Page 23 of The Unlovable Lady

“What look, Aunt?”

“You have walked into a room and seen everything wrong with it, and now you mean to put it right. I daresay I shall see you again only when the dancing begins.”

“I shall be of use,” Rosalind replied. “It is a great deal to arrange, and they are short-handed.”

“They are always short-handed. It is the nature of a ball to be short-handed, is it not? You need not carry the whole burden yourself.”

“I should like to! I am far better employed than standing about. Only look at the greenery. It is in a sad muddle.”

Augusta gave her a long, dry, measuring look. “Very well. Be of use. But you will dance when you are asked, Rosalind, and you will not contrive to be elbow-deep in holly at the very moment the invitation comes. I have seen you work that trick before, and I shall not let you work it tonight.”

“Aunt, I hardly think anyone will ask.”

“I am in the room, and I shall be watching.” With that, Augusta went off toward the fire and the other matrons.

Relief poured through her limbs, for in a room full of accomplishments belonging to other women, this task was one she understood entirely. She had come in the green gown, since Augusta had simply had it laid out, yet the work proved the cure for it. Bent over a side-table with her hands busy below the notice of the room, she was nobody in particular, which was exactly what she knew how to be.

She took the swags down one by one and re-tied each with a small stone worked in low at the back of the holly. She had a footman wedge the garden door, and a quiet word to the under-butler sent the late carriages round to the further door, all of it unasked and unthanked, as she had long since stopped expecting either.

The rooms warmed and looked very well, and Rosalind stood at the edge of it and felt for a while entirely content. Lord Dover’s arrival escaped her eye, though the talk near the door changed its note.

“You have done all this,” he said.

He stood across the side-table from her in evening black. Another gentleman would have opened with a courtesy.

“Lord Dover.” She dipped a small curtsy. “I have sorted some greenery, nothing more. The Glanvilles’ people did the rest.”

“The Glanvilles’ people did not wedge the garden door. I came in by it a quarter of an hour ago, when the draft very nearly took my hat, and again just now, and the air stood perfectly still. Between the one and the other, there was you.”

“You make a great study of garden doors, my lord.”

“I make a study of who sets a room to rights without being asked.” He set his hand upon the table’s edge, reaching for nothing. “They will dance under your swags and sup at your table, and go home saying the Glanvilles kept a handsome evening. And you will let them.”

Heat rushed up into her cheeks, which sent her bending over the bay to hide it. “Anyone might have done it.”

“Anyone did not.” He spoke without any heat, just as he had spoken about the ivy, which left her without a single door to put the remark through. “You find whatever is wrong and quietly put it right, then vanish from it, so that the room looks well and nobody can say why. It is a kindness done backward. You give the gift, and then you take your name off it.”

Words failed her, for the observation came too near the truth, and every deflection she owned refused to fit it. He stood across the bay and let the silence stretch far past what any silence had a right to in a crowded room.

What answer existed for a man who looked at the work, named the woman, and then simply waited, wanting nothing in return? The waiting left her stranded in the open with her usefulness stripped away.

“They are forming a set,” Augusta announced, having come up unhurried at Rosalind’s elbow, and there was wickedness beneath the dryness. “The first of the evening. Lord Dover, I believe you came over here to ask my niece to stand up with you, and were prevented by a great quantity of holly. Allow me to remove the holly from the conversation.”

“Aunt —”

“Rosalind, you have sorted enough bay for any three Christmases. Go and dance.”

“Lady Holt is quite right,” Dover agreed, “though I had not yet got so far as the asking. She has read the thing before I said it, as ever.” He looked at Rosalind across the table. “Lady Rosalind, will you stand up with me?”

And there it was. With the greenery sorted and Augusta standing by, her brow already lifting, every last task between Rosalind and the answer had disappeared.

“I will,” she said, and when he gave her his arm to the set, she had to let her hands be empty to take it.

She had stood beside him at a wire frame, at a long table, and by a window, always with something in her hands. Now the dance required nothing of her but the figure and, by turns, his gloved hand.

Her hands felt absurdly empty. Her heart began to pound beneath the green silk.

The music began. They bowed and curtsied, the line moved, and the dance had them.