Page 6 of The Unlovable Lady

They came out of the dining-room an hour and a half later, the company loosened by wine and the marchioness graciously departed.

“So tell me about the gray gown,” Westcott said, arriving with two glasses and handing one over. “She is not your usual study, is she?”

“My usual study is what a woman is after. There is generally a great deal to find.”

“And with this one?”

“This one talked Lady Marchwood’s ruined order back into being when the dowager walked in three rungs above it — and ranked the Somerset half of the room to do it, which no other soul in London could have done. Then she gave her own place away to right the numbers, and steadied old Lady Pelham out of a faint while she was about it, and took the worst seat at the table for her pains, looking pleased to have it.” Dover heard an edge come into his own voice and did not much like it. “A useful woman needs thanking, Westcott. A useful woman makes quite certain you saw the use. I have watched a great many people be good in a room. I have never once watched somebody be good with no one looking.”

“And what, precisely, do you imagine she is after?”

It was the old question, the one Dover always had an answer for. It had always come ready and correct, and that readiness had kept him safe for two years. He opened his mouth to give it.

“Nothing,” he said. “That is the difficulty.”

Westcott did not crow. He only nodded, slowly, and drank his brandy.

“You will want to know who she is.”

“I have no particular interest in who she is.”

“No, none at all. You have merely watched her for two hours and refused your wine.” Westcott smiled, gently now, the needle laid aside. “Her name is Lady Rosalind Hartley, daughter to the Earl of Marbury. She has come up to Town with her aunt, Lady Holt. A widow, a house in Wimpole Street, and rather more sense than the rest of that family put together. She is six-and-twenty, uncourted, and so far beneath the Season’s notice that I daresay you are the only man in this room who knows her face.”

Lady Rosalind Hartley.

An earl’s daughter with no fortune to speak of, uncourted and apparently content to pass unnoticed. Dover looked across the room and found her seated beside the quietest lady in the company, some Somerset cousin who knew scarcely a soul in London. Rosalind listened as though the woman had said something worth hearing.

“You are doing it again,” Westcott observed. “Staying. It is gone eleven, Dover. Your door is behind the greenery, and you have not glanced at it this half hour.”

“I am aware of the hour.”

Westcott drained his glass. “Only promise me this. When you have worked out what she is after, you will tell me, will you not?”

He went off into the company.

Dover remained where he was.

He found the greenery-hung door at last, a full hour past his usual time, and went through it into the cold.

Yet one question followed him home through the dark streets.

What is it that you want, Lady Rosalind Hartley?

Chapter Three

Rosalind rose in the gray half-light and went down before the house was properly awake. A maid was already at the grate in the small breakfast-room, and the fire was well laid and needed nothing from her.

She stood in the doorway with her hands empty, wondering what she was to do with a morning that asked nothing of her. At Marbury she would have had the linens counted by now. She crossed to the window. Wimpole Street lay quiet under a thin December light, and her aunt had said, with some satisfaction, that it was not Mayfair and did not pretend to be.

“You are up before the chimney-sweep,” said Augusta, coming in.

“I did not like to lie abed in a strange house.”

“It is not a strange house. It is your aunt’s house, and you have a room in it.” Augusta settled herself at the table. “As far as I am concerned, the room has your name on the door. Now sit down and take some of this before it goes cold, for I find I do not enjoy watching a person hover.”

She fixed her niece with that steady, direct look which still made Rosalind want to study the curtains, and Rosalind sat. When had anyone last thought of her before she had thought of herself?

“I have written some letters,” Augusta went on, “and I will tell you of them, for I do not care to spring things on people. Madame Levasseur is to come at eleven.”