Chapter the First: On the Matter of Lady Octavia’s Curious Affliction in the Presence of Old Friends
The chandeliers of St. Michael’s Palace broke the gaslight into prismatic shards that drifted across the marble floor of the ballroom and dappled the assembled nobility in gold and shadow. For one evening the northern house had put off its customary austerity; its ancient halls brimmed with the cream of Yorkshire society, whose voices rose and fell in counterpoint to the measured strains of the orchestra. Beyond the tall windows, frost wrote its delicate calligraphy upon the glass, and the bitter winter night was held at bay by fires roaring in hearths wide enough to stable horses.
Octavia Blackwood twirled at the edge of a laughing circle of young ladies, her chestnut curls slipping their pins as she rendered Lord Hallowell’s pompous bow with theatrical exactitude. Behind their lace-edged fans her companions’ shoulders shook. Their eyes crinkled above pressed lips, and for all their efforts at decorum, a snort or a smothered gasp escaped now and then.
“And then,” she went on, sinking her voice to the elderly lord’s gravelly rumble, “he declared that no lady of quality would dare to wear sleeves so abbreviated.” A sweep of her hand towards the fashionable brevity of Miss Thornton’s own sent the circle into fresh, muffled hysterics.
“Octavia, you’re positively wicked,” Elizabeth Hartwell chided, with not a trace of real disapproval. “What if someone should hear you?”
“Then they’ll discover I possess a talent for mimicry that my governess entirely failed to suppress.” That good woman had laboured for years to teach her the languid boredom thought proper in a young lady of family, and had at last retired from the field defeated. Unlike so many of her peers, Octavia could not keep her face composed in a world so determined to amuse her, nor see why propriety should so often stand between a person and her enjoyment.
Her gown of brown muslin had been chosen for ease rather than concealment. Its simpler cut let her move without the ceaseless fussing that grander toilettes demanded, and its warm shade answered the hazel of her eyes and the natural colour in her cheeks. She had no patience with the pallid, languishing look so many of her contemporaries cultivated.
“Speaking of impropriety,” Sophia whispered, leaning in until her breath stirred the curls at Octavia’s temple, “have you observed how often Lady Castleford happens, quite by accident, upon Captain Lloyd behind the potted palms?”
“Thrice within the hour.” Octavia arched a brow. “I’ve been keeping count. Her husband, meanwhile, seems quite enchanted by the punch bowl.”
“Octavia!” Elizabeth’s gasp held no real shock, and her face was bright with interest. “You oughtn’t to notice such things.”
“Why ever not? It’s a great deal more diverting than pretending to care about the weather and the price of ribbon.” Octavia lifted her champagne, and the bubbles winked in the light as she surveyed the room over the crystal rim. She had always preferred watching to taking part in the rigid choreography of the ton. Not that she disliked dancing, for she loved it dearly; it was the performance demanded between the sets that wearied her more than any reel.
“Don’t look now,” Sophia murmured, nudging her, “but James Ashworth has been watching you these five minutes together.”
“James?” Octavia laughed and turned at once, warning or no. “He’s practically a fixture at Blackwood Manor. We’ve been climbing trees and courting trouble together since I was in leading strings.”
Across the room her old playfellow met her eye and raised his glass in a small salute. His blue coat sat close upon the breadth of his shoulders, and the gaslight made his golden hair almost luminous; a single lock had tumbled over his brow in what Octavia suspected was a most carefully calculated disorder. The rising star of Parliament wore his power as he wore his cravat, loose enough to look effortless and arranged with precision for the greatest effect.
“Fixtures don’t look at young ladies in quite that manner,” Elizabeth observed, and the circle dissolved into giggles once more.
Octavia rolled her eyes. “James looks at everyone in that manner. It’s how he persuaded your cousin to lend him that stallion last season.”
“And how he persuaded my sister to walk with him in the garden for a scandalous quarter of an hour at the Millerson ball,” Sophia added, with a knowing smile.
“Poor James.” Octavia sighed with theatrical gravity. “He cannot help being handsome. It’s a terrible affliction.”
When the orchestra struck up a lively country dance and partners arrived to claim them, the little group scattered. Octavia begged off with a promise of the next set. She wanted a moment to catch her breath, as much from the chatter as from the dancing, and a quiet place from which to watch the room turn.
She had just settled against a fluted column when a peculiar sensation prickled at the base of her spine.
The fine hairs along her arms rose. Heat gathered in her chest until her skin seemed too tight for her bones, and her heart struck against her ribs with sudden urgency whilst the ballroom drew in about her, too close, too fevered, too loud. The mingled perfumes of a hundred guests sharpened until she could tell rose water from violet, and taste the beeswax of the candles and the chalk dust rising from the floor.
Octavia pressed a palm to her temple. Through the crowd she glimpsed James again, and a cord she had never known existed drew taut beneath her breastbone. It answered him; there was no other word for it. Some dormant part of her had stirred and was reaching towards him, as climbing roses reach for the light.
She was moving towards him before she had decided to, threading between clusters of guests with an impatience foreign to her. The nearer she drew, the stronger the pull became, an awareness that hummed along her nerves like a fingertip drawn across harp strings. She was still several yards off when James’s head came up sharply. His shoulders tightened, as though some unseen current had passed through them, and his attention fastened upon her over the intervening heads with a hunter’s unwavering focus.
His presence reached her before his voice did, and woke an instinct she could neither name nor quell.
“Deserting your court of admirers, Tavi?” The old childhood name came with all its easy intimacy, yet the voice itself had altered, deepened and roughened at the edges.
“They’ll manage without me.” She heard how breathless she sounded, and despised it. “I have been regaling them with impressions of Lord Hallowell that would certainly earn me a scolding from my father.”
James laughed, and the sound went through her in a way no proper explanation could account for; a flush rose beneath her stays and her breath caught, audibly. “Your impressions were always scandalously exact. Do you remember old Mr. Holloway at the village fête? You took him off so perfectly that the poor man looked about him in bewilderment, convinced someone had called his name.”
“I was twelve, and you laughed so hard you fell out of the apple tree.” She seized upon the memory as a woman in rough seas seizes driftwood. “You ruined your best waistcoat with grass stains.”
“Worth every minute of the lecture,” he assured her, the corners of his eyes creasing. For a long moment he studied her face, and then the expression altered, subtle as cloud crossing the moon. “You seem... different tonight.”
“Different how?” She tilted her head, and the movement released a fresh waft of her own scent: lemon verbena, and beneath it a wilder note she had never noticed before, one that belonged to forest floors rather than ballrooms.
James’s pupils widened until the blue of the iris was no more than two thin rings, and he stepped nearer, seemingly without meaning to, until the heat of him reached her through the evening clothes.
“I’m not entirely certain,” he admitted, so low that gooseflesh rose along her arms, though the room was perfectly warm. “But it suits you.”
Octavia found herself leaning towards him while memory came to her unbidden. There was James at twelve, pushing her on the garden swing until her slippers all but touched the clouds, and James at sixteen, his voice newly broken, debating philosophy with her father. There was James only last summer, the summer her twentieth birthday came and went with her debut still deferred, when his hand had brushed hers at Lady Fairleigh’s dinner and an odd little flutter had started beneath her ribs. The boy who had climbed trees beside her and ruined countless pairs of shoes in the brook stood before her now, familiar and yet mysteriously altered, like a painting she had passed a thousand times and suddenly saw, in a different light, to hold unsuspected depths.
He was still James. But the way he looked at her now touched a part of herself she did not recognise.
“Your admirers are watching,” James murmured, with a glance towards her friends, who were following the exchange with ill-concealed interest. “Ought I to make a more proper display? A deeper bow? A solemn petition for the next dance?”
Octavia gave a most unladylike snort. “Pray, don’t. They’re already quite certain your intentions are less than honourable.”
“Me?” James pressed a hand to his heart in mock offence. “I’ve known you since you were missing your front teeth. What could be more honourable than that?”
The easy banter steadied her, though not for long.
James went still in the middle of a breath. It was not the pause of a gentleman collecting himself but the utter suspension of a creature that has caught the scent of danger, his whole body tensed, every sinew readying itself for what his mind had not yet grasped. His fingers whitened about the stem of his glass whilst his other hand rose to his cravat and tugged at it, as though it had tightened about his throat. The elegant charm he wore like armour hardened and grew brittle; his jaw set, and a low sound, very nearly a growl, rumbled in his chest.
It was too quiet for anyone else to hear. Octavia heard it clearly, impossibly, as if he had breathed it into her ear.
“Ravencroft,” he muttered, his eyes fixed on a point across the ballroom with an intensity no longer wholly civilised. His nostrils flared. The careless grace that had lit his face a moment before had set hard and territorial, more moonlit forest than ballroom.
Octavia followed his gaze, her own pulse quickening, and saw the familiar crimson of a uniform cutting through the crowd towards them.
Marcus Ravencroft had been one of their childhood trio for as long as she could remember: Marcus, grave even as a boy, a ballast to James’s mischief while Octavia led them both into one adventure after another. Soldiering had taken him away for years together, and his return had brought back the old easy familiarity, though it came now weighted with a darker gravity. She had glimpsed the same thing, now and then, in James: an older current moving beneath the surface of their careful propriety.
A current that, until this very evening, had remained invisible to her.
Now that she had seen it, she could not look away.
