Page 85 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

She looked back at the stage.

Oliver would have heard it. The thought arrived before she could close the door against it, and it brought others in its wake, crowding the dark of the opera box like uninvited guests. Oliver would have leaned toward her and murmured a remark about the tenor’s breathing, or the conductor’s posture, or the way the strings had entered two bars late and made the dissonance richer for the mistake. He would have watched her face while the music played, not because the performance bored him but because her reaction interested him more than the stage. He had always done that. At the Royal Academy, at Hartfield, at every event they had attended together, she had turned to find his gaze already on her.

She gripped the arm of her chair and pressed the thought down. The soprano sang on.

“The tenor is rather flat,” Frederick observed during the interval, setting the program aside at last. “Lord Ashton warned me. He heard the fellow in Bath and said the man lacked discipline.”

“I thought the soprano was extraordinary.”

“Was she? I confess I was distracted by the program notes. Did you know Mozart composed this in under six weeks? Remarkable, when you consider the complexity.” He sipped his champagne. “I have been thinking about the wedding breakfast. I spoke with my housekeeper this morning. She suggests a cold collation rather than a formal dinner. Less expense, less fuss.”

“I thought your mother preferred a formal dinner.”

“She does, but my housekeeper has convinced me otherwise. The savings are considerable, and frankly I see no reason to spend sixty pounds on a meal people will forget by Thursday.”

Louisa huffed out a breath. “Then why did you ask me to present a united front about the menu if the decision was already made?”

He paused, his glass halfway to his lips. “I have not made the decision. I am simply telling you what I think.”

“It sounds rather as though your mind is made up.”

He set the glass down. His expression carried the faint, injured confusion of a man unaccustomed to contradiction, the brief stalling of composure that always preceded his recovery. “I did not realize you felt strongly about the breakfast.”

“I feel strongly about being consulted.”

“You are being consulted. I am consulting you now.”

“Are you consulting me or informing me?”

The interval bell sounded. Around them, guests rose from their seats and returned to the corridor, silk rustling, conversation resuming in the bright gaslights beyond the curtain. Frederick studied her for a moment, then produced the careful, conciliatory smile he kept in reserve for conversations that had moved beyond the boundaries he had drawn for them.

“We shall discuss it further at home,” he said. “You are tired. The Season has been punishing.”

She was not tired. She was fully, painfully awake, sitting in an opera box beside a man who believed every objection she raised was a symptom of fatigue rather than a thought worth hearing. She folded her hands in her lap and watched the curtain rise on the third act, and she did not look at Frederick once for the remainder of the evening.

* * *

“And the surveyor had the audacity to claim the measurement was approximate.” Frederick set down his spoon and addressed Lord Cresswell across the table. “Approximate. I told him I did not pay for approximation. I paid for precision.”

Lord Cresswell nodded politely. Louisa sat quietly. As expected, Frederick had not brought up the wedding breakfast in the past three days—and she did not expect him to bring it up again, especially today.

“I drafted the solicitor’s letter myself,” Frederick continued. “Three pages. Every discrepancy itemized. Every precedent cited. My solicitor said it was the most thorough correspondence he had received from a client in twenty years.”

“Very diligent of you,” Lord Cresswell said, reaching for his wine.

Louisa finished her soup. She had not spoken since the fish course, when Frederick had answered a question Lady Cresswell had directed at her about the wedding date. He had answered it pleasantly, thoroughly, and without pausing to check whether Louisa might prefer to answer it herself.

“The trouble,” Lord Cresswell said, turning his glass by the stem, “is that our own registry has complicated matters further. The western boundary has been in dispute since my father’s time, and the county office cannot seem to locate the original survey.”

“You should write to them,” Frederick said. “Firmly.”

“The registry office at Guildford handled a dispute for my father’s property in Surrey,” Louisa offered.

Frederick glanced at her. Lord Cresswell set down his glass.

“The eastern boundary had been recorded incorrectly since 1794,” she continued. “My father discovered the error when the adjoining landowner attempted to fence a strip of meadow that had belonged to our family for three generations.”

Lord Cresswell leaned forward, his eyebrows rising above his spectacles. “And how was it resolved?”