SEASON OF SCANDAL

The hackney stopped at the wrong end of Grosvenor Street, and Cecily Marsh had to walk the last two hundred yards in shoes that had never been made for London pavements. Her trunk would follow. The driver had explained this with the cheerful certainty of a man who would never see her again.

She stood outside the Ashworth townhouse with her traveling bag in one hand and the letter of employment in the other, reading the brass number on the door as if it might, at the last moment, prove to be incorrect. It did not. She folded the letter into her coat pocket, lifted the knocker, and waited.

The butler who answered was named Grisham. He told her so himself, unprompted, as he took her bag and led her through a hall that smelled of beeswax and forced flowers. He had the expression of a man accustomed to arrivals of all varieties and disposed to judge none of them until the second week.

“Lady Ashworth is in the morning room,” he said, “and wishes to see you before the arrangements for this evening require her attention.”

It was half past three. The ball, her letter of engagement had noted, began at nine.

Lady Ashworth was smaller than Cecily had expected. She sat behind a writing table whose surface held three separate correspondence piles and a cup of tea going cold, and she assessed Cecily in the three seconds before she gestured to a chair with the efficiency of a woman who had made up her mind well in advance of the meeting.

“You come recommended by Mrs. Phelps,” she said, “who tells me you are sensible and discreet and very nearly impossible to rattle. Those were her exact words.”

“Mrs. Phelps is generous.”

“She is accurate. I hired you on that basis.” Lady Ashworth set down her pen. “I will be direct, Miss Marsh, because we have approximately five hours before I must see to my hair. My nephew is Lord Edmund Vane. You will have heard the name.”

“I have heard it,” Cecily said carefully, which was true in the way that saying one had heard of the Thames was true.

“Then I will not waste time rehearsing his history. He is charming, he is reckless, and he is, if I understand the current state of his finances correctly, three bad decisions from a crisis he cannot joke his way out of. I require someone to stand near enough to him this season to intercept the worst of it.” Lady Ashworth paused. “Not a keeper. I want no scenes, no confrontations. Simply a steady presence with enough intelligence to see trouble before it arrives and enough composure to redirect it.”

“And in exchange?”

“Forty pounds per quarter, your room here, your meals, and an invitation to every social occasion Edmund attends. Which is to say, most of them.”

Cecily did not let herself do the arithmetic visibly, though it arrived in full: forty pounds was more than twice what Mrs. Phelps had paid her to manage a house and two difficult daughters in Wiltshire for six months. Forty pounds was the difference between returning to her uncle’s parish in September and something else entirely.

“I accept,” she said.

Lady Ashworth picked up her pen again. “I thought you would. Grisham will show you to your room. There is a gown in the wardrobe, blue, which I believe will fit you well enough. You will need it for this evening.”

Cecily rose, then stopped. “Does Lord Vane know about this arrangement?”

The pause that followed was one half-second too long.

“He will,” said Lady Ashworth, “by the time it matters.”

---

Across Mayfair, on the north side of a square whose garden was kept locked against exactly the sort of person Edmund Vane had spent this decade becoming, his valet was engaged in the close study of a shirt cuff.

“The left one, my lord,” said Fellowes, with the gravity of a physician reporting a diagnosis. “There is a pull in the thread. Small, but present.”

Edmund held up his arm. The cuff was white, starched to the precise rigidity that separated a gentleman from a man merely wearing a gentleman’s clothes. He turned his wrist and found the pull Fellowes meant: a single thread, barely visible, loosened from the weave near the button.

“Change it,” he said.

Fellowes was already opening the drawer. He had been Edmund’s valet for six years and had the particular talent of a good chess player: he anticipated by three moves, and he never commented on the game.

The room itself was handsome. Edmund had always known how to arrange a room; it was one of the things he did without thinking, like remembering names and making people feel they were the only one in the room worth speaking to. The furnishings here were good, solid things, chosen before his father had begun the long project of selling anything that wasn’t bolted to the floor. Edmund had been nineteen for the worst of it and twenty-three when it stopped, which is to say when there was nothing profitable left to stop.

The mirror gave him back what the world expected: dark coat, pale waistcoat, cuffs now corrected. His hair was his own business and cooperated under sufferance. He looked, as he always looked, like a man about whom no one needed to worry.

He picked up his gloves from the dressing table, and then set them down again.

“Fellowes,” he said, to his reflection as much as to the man, “do you know what Lady Ashworth wants?”

“She has not confided in me, my lord.”

“She sent a note this morning. Very warm, very brief. She is never both at once unless something is required of me.”

“Perhaps she simply wishes for your company.”

Edmund considered his aunt, who had written to him four times this year and three of those times had enclosed a clipping from a newspaper alongside a comment that began: “I mention this only because.” He picked up his gloves again.

“She wants something,” he said. “But the ball will be dull without her, and she sets a better table than anyone else in Mayfair, so.” He smoothed the left glove down over his knuckles. “We will go and find out.”

Fellowes held his coat and said nothing, which was its own form of commentary.

---

The Ashworth ballroom had been opened up into the adjoining saloon to make room for what Lady Ashworth’s invitation had called an intimate gathering, a phrase that had apparently reached every family of standing in two counties. Candles burned in five separate chandeliers. The smell was hothouse roses and warm bodies and someone’s rather assertive pomade.

Cecily entered through the side door at three minutes past nine, wearing the blue gown, which fit nearly well enough, and carrying the expression she had spent two hours in a unfamiliar room practicing: pleasant, quiet, unremarkable. A wallflower, her uncle would have said, not unkindly. The sort of woman a room absorbed without noticing.

She had always found this useful.

She positioned herself near the windows with a glass of punch she did not intend to drink and surveyed the room with the systematic attention of someone working, not attending. There was the Countess of Whitmore, whose husband was speaking too loudly near the card room. There was a cluster of young men near the punch table generating the particular energy of people about to do something inadvisable. There was Lady Ashworth, crossing toward the entrance with a smile that meant she was expecting someone.

And there, moving through the door as though the room had arranged itself to receive him, was Lord Edmund Vane.

Cecily observed him with the same attention she’d given everyone else. Tall. Dark-coated. Cuffs impeccably white. He had the kind of face that had probably been called beautiful when he was twenty and had since become something more interesting than that; it was a face that knew exactly what it was doing, which was the most dangerous thing a face could do.

He smiled at something Lady Ashworth said, and half the room shifted without quite meaning to, like flowers turning toward a light source they hadn’t acknowledged.

Cecily looked back at the young men near the punch table. One of them had picked up something small and gloved, and the group’s energy sharpened into amusement.

She looked back at Edmund Vane, now circling the room with the ease of a planet in its established orbit, greeting and deflecting and charming in one continuous motion.

She looked at the room that held them both: the candles, the roses, the rustling silk, the soft machinery of the season turning over its first wheel.

She drank the punch after all. It was not good punch.

Somewhere above her, the chandeliers threw light down without preference, and the evening opened its hands.