Page 4 of The Unlovable Lady

“You might try standing in the middle of it all,” he said. “I am told the view is much the same, and the punch is nearer.”

Dover glanced toward the middle. Lady Marchwood’s Christmas dinner was the great effort of her year — thirty covers, London leavened with her husband’s Somerset people come up for the Season — and the Season was young enough that the débutantes still believed the whole business meant something. Near the fire, a girl in blossom-pink laughed rather too long at something a man twice her age had said. Her mother, watching from two yards away, looked satisfied. Across the room, a young gentleman delivered a clearly rehearsed witticism and glanced about to see who had heard him be clever.

“From the middle, one is surrounded by people deciding what they want from him,” Dover said. “I prefer the wall. No one asks anything of a man standing here.”

“No, though every matchmaking mother in Mayfair knows exactly where to find you.” Westcott tilted his glass toward the company. “You have made yourself a fixture, Dover, the viscount who stands apart. It is thought very romantic. Three of them are looking at you this very moment, composing their introductions.”

Dover did not turn his head. “Two of them. The third is looking at the door, just as I am, and I would guess for the same reason.”

“And which door is yours tonight?”

“The one behind the greenery. I shall be through it by eleven.”

“You will, I am sure. One could set a watch by your leaving.” Westcott sounded like a man collecting on a private wager. “I have half a mind to stay, only to see whether the Season can ever hold you past midnight. Though I fear I should grow old waiting.”

Dover let the remark go by. It was an old needle, and Westcott meant nothing cruel by it. His friend had watched him leave every gathering at the same hour for two years now, until the leaving had grown tiresome to him. Dover found it tiresome himself, if he was honest.

So he watched the room instead, until the only thing in it worth a second look proved to be the very thing nobody else was looking at.

She stood a little apart, near the dining-room doorway, in a gray gown that had been a better color two Seasons ago and had since been made over with more sense than money. She was not pretty in the way the room counted pretty, so the company had looked past her entirely. She seemed quite content that it should.

But her eyes stopped him. They went over the room just as his own did, steadily, cataloguing, counting, missing nothing. She seemed to be keeping account of something, though he could not tell what. A small, unfamiliar curiosity stirred in his chest, and he did not entirely trust it.

She had spent the better part of the hour, he had noticed, at the unfashionable end of the room — among the Somerset cousins and the rest of the country contingent, guests the company had written off on sight — listening a great deal more than she spoke. Finding her level, he had thought, and had thought no more about it.

An older woman stood at her side now, upright and handsome in navy silk fresh from the modiste, wearing the dry, settled look of a lady who had sat through a great many dinners and been awed by none. Now and again she said a low word, and the girl in gray bent her head to listen.

“Lady Holt,” said Westcott, following his glance. “By the door, in the navy silk. I would scarcely have known her, for I thought she gave up London society altogether when she was widowed.” He frowned. “The lady with her I do not know. Some relation, I should think.”

Then a footman came to the hostess with word from the hall and murmured a name to her, and everything changed in a moment.

Dover saw her hear it. Color climbed into her cheeks, while her smile stiffened into something that was no longer a smile. He understood the disaster almost before the footman had finished speaking, for he had been raised to understand exactly this.

“The Dowager Marchioness of Stillingbourne,” Westcott said. “I did not know she was expected.”

“She was not. That is the whole trouble.”

The hostess did the one thing she could not refuse to do. She went forward, smiling, to greet the great lady, since a dowager marchioness who arrives unlooked-for must be received at once, and received as the gladdest surprise of the year. Lady Marchwood turned her whole face toward the door, and her charm with it, though it meant leaving her dinner in ruins behind her with no one to mend it.

Lady Holt and the girl had seen the trouble as quickly as he had. The older woman’s head turned sharply, a word passed between them, and the girl’s gaze went to the dowager, then down the long double room toward the dining-room doors, then back again. Everyone else had yet to catch up to the danger. Those two had it already.

Something in Dover’s stillness must have reached Westcott, for his voice dropped a degree. “You have gone quiet on me. What am I not seeing?”

“A ruin, unless I am very much mistaken.”

“A ruin? Over one late guest?”

“A dowager marchioness is the highest rank in this room by three rungs. She must be handed in first, on the host’s arm, ahead of every soul who has been promised a better place this fortnight.”

“Then they move her up. Every man and woman here has known their own precedence since the nursery, and everyone else’s besides. The room will sort itself while the soup cools.”

“Half of it will.” Dover did not take his eyes from the hostess. “Half of this room is London, and Lady Marchwood knows exactly how they must go in. The other half came up from Somerset on Tuesday — cousins by marriage, county people, and the Dean of Wells and his lady among them. She has spent a fortnight working out who may properly be paired with whom.”

“Then she alters the order.”

“In four minutes? While receiving the highest-ranking lady in the room and pretending her arrival is the happiest surprise imaginable?”

Westcott looked again toward Lady Marchwood. “I begin to see the difficulty.”