Not that he imagined Camellia too weak to bear it. But it could not have been clearer that she was unaccustomed to the load.
“I had not expected to dance this evening,” she confessed with a nervous twitch of her lips that might have been meant for a smile. “At least, not with you, Lord Ashborough.”
“You prefer to avoid the public eye.” His offer had been a selfish one, then. No, not even that, for dancing with her was against his own interests too.
He would much prefer to study her in private.
Her brow wrinkled. “The public eye? Why, I’m sure not a soul in this room has marked my existence. Their attention is all for you.”
Had he merely projected his own weakness onto every other man in the ballroom? He might have glanced around him to see if she was right—if he had been capable of looking away from her.
In contrast to the other women present, her dark hair was dressed simply, to the point of severity. Her spectacles caught the glare of the candlelight, effectively masking her best feature. And her dress was ill fitting, unbecoming, and at least a decade out of fashion, hastily made over from one of the countess’ castoffs, if he had to guess, and by someone with little skill with a needle, or else under orders not to reveal Miss Burke’s charms.
Further proof that Lady Merrick recognized the dangers of displaying her niece beside her daughter, of inviting comparison between interesting and insipid, sharp and dull.
Despite the dress, and despite her assurances, he could not quite convince himself that the collective eye of the assembly could overlook what was growing obvious to him: Camellia Burke’s extraordinary beauty. The blue-black sheen of her raven hair. The sparkle of her grass-green eyes. The promise of her slender body.
But would it be so surprising if the two hundred or so guests in Lady Montlake’s ballroom failed to see it? After all, she was teetering dangerously on the brink of spinsterhood; other men clearly had passed over this treasure of the Emerald Isle. By contrast, he had spent too much time since their stroll through Hyde Park imagining what it would be like to toss those wire-rimmed spectacles aside, tangle his fingers in the black silk of her hair, and put her curious tongue to better use than asking impertinent questions.
“You attend such entertainments frequently, I suppose?” she asked when the music began and the steps brought them together.
After their last encounter, he had not known whether to expect conversation—or rather, since she seemed never to be at a loss for words, he had not known what sort of conversation to expect. “No. My own small circle rarely intersects the broader realm of polite society,” he replied. “Foxy is my nearest brush with respectability.”
Pursed lips warred between amusement and disapproval. “One wonders which of you is more tarred by that brush.”
Fox. Unquestionably. If only she knew the number of times Gabriel had pleaded with him to forgo their friendship and save his own reputation. He surely would have had a preferment by now, perhaps something even more lucrative than the place that had been promised him, if not for his association with the infamous Lord Ash.
“Can you doubt how I suffer, Miss Burke?” he replied with forced glibness. “Ever under the watchful eye of our future clergyman? It’s a wonder I can dance at all.”
“Then I find myself doubly glad you asked me before my cousin,” she replied. “Once to save Lady Felicity from the uncomfortable scrutiny any partner of yours must endure.”
“Yes?” he encouraged, deliberately turning her toward him, rather than away as the dance demanded.
“And once to save her the embarrassment of dancing with a man who has forgotten the steps,” she chided, slipping back into her proper place.
When the dance at last ended, he ushered her through the curious but disapproving crowd, which again parted to make way for his passage, as if he were pitch and they wary of being defiled. In the crowded supper room, competing aromas of perfume and sturgeon and bodies combined to form a haze of scent that hung over the assembled company. He saw no sign of either Fox or Lady Felicity, so he steered Miss Burke to the last empty seats he could find, on the far side of the room. A nearby couple scraped their chairs across the floor, drawing away to avoid any appearance of association.
“May I fetch you some refreshment, Miss Burke?”
“No, thank you, my lord. I am not hungry.”
A pity. He so enjoyed satisfying a woman’s appetite. “Some wine, then?”
She conceded to that offer with a dip of her dark head. When he returned, she had drawn off her gloves and laid them aside. As her slender fingers curled around the goblet and lifted it to her lips, he spied a dark smudge of ink along the side of her right hand and speckling her first and second fingers—the mark of someone who had spent hours with her pen. Lady Merrick’s correspondence must be voluminous.
He had had similar stains himself, once, too stubborn for pumice. At school, translations of Latin and Greek had absorbed him, coming as they had at a time when he was desperate to find some meaning in those old adages about beauty in tragedy, desperate to find a way to allay his own suffering.
All his efforts had only proved that those grand truths were nothing more than lies.
“I assumed every English schoolboy was taught the classics,” she remarked as he seated himself beside her. An almost uncanny observation, given the direction of his own thoughts. But her conversation, like everything about her, seemed to be something out of the ordinary.
“Tortured into learning them, more like,” he corrected.
“Then I wonder why Lord Branthwaite should suspect you in particular of naming Mr. Fox’s dogs.”
Gabriel did not fool himself into thinking Branthwaite had meant the remark as a compliment to his wit. “Merely a jest between…” Fox’s eldest brother tolerated
