frances is indisposed tonight, I’m afraid. A tiresome headache. She sends her regrets.”
The young women made sympathetic noises, and the conversation moved on, and Frances filed away the small, strange feeling the exchange had left in her chest to examine at a later time.
She had been to dozens of balls in the past three Seasons. She had danced at all of them, pleasantly enough, with the small,rotating collection of men who either did not know about the Pembroke debts—which had been repaid—or did not care. The rest of theton,though not unkind, usually avoided her company.
She had grown used to it, but tonight, wearing Eleanor’s name, she had danced four times before supper and had three more requests she had been obliged to decline.
So that is how it is, she thought, watching a young lord she recognized bow over her hand with an attentiveness he had never once directed at Lady Frances Pembroke in three years of shared social engagements. She filed that away too, under a different heading.
The evening wore on, and the nervousness that had been manageable in the first hour began to accumulate. Across the room, she could see the Duke—not difficult to spot, even masked, given that he was the tallest man in the room.
He was not always looking at her, but often enough that she felt it, and when she turned and found his gaze across a room full of people, it was like walking into something solid and having to correct her balance.
He is watching me because he thinks I am Eleanor,she reminded herself.He is watching because he is suspicious of Eleanor. It has nothing to do with me.
This was a perfectly rational thought, and she was going to keep thinking it.
By half eleven, her nerves had reached a pitch that she did not think she could sustain much longer without something giving way. She worked her way gradually toward the edge of the room, paused to exchange a few words with a group near the doors to the terrace, and then, when no one was looking directly at her, she slipped through them and out into the night.
He had been watching her all evening.
Alexander was not entirely sure when the unease had begun. It was somewhere between the second dance and the supper interval though he could not have said precisely what had unsettled him.
Eleanor had performed well enough. She had moved through the room with ease, spoken to the right people, and filled her dance card as he had instructed. By any observable measure, the evening had proceeded exactly as he had intended.
And yet...
As he watched his sister laugh at something Lord Ashworth’s youngest son said, a thought nudged the back of his mind.
She is taller, and that is not due to shoes.
He had noticed it at the top of the staircase and accepted the explanation readily enough. Eleanor was prone to theatrical choices, and the shoes were not impossible, but the thought had not quite left him. Nor had the stillness. Eleanor was not a stillperson. She moved through rooms the way she moved through conversations with an energy that sometimes exhausted him. Tonight, she was contained, somehow. Present but careful, and Eleanor had never once been careful in her life.
