Page 133 of How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days

Lady Phoebe made a half-hearted move to follow them.

‘Perhaps you ought to have a rest, my lady,’ Reeves suggested quietly. ‘I can fetch some—’

But in the next moment Lady Phoebe was shaking her hair back and standing tall.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘We have guests, Reeves! And the fireworks are soon to start. Miss Hanworth, I will need my domino and loo mask back. Elspeth will fetch you others.’

‘Yes – of course,’ Lydia said, unfastening the buttons of the cloak, and handing it over.

Lady Phoebe clapped her hands, briskly, and began leading the way back to the shining windows of Hawkscroft House.

Ashford and Lydia followed, at a slower pace.

‘Thank goodness you arrived when you did,’ Lydia marvelled.

‘You were incredible,’ he said.

‘So were you,’ she said.

‘The bravery …’

And they were talking over one another, as they seemed always to do, but gabbling and giddy rather than cross and crotchety.

He put a hand to her arm, stalling her.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I mean it – thank you. What we would have done, if you had not been here …’

He shook his head as if to rid himself of the possibility.

‘You were incredible,’ he repeated and Lydia, not usually one for blushing, felt her face turn blisteringly warm.

‘Come along!’ Lady Phoebe’s voice beckoned them imperiously from the entrance hall. They both startled.

Ashford exhaled around a laugh. ‘We had best go inside.’

They paused only for Lydia to accept from Elspeth a new domino and mask which she hastily put on in the deserted entrance hall, before following Lady Phoebe’s procession towards the ballroom. There, the festivities were still in full swing. The band still playing. The candles still burning. No one seemed to have noticed anything was in the least amiss.

‘Well then,’ Ashford said. He turned to Lydia and gave a superfluous wave of his hand. ‘May I have this dance?’

Lydia made a great show of looking left and right for another partner – pretending to consider a florid gentlemen wearing a domino of bright emerald green standing nearby – before placing her hand in his.

‘Good of you,’ he said.

‘Young ladies of quality ought to partake in charity every now and then,’ she said primly, and he snorted a laugh as they swept together onto the dance floor, arm in arm.

Lydia felt suddenly awash with the relief of it all, the tension that had knotted her spine ever since she and Ashford and Lady Phoebe had met in that drawing room releasing with every exhale.

‘I can hardly believe it,’ she said, as they took their places opposite each other.

There was so much contained with the sentiment. I cannot believe it is over and I cannot believe it happened but also, I cannot not believe anything that had happened, these past nine days.

‘I know,’ Ashford said, and she believed he did know. For who else could understand exactly how she was feeling, in that moment, than he?

The musicians struck up a lively tune, one of Lydia’s favourite country dances, so full of spins and jumps and hops that on the most ordinary evening one could not help but smile. Tonight, so very much no ordinary evening, they had hardly begun the first shape before she began to laugh, her giddiness rising and rising as they began turning, swapping partners and returning to one another – and she saw that Ashford was laughing with her. Not the modulated laugh he commonly gave when appreciating a witty comment, or the forced chuckle when amusement was socially wise, but something rather more helpless, spilling out of him as if he could no more contain it than keep the world from turning. The sound of his delight made Lydia’s exhilaration ratchet even higher, and as they stepped towards one another again, clasping hands and spinning once more, faster and faster, Lydia felt she might burst from the joy of it all.

The dance ended too soon.

‘Another!’ she demanded, even before she had risen from her curtsey. ‘Let us remain for another.’