Chapter One
The Duke of Rothermere was, by all accounts, about to ruin a girl’s life in under a minute, and Vivienne Hale had exactly that long to stop him.
She had not come to Lady Fenhallow’s ball to save anyone. She had come to watch, from a discreet distance near the potted ferns, as her actual client (a banker’s daughter named Miss Josephine Pratt, with a fortune too new to be forgiven and an accent Vivi had spent three weeks sanding into something the ton would tolerate) danced her first quadrille under the eyes of society. Vivi’s job tonight was invisibility. She was good at invisibility. It was, in fact, the entire architecture of her professional life: to stand at the edge of rooms full of people who had never had to earn their place in them, and quietly make sure that the people who had to earn it did not stumble.
She watched Miss Pratt turn correctly, smile correctly, laugh at precisely the right volume when Lord Aveline made his small, dry joke about the state of the punch: three weeks of coaching distilled into ninety seconds of perfect, unremarkable ordinariness, which was, in Vivi’s estimation, the highest compliment her profession could pay a client. No one watching would ever know how many evenings it had taken to teach a clever, anxious girl that laughing just so was a survivable social act rather than a mortal risk.
“There she is,” murmured Lady Marbury, drifting past on the arm of a bored colonel, loudly enough for three separate conversations to catch the scent of it. “Hale, isn’t it? The one who takes money from cits to teach their daughters which fork is which. I hear she’ll take money from anyone these days. Even dukes, if the rumor’s to be believed.”
“Which rumor is that, Lady Marbury?” Vivi asked pleasantly, materializing at the woman’s elbow with a smile so warm it could have curdled milk.
“Only that the Dowager Duchess has been asking after discreet professionals of a certain reputation. One does wonder what sort of assistance a duke’s mother requires that cannot be found among her own circle.”
“One does wonder a great many things, Lady Marbury. I find it saves a good deal of time to simply ask, rather than wonder aloud where the person in question might overhear.” Vivi’s smile did not waver. “Miss Pratt looks lovely tonight, don’t you think? I understand her father’s bank just extended a rather generous loan to Lord Fennimore’s estate. Renovations, mostly. The roof, I’m told, though I understand there was some unpleasantness with the stables as well.”
Lady Marbury’s mouth thinned, Lord Fennimore being her own brother and the loan in question being precisely the sort of humiliating necessity nobody discussed at a ball, and she drifted away without another word, taking her bored colonel with her.
Across the room, near the card-room doorway, a slim, watchful man in an exquisitely cut coat had gone very still, listening with the particular attention of a man who collected other people’s small defeats the way other men collected snuffboxes. Vivi did not know his name yet. She would come to know it well enough. Reginald Ashworth-Vane logged the exchange the way he logged everything of possible future use: the precise wording, the flush that had crept up Lady Marbury’s throat, the ease with which the younger woman had disarmed her. He filed it neatly away and returned his attention to the room, waiting, as he always waited, for something more useful to present itself.
She had not planned to notice the Duke of Rothermere at all.
But one could not fail to notice a man built like an argument, tall, unsmiling, dressed in unrelieved black that made every other gentleman in the room look as if he were trying too hard, cutting across the crowded floor with the deliberate calm of someone who intended to say something unforgivable.
He stopped in front of Miss Araminta Vale, the youngest daughter of a viscount with more debts than daughters, who had, as Vivi later learned, made the catastrophic error of laughing, in public, at a joke about the old Duke’s dead heir, made by a young buck who had since prudently vanished into the card room, leaving the girl to answer alone for a moment of thoughtless mirth that had never truly belonged to her.
“I understand,” the Duke said, in a voice pitched to carry exactly as far as he wanted it to, “that you found something amusing a moment ago.”
The ballroom, with the terrible instinct of a hundred people who smell blood, went quiet. Even the orchestra seemed to falter, though it did not, in fact, stop playing; it only felt, to every straining ear in the room, as if it had.
Miss Vale went white.
Vivi did not decide to move. Her feet simply began carrying her before her mind had finished the sentence this is not your problem, weaving between silk skirts and startled chaperones until she arrived, breathless and smiling, at Miss Vale’s elbow as if she had been sent for.
“Forgive me,” she said, to the Duke, in the bright, unbothered tone she used on difficult clients and worse mothers, “I believe Miss Vale promised me this dance an age ago, and I am dreadfully persistent.” She turned to the girl before he could answer. “You did promise, darling. You know you did.”
Miss Vale, wide-eyed, latched onto the lifeline with both hands. “Yes, yes, of course, I’m so sorry, Your Grace...”
“I’m sure His Grace will forgive the theft,” Vivi said, already steering the girl away by the arm, “seeing as he was not, in fact, invited to this conversation.”
She felt the room’s attention swing to her like a struck bell. She felt, more precisely, the Duke of Rothermere’s attention swing to her, a physical thing, a weight, green eyes narrowing on her face with the look of a man recalculating a sum that had come out wrong.
“And you are?” he said.
“Leaving,” Vivi said, “with your victim. Good evening, Your Grace.”
She did not look back. She delivered Miss Vale safely into the care of her mother, who wept a little over her daughter’s shoulder in the particular silent way of women who have watched too many young girls learn too young how quickly a room could turn, and accepted the woman’s tearful, whispered thanks with practiced deflection.
“Truly, it was nothing,” Vivi told her. “He will have forgotten the whole business by the time the carriages are called. Society has the memory of a magpie: bright and shining and gone within the hour, chasing the next glittering thing.”
“You cannot know how grateful...”
“I do know, actually. It is rather the whole of my trade.” Vivi pressed the woman’s hand and turned away before the gratitude could curdle into the sort of obligation she made a point never to collect, and did not permit herself to think about the Duke of Rothermere again for a full seven minutes: a significant act of self-discipline, for Vivi. She did not see, and would not learn for some weeks, that Reginald Ashworth-Vane had watched the entire exchange from the card-room doorway with the unhurried satisfaction of a man filing away a new and potentially useful name in a ledger only he could read.
