Page 21 of The Unlovable Lady

“It wants something lighter, I think,” said Miss Faulkner, who plainly had no settled notion at all and refused to let that stop her. “After so plaintive a piece, one must judge the temper of a room.” She turned her chin to the angle her mother had taught her. “I daresay you find the same in your own house, Lord Dover, do you not? One must always be judging what will please.”

It was cleverly done for the daughter’s part, since her mother had given her an opening, a subject, and a viscount all three. On any other afternoon he would have let the charm slide past him and thought no more about it.

Then Rosalind went still beside him.

This was something other than her guarded stillness, which he knew well enough by now, the held breath, the color rising behind a quiet face. He understood it at once, because it was his own. She had seen it just as he had: the drift that was only pretending to be natural, the daughter brought near, the opinion made ready. Had she read it all in the same half-second? He was sure she had. She stood beside him seeing everything while performing nothing.

Warmth spread through his chest. Here, at last, was company. In two years of watching rooms he had never once stood beside another person who saw the same room he saw, and her silence made a better defense than his own wit had ever managed.

“I am no judge of what pleases a room,” he said to Miss Faulkner, courteous and exact. “I came to this one to be played at, and to be let off judging anything at all. It is a great rest.”

A small sound came from Rosalind’s direction, a breath let out a fraction too quickly through her nose, the ghost of a laugh from a woman who rarely laughed. It landed as surely as a hand set upon his sleeve, and it warmed him through.

“You are too modest, my lord!” exclaimed Lady Marbury, into a small silence she could not read. “Cassandra, you must go and choose the music yourself. There is no one with a surer hand for it.”

“I think Miss Faulkner is wanted at the tea-table, Lady Marbury,” said Rosalind, before Cassandra could be steered another inch. Her voice was flat and courteous and gave nothing to grip. “Mrs. Allerton was asking after help. There is a great deal of pouring to be managed and no one to manage it.”

“Surely the music must come first,” said Lady Marbury.

“The music will keep, while the tea will not.” Rosalind smiled at Miss Faulkner. “And Miss Faulkner has so sure a hand. It would be a great kindness.”

It was beautifully done, and Dover watched it land. She had taken the daughter’s own compliment, so sure a hand, and turned it gently into an errand across the room, then dressed the errand as a kindness that nobody could refuse without seeming unkind. Lady Marbury could do nothing but smile her warm cold smile, say how very thoughtful, and steer her daughter off toward the tea, whereupon the same easy drift that had brought the pair of them to his elbow carried them away again.

How had she managed it so smoothly? Miss Faulkner was gone from his elbow as cleanly as the frightened girl’s music had been set to rights, leaving the two of them by the instrument with the next song still unchosen and the room going on warm and loud around them.

“You did not have to do that,” Dover said.

“I did nothing. There was tea to pour, that is all.” She lifted one shoulder. “It was the simplest thing in the world.”

“It was not the tea.” He looked at her then, and she looked back at him, color climbing along her cheek even as she held his gaze. “You saw it all, the same instant I did. I am sure of it.”

“My lord⁠—”

“You saw her bring the girl near with that opinion ready,” he went on, “and you took her off my elbow before she could deliver it, and you dressed it as a kindness so smooth that the countess thanked you for it.” He shook his head slowly. “I have watched a great many people manage a room. I have never watched two people manage the same one at once, from opposite ends of it, without a word passing between them.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Across the room a new player was being coaxed toward the keyboard with the usual pretty protests, and he waited, since he had learned better than to fill her silences.

“It is only that I have stood where Miss Faulkner stood,” she murmured at last. “A great many times. I know what it is to be placed before a gentleman and expected to please him, and one learns to feel for the girl, whatever one thinks of the mother.” She drew a breath. “I did not do it for you, my lord. I did it for her. She wished herself elsewhere quite as much as you did, I am sure.”

“Yes,” Dover replied. “I daresay she did.”

That, he thought, was what disarmed him. Another woman would have used the moment, would have offered him a look from beneath her lashes or a studied accident of position, every small trick he could have named in his sleep. Rosalind had simply stood beside him and read a room with him, which made it the most disarming hour he had spent in London.

He had stopped looking for the flaw in her. The thought arrived quietly and refused to be got round. When had it happened? Somewhere across these weeks he had simply stopped, as a man stops bracing for a step that is no longer there, and only this moment had shown him it was gone, while he stood useless by a keyboard with a sheaf of music he had forgotten he held.

He had got that far, and no further, when she said the thing he was unbraced for.

“You did not come here for the music,” she said.

He looked at her. She was watching him now rather than the room, with the same level, steady attention he had spent a fortnight turning upon her.

“Why do you say so?” he asked.

“Because I have watched you in other rooms,” she said quietly. “You always know where the door is. Tonight you have not looked at it once.”

He looked at her.

“I think you came because you knew you might enjoy yourself.”