Page 46 of The Unlovable Lady

“It might. A great many things might.” His thumb moved once, gently, at her cheek. “And are you sorry it is said?”

“No.” The word came out of her sure and at once, and she was startled by the speed of it. “No, I am not sorry.”

“Nor I. You have said it now, and I shall not let you take it back and lay it at the door of the mistletoe. There is no mistletoe in here, you will observe. What will you blame now? You have nothing left but me, and I find I am glad to be blamed.”

She laughed before she could stop herself, and he smiled at the sound. For a moment neither of them said anything.

Then Augusta’s voice came through the gap in the door, and it had changed.

Gone was the dry recall, gone the pitch that carried a joke. The voice came low and even and careful, and Rosalind heard the care in it before she heard the words, for her aunt only spoke with that deliberateness when a thing had landed where it mattered.

“Rosalind. When you have found the fan, child, come out to me. The carriage is sent for. We are going home a little early tonight.”

Cold slid down Rosalind’s spine. James drew back to the correct distance with the public look coming over him, and the glad ease still sat on his face, for the change had passed him by entirely. Only she knew the weather of that voice. She stood with the fan in her hand and the kiss still warm on her mouth, and beneath the bright, whole joy of it, fear laid one cold hand on the back of her neck.

It was the same care Augusta had used over the teacup, the same half-degree of stillness, with the dry wit come late or missing altogether. Something had reached her aunt in the half-hour Rosalind had been out of the room — some look across the cards, some half-caught word, some cooling at the edge of the company that Rosalind had been too far inside her own happiness to feel. Augusta had felt it, and she was sending for the carriage early, and there was no joke anywhere in her voice.

Rosalind came out of the library with the fan and found her aunt waiting in the thinning room, her cloak already over her arm and the company smile gone from her face altogether. Augusta looked at her for a long moment, the straight unhurried look that was its own affection, and then glanced once past her, toward the warm bright room where, very quietly, a whisper was beginning to spread.

“There is a thing I must say to you when we are home and the doors are shut,” Augusta said, low, only to her. “I have left it too long. I had hoped to leave it longer.” Her hand came to rest on Rosalind’s arm, steady, as a hand rests on a thing it means to keep. “Come away now, child. Whatever you carried out of that room, carry it carefully. You are going to need it.”

“Yes, Aunt,” Rosalind managed, though her mouth had gone dry.

Chapter Fifteen

Rosalind pressed her gloved fingers to her lips in the darkness of the carriage as it rattled home toward Wimpole Street, then took them away again at once, for fear her aunt should see. Lord Dover had kissed her, and she had told him that she loved him.

I love you, James. She had spoken the words aloud, in a low warm room, and he had not turned away from her.

“We are home,” Augusta said.

Rosalind glanced at her aunt in some surprise, for Augusta had not spoken once the whole way from the Thornes’. She had sat with her face turned to the dark glass, though silence was never her habit. A small cold thread of unease worked in beneath Rosalind’s gladness.

They went in together, and Augusta led the way to the small parlor at the back, her own particular room, where the work-baskets lived and the miniatures stood upon the chimney-piece and no callers were ever shown. Rather than going up to her bed, she warmed her hands a moment at the grate and then spoke without turning.

“Shut the door, child.”

Rosalind did as she was asked, though her heart had begun to beat a little faster.

“Come and sit by me.” Augusta crossed to her own good chair and sat very straight, folding her hands in her lap. “Not there. Here, where I can reach you. I find I should like to be able to reach you for this.”

“Aunt, what is it?” Rosalind sat, though the gladness in her made her slow to read the room. “You have been strange all the way home. You sent for the carriage a full hour before you meant to. Has something been said of me? If someone saw Lord Dover and me at the⁠—”

“It is not the party.” Augusta gave her the straight, unhurried look that was its own kind of affection, though tonight it stayed rather than passing on, and the staying frightened her. “Though I will not pretend the party has nothing to do with it. You have made a match, Rosalind, or you are very near to making one, and the whole room saw it.”

“Then why do you look at me so gravely?”

“Because I am glad of it, and I want you to hear that I am glad before I say the rest.” Augusta’s voice was steady. “He is a good man, and he sees you truly. I have watched a long while to be sure of it, and I am sure.”

“The rest?” A knot tightened in Rosalind’s stomach. “Aunt, you are frightening me, and you have never once frightened me. You tell me the true thing, for that is what you are through and through, so tell it to me now.”

“There is a thing I have kept from you.” Augusta’s hands lay perfectly still in her lap, with the stillness of a woman who had decided to spend something and meant to spend it cleanly. “I have kept it eleven years. Your mother gave it to me near the end, when she could not carry it alone any longer. I swore I would carry it to my grave, and I meant to, but tonight the whisper began to move. I felt it at the cards, in a face or two cooling at your name when they believed I was not attending.”

“A whisper?” Rosalind’s breath caught. “What can anyone have to whisper about me?”

“A whisper that has begun to move cannot be stopped, but it can be got ahead of, and I mean to get ahead of it.” Augusta leaned forward. “You shall hear it from me, in my own house, with the doors shut, before the Ton can fling it at you in the middle of a crowded ballroom. You will not be ambushed, not while I am living, for whatever else has been done to you, that one thing shall not be.”

The gladness ran out of Rosalind like water from a cracked jug, slowly and then all at once, and fear crept in to fill the place it left.