Five O'Clock in the Park

You kept last night's card. Of course you kept it. It's tucked inside the cover of your pocket ledger, the knave of hearts with his smug painted face, and your answer is somewhere across London in Rowland Ingleby's hands. You wrote it at one in the morning on Sowerby paper and sent it down to the mews with Moberly, and you have been trying not to think about what you said ever since.

At a quarter to five he arrives in a curricle so beautiful you're suspicious of it.

"It isn't mine," he says, before you can ask. He hands you up. "Rule one, delivered without being asked. It's Bede's. He's lent it to me as a penance."

"For what?"

"For being red-faced in a conservatory." He settles beside you and takes the reins. Sedley, who turns out to be a lean, silent man of about forty-five with a face like a closed door, climbs up behind as groom. "I've also borrowed the horses, the gloves and, I'm afraid, the hat."

"Is anything you're wearing yours?"

"The coat. And the face." He glances at you sideways. "Both a little worn, but they've held up."

Aunt Tabitha has declined to come; she says Hyde Park makes her sneeze and she trusts Sedley's face. You're not sure that's how chaperonage works. You're not about to argue.

London has come out to dry itself. After ten days of rain the sky is a pale, startled blue, and the whole ton is in Hyde Park at once, in carriages and on horseback and on foot, crowding the Ring like birds on a fence. The ground steams. The trees drip. Everyone is pretending it's spring.

And everyone, the moment Rowland turns in at the gate, looks at you.

You feel it like weather. Heads swivel. A barouche slows. Two ladies on the path stop walking entirely.

"They're staring," you say through your smile.

"They were always going to stare. Last night I knelt on a ballroom floor for you. Half of them think I've run mad. The other half have bets on how long it takes your father to shoot me."

"Is that true? About the bets?"

"Rule one," he says cheerfully. "Yes. Lord Ellingham has me dead by Friday."

You laugh before you can stop it.

A lady in a passing barouche actually turns around in her seat.

"There," he says softly. "That's done more for my reputation than anything I've managed in a year."

"Your reputation." You fold your hands. "I have questions about your reputation."

"I imagined you might."

"How many mistresses?"

He doesn't blink. "Currently? None. Historically? Fewer than the Morning Post claims and more than your aunt would like."

"The Post says you kept an opera dancer in Chelsea."

"I paid an opera dancer's rent in Chelsea for four months because her landlord was a brute and she had a sister to feed. I never set foot in the house. She married a baker in March." He shrugs. "The Post preferred its version. So did I, frankly. It's very restful, being thought wicked. People expect so little."

You look at him. He keeps his eyes on the horses.

"Why don't you dance with debutantes?"

"Because the moment I dance with a girl twice, her mother starts asking about my income. Better to dance with widows. Widows already know."

"Do you gamble?"

That one lands differently. His hands tighten on the reins, very slightly. "I play. I win, mostly. I'm good at cards and I hate them."

"Where does the money go, when you win?"

A pause. Then, reluctantly: "Kent."

"What's in Kent?"

"A roof that leaks," he says, "and about forty people who need it not to." Then, before you can follow that: "My turn. Rule four."

You'd forgotten rule four. You suspect he knew you would.

"Ask," you say.

"Why didn't you walk away? Last night. You heard me say the worst thing a man can say about a woman he means to marry. You could have ruined me in one sentence. Instead you made me kneel and then you made rules." He finally looks at you. "Why?"

You consider lying. It would be so easy. It's what you've done for two Seasons: smiled and said something light and let them think what they liked.

"Because you were the first one who didn't pretend," you say. "And I wanted to know what that was worth."

He looks at you for a long moment. A carriage behind you has to swerve.

"Careful," you say. "You'll overturn Bede's curricle and then you'll owe him another penance."

"Worth it, Ava," he says.

You go round the Ring twice. People bow to him who wouldn't bow to you last week, and bow to you because they're curious, and you can see them all doing sums behind their eyes: Hollinsby's debts, Sowerby's money, the kneeling, the laughing. It should feel humiliating. It doesn't. For once you're in on the joke.

On the second circuit a rider pulls up alongside.

He's on a tall bay, and he's golden in the way a summer afternoon is golden: fair hair, a warm sunburned face, kind blue eyes, a smile that seems to say I know, I know, it's all very silly, isn't it? He touches his hat.

"Hollinsby. I didn't know you were out of bed before noon."

"Selwood. I'm reformed. It's very sudden." Rowland's voice is easy, but you feel him go a little stiffer beside you. "Miss Sowerby, the Honorable Tristram Selwood. Miss Ava Sowerby."

"I know," says Tristram Selwood, and bows from the saddle, and smiles at you as if you were the only interesting thing in the park. "I've been trying to get an introduction for a fortnight. Lady Bellingrove kept forgetting. I think she was saving you for someone with a better title."

"She was saving me for someone who'd make a spectacle," you say.

He laughs. It's a nice laugh, open and easy. "Then she got her wish. Miss Sowerby, I hope you'll save me a dance at the Fernhallow ball. I promise not to kneel. I've a bad knee from Spain."

"You were in the Peninsula?"

"Briefly and badly. I'm much better at dancing." He glances at Rowland, still friendly. "If Hollinsby leaves you any."

"Rule two," you say, before you can help it. "I choose."

Tristram Selwood looks puzzled and charmed. Rowland looks very hard at his horses' ears and doesn't smile at all.

"Then I'll hope to be chosen," Selwood says, and touches his hat again, and canters off toward a cluster of girls under the elms, who all turn to watch him come like sunflowers.

"He's lovely," you say.

"He is," says Rowland. "Everybody says so."

"Rule one. Do you like him?"

"I don't know him well enough to dislike him. I'd like to, though." He glances at you. "That was honest. I didn't enjoy it."

You're laughing again, you can't seem to help it today, and you put your hand on his arm without thinking.

He doesn't look at your hand. He's looking past you, past the Ring, into the trees.

You follow his gaze. Under a dripping chestnut, half in shadow, a man stands alone. He's thickset, in a brown coat too heavy for the weather, his hat pulled low, and his nose looks as if it has been broken more than once. He isn't watching the carriages or the horses or the girls under the elms.

He's watching Rowland. Just Rowland. Without blinking.

Under your hand, Rowland's arm turns to iron.

You look up at his face. All the color has drained out of it; even his lips are white.

"Rowland?" It's the first time you've said his name. "Who is that?"

He doesn't answer. He doesn't even seem to hear you. He gathers the reins in one hard movement, wheels Bede's beautiful curricle across the Ring so sharply that a phaeton has to pull up shouting, and turns for the gate and home without a single word.