Two Heads

It has rained for nine days, and Lady Bellingrove's ballroom smells of wet wool, beeswax and money.

Most of the money is yours.

You know this because you can feel it moving through the room ahead of you, the way a draft moves through a house. Heads turn. Fans open. A lady in lilac says something behind her hand, and the girl beside her laughs into her glove.

"Chin up, Ava," says Aunt Tabitha, at your elbow. "You look as if you're walking to the gallows."

"I'm walking to the punch bowl."

"Same thing, in this house. Lady Bellingrove's punch has killed stronger women than you."

You almost smile. Aunt Tabitha is fifty-one, wears gray silk like armor, and has read every novel published since 1790. She claims to sleep through every ball. She has never once missed a word.

Your gown is white, because you're unmarried, and very plain, because the last time you wore something beautiful the Morning Post described it as a shop window with a girl inside. Your gloves are long enough to hide the ink stain on your second finger. You checked twice in the carriage.

You are Ava Sowerby. Your father makes paper in Birmingham and playing cards in Holborn, and there is not a card table in England without a deck of Sowerby's Best on it. Last year he bought a house in Russell Square with forty windows. This year he bought you a Season.

Two Seasons, actually. Nine proposals. Every one of them for the forty windows.

"Miss Sowerby." The voice is low and lovely, like velvet poured over a knife. "How brave of you to come in this weather."

Letitia, Lady Pargeter, is twenty-eight, widowed at Christmas, and so beautiful that men forget their own names around her. Dark eyes, dark curls, a gown of bronze silk that cost more than most families earn in a year. Three girls flank her like ladies-in-waiting.

"It's only rain," you say.

"Of course. I forget your people are used to weather. Mills and so on." She smiles. "Tell me, is it true your father prints the cards they play with at White's? How clever. Every gentleman in that club has held something of yours in his hand."

One of the girls chokes on a laugh.

"Every gentleman at White's has lost money on something of mine," you say pleasantly. "My father considers it a public service."

Lady Pargeter's smile doesn't move, but her eyes do. "Forty thousand a year, they say. Some say sixty." She looks you over, slow, the way a buyer looks at a horse. "I suppose that buys a great deal. Not everything, but a great deal."

She moves away in a rustle of bronze. Her friends follow.

"Sixty," Aunt Tabitha murmurs. "Gilbert will be delighted. It's nearer seventy."

"Aunt."

"I'm asleep, dear. Don't mind me."

You get your punch. You don't drink it. You hold it, because a woman holding a glass is a woman with something to do, and you stand by a pillar and watch the room.

And like every other woman in it, you end up watching him.

Rowland Ingleby, Viscount Hollinsby, is standing by the long windows with his back to the rain, and he is the most beautiful man you have ever seen.

It's not a romantic observation. It's a fact, the way the rain is a fact. He's tall and lean, and his evening coat is not new, you can see that from here, the cuffs a shade softer than they should be, but it fits him the way water fits a glass. His hair is dark gold and falls over his forehead as though it has never once obeyed a comb. When he turns his head, the candlelight catches his face, and a girl in pink walks directly into a footman.

"Hollinsby," Aunt Tabitha says, without opening her eyes. "Father died last spring. They say the estate's mortgaged to the chimney pots. They say he's had every widow in Mayfair and owes money to half of them."

"Who says?"

"Everyone. Which means about a third of it is true. I'd like to know which third."

He hasn't danced once. You noticed. You notice things; you were raised in a counting house. Six girls have drifted past him with their mothers. He's bowed to each and smiled at each, and he hasn't asked a single one.

Then his eyes cross the room and land on you.

It lasts a second. Less. His gaze touches your face, your plain white gown, the full glass in your hand, and moves on.

You feel it like a hand on the back of your neck.

"I need air," you say.

"Conservatory," says Aunt Tabitha. "Left past the card room. Don't let anyone kiss you among the orange trees, it's terribly unoriginal."

Lady Bellingrove's conservatory is a glass box full of trees that have no business surviving an English April. The rain drums on the roof. Lanterns hang from the iron ribs, and the air is warm and green and smells of oranges and wet earth.

You find a bench behind the biggest tree and sit, and for one minute nobody is pricing you.

You pull off your left glove and look at the ink on your finger. Blue-black, from this morning, when you went over the Holborn accounts with your father because the new clerk can't add. You rub it with your thumb. It doesn't come off. It never does.

Footsteps on the tiles. Two men.

"...not going to dance at all? Lady Bellingrove will have you shot."

"Lady Bellingrove can stand in line." The second voice is low, amused, worn at the edges like a favorite coat. "Bede, I didn't come to dance."

You go very still.

They stop on the other side of the orange tree. Through the leaves you see a red-haired man in a captain's half-pay coat, and a gleam of dark gold.

"Then what did you come for?"

A pause. The rain fills it.

"Her," says Rowland Ingleby. "The Sowerby girl."

Your heart does something unhelpful.

"Good God," says the captain. "You're serious."

"I've never been more serious in my life." Glass clicks on stone; he's set down a drink. "I must be married to the Sowerby money by Michaelmas, Bede. Not engaged. Married. Settled. Signed. There isn't another fortune in England big enough or a family desperate enough for a title to take me."

"You've barely spoken to her."

"I looked at her tonight. She looked back. That's more than most of my acquaintances manage." His voice goes flat and tired. "It doesn't matter. I'd marry her if she had two heads."

Your fan snaps.

It's a cheap ivory thing, and the sound it makes in that glass room is like a pistol shot.

Silence on the other side of the tree.

You stand up, because there's nothing else to do. The captain sees you first and turns the color of his hair. And Rowland Ingleby turns slowly, and looks at you through the orange leaves with eyes the exact green of a wine bottle held up to the light.

He doesn't flinch. He doesn't bluster.

He only says, very quietly, "Miss Sowerby. How much of that did you hear?"