“Oh.” Frances looked at her with sudden realization. “Of course you have not. But you have danced at the school forever, Susanna, demonstrating steps for the girls. Now at last you will be able to put your skills to work at a real dance. And you need not be afraid that you will make a cake of yourself and everyone will notice. This is a country assembly with country people who will go to enjoy themselves, not to observe one another critically. And if that suddenly wary look has anything to do with the fact that Viscount Whitleaf will be there too, you silly goose, I will be wishing that he were to take himself off back home to Sidley Park before the fateful night. You must not allow yourself to be intimidated by him.”

Sidley Park. Susanna’s heart sank again at the name. Why did Viscount Whitleaf have to be a friend of Mr. Raycroft? And why did he have to be staying with him at Hareford House now of all times? For so many years-eleven, in fact-there had been no real reminders of her childhood and its abrupt, ghastly ending. She had been able to convince herself that she had forgotten.

“Oh,” Frances continued, “and Lucius has bullied the vicar into seeing to it that there will be at least one waltz at the assembly. Have I ever told you about our first waltz together-in a dusty assembly room above a deserted inn with no one else present, no heat though it was the dead of winter, and no music?”

“No music?” Susanna laughed.

“I hummed it,” Frances said. “It was the most glorious waltz ever waltzed, Susanna. Believe me it was.”

They lapsed into a companionable silence while Frances’s dreamy expression and slightly flushed cheeks indicated that she was reliving that waltz and Susanna wondered if anyone would dance with her at the assembly. Oh, how she hoped so! She would not even think about the waltz. Just one set- any set.

She knew the steps of the waltz, though. It was a dance Mr. Huckerby, the dancing master, always taught the girls at school. He was not, however, allowed to dance it with any of them, but only with any teacher who was willing to oblige for demonstration purposes. That had used to be Frances. Now Susanna and Anne and sometimes Mademoiselle Étienne, the French teacher, took turns.

Susanna loved the waltz more than any other dance. Not that there was anything even faintly romantic about performing the steps with Mr. Huckerby, it was true, especially when an audience of girls, many of them stifling giggles, looked on. But she had always dreamed of waltzing in a glittering, candlelit ballroom in the arms of a tall, handsome gentleman who smiled down into her eyes as if no one else existed in the world but the two of them.

I am not a romantic,she had said earlier to Viscount Whitleaf. What an absolute bouncer of a fib! She lived a busy, disciplined life as a schoolteacher, and she did indeed love her job-she had spoken the truth about that. But her dreams were rich with romance-with love and marriage and motherhood.

All those things she would never experience in the real world.

As if I had stepped into a moment that was simply magic.

She had wanted to weep when he spoke those words, so meaningless to him, so achingly evocative to her. How she longed for the magic of someone to love more than anyone or anything else in life. Of someone to love her in the same way.

For an unguarded moment she pictured herself waltzing with Viscount Whitleaf, those laughing violet eyes softened by tenderness as they gazed into her own.

But she shuddered slightly as she shook off the image and reached for a ginger biscuit. She must certainly not begin sullying the splendor of her dreams by imposing his image on them.

And then she thought of something else he had said.

You wounded me to the heart-to that chest organ, that mundane pump.

She almost ruined her aversion to him by chuckling aloud with amusement.

Frances would think she had taken leave of her senses.

And then she thought again of Sidley Park. She had lived until the age of twelve only a few miles away from it, though she had never actually been there. She had known it as the home of Viscountess Whitleaf, though she had always known too that the young viscount lived there as well as his five sisters, who bore the name of Edgeworth. She recalled that when she had first heard Frances speak of the Earl of Edgecombe she had had a nasty turn, wondering if he was of the same family-until she had realized that the names were not identical.

But apart from that, she had done a good job of holding the memories at bay. They were just too excruciatingly painful. She had heard that some people blocked painful memories so effectively that they completely forgot them. She sometimes wished that could have happened to her.

A specific memory came back to her then. She must have been five or six years old at the time and was playing close to the lake with Edith Markham when they had been joined by a young boy a few years older than they. He had asked them with great good humor and open interest what they were doing and had squatted next to Susanna on the bank to see if there was a fish on the end of her makeshift fishing line.

“Oh, hard luck!” he had said when he had seen that there was not. “I daresay the fish are not biting today. Sometimes they do not-or so I have heard. My mama will not let me go fishing. She is afraid I will fall in or catch a chill-instead of a fish, ha-ha. Did you get it? Catching a chill instead of a fish? Does your mama fuss you all the time? Oh, I say! You have the greenest eyes, don’t you? I have never seen eyes of just that color before. They are very fine, and they look very well with your red hair. I daresay you will be pretty when you grow up. Not that you are not pretty now. I do beg your pardon-I forgot my manners for a moment. A gentleman never lets a lady believe that perhaps she is not pretty. May I hold the rod? Perhaps I will have better luck than you though I daresay you have had more practice.”

But no sooner had he seated himself on the bank and taken the rod from her, looking bright and happy and friendly, than an older girl had appeared and told him in a hushed, rather shocked voice that he ought not to be playing with that little girl, and then another girl, even older, had come rushing up to catch him by the hand and pull him firmly away from the bank and tell him that he must never, never go so close to the water again. He would fall in and die, she had said, and then what would they all do to console themselves?

Edith had gone off with them, and later Susanna had learned that they had come from Sidley Park on an afternoon visit-Viscountess Whitleaf with the young viscount, her son, and her daughters.

Susanna had not thought of that incident for years and years. She was surprised she remembered it at all.

Were that friendly, talkative, overprotected little boy and the viscount she had met this afternoon one and the same, then? But they must be. She had liked him then and wanted him for a friend. She had hoped he would visit again, but though she believed he had, she had never seen him again.

Even then they had been worlds apart.

“We have been invited to spend the evening with Mr. Dannen and his mother tomorrow,” Frances said. “It will be something for you to look forward to. And you will have a chance to take a look at him and find out if you like what you see.”

She chuckled at the look on Susanna’s face, and then they both laughed together.


Peter had spoken quite truthfully about neighbors in the country frequently coming together, either for impromptu walks and rides and drives and daytime calls at one another’s homes or for more formal entertainments like dinners and carriage excursions and garden parties.

The evening of the day after he first met Susanna Osbourne offered one such formal gathering.

Dannen’s mother had recently come from Scotland, where she lived with a widowed brother, to spend a few weeks with her son. And so he had invited his neighbors to meet her at an evening of cards and music followed by supper.

The Raycrofts were among the first to arrive, but by the time Peter looked up to observe the arrival in the drawing room of the Earl and Countess of Edgecombe with Miss Osbourne, Miss Krebbs was seated beside him on a sofa, the Misses Jane and Mary Calvert were sitting close by, one on a chair, the other on an ottoman, and Miss Raycroft was leaning on the back of the sofa, having declined his offer to allow her to sit.

They were talking-almost inevitably-about the assembly. Miss Krebbs had asked him about the waltz and whether it was embarrassing to dance a whole set face-to-face with one partner and actually touching that partner all the time.

There had been a flurry of self-conscious giggles from the other ladies at the question, and then they had all fallen silent in order to hear his answer.

“Embarrassing?” he had said, looking from one to the other of them in mock amazement. “To be able to look into a lovely face while my one hand is at the lady’s waist and the other in hers? I cannot think of any more congenial way to spend half an hour. Can you?”

“Oh,” Mary Calvert said with a deep sigh. “But Mama will insist that it is too fast a dance for any of us to perform-and I am not talking about tempo.”

“The beauty of the waltz, though,” Peter said, “is that it is danced in public with every mama able to keep an eye upon her daughter-and upon her daughter’s partner. No man with a grain of sense would attempt anything remotely indiscreet under such circumstances, would he-despite what he may wish to attempt.”

They were all in the middle of a burst of merry and slightly risqué laughter when Peter looked up and his eyes met Susanna Osbourne’s across the room.

Ah.

Well.

If someone had told him that a lightning bolt had penetrated the roof and the ceiling and the top of his head to emerge through the soles of his feet on its way through the floor, he would not have contradicted that person.

Which was the strangest thing really when one came to think of it, considering the fact that in the brief moment before she looked away he saw neither stars in her eyes nor adoration in the rest of her face. Quite the contrary, indeed. Her look made him uncomfortably aware of how he must appear sitting here, surrounded by young beauties and laughing his head off with them.

Vain, shallow popinjay.

He did not catch her eye again for all of the next couple of hours or so while he conversed with almost everyone else, played a few hands of cards, and then turned pages of music at the pianoforte while several of the young ladies displayed their talent at the instrument or twittered merrily about it. All the other men, he noticed, went to extraordinary lengths to avoid such a chore, though they did applaud politely at the end of each piece.

It seemed unsporting of them to keep their distance even though they were probably having interesting conversations about farming and hunting and horses and such things-as he had done yesterday with Edgecombe and Raycroft in the library at Barclay Court. When one was at a mixed entertainment, though, one ought to make oneself available to the ladies.

Miss Osbourne, he was interested to observe, did not sit in a corner looking severely and disapprovingly about her at all the frivolity and vice-money was actually changing hands at the card tables, though in infinitesimal amounts, it was true. Rather, she moved about among several groups with the countess until Dannen himself appropriated her and engaged her in conversation while the countess moved on. He was doing most of the talking, Peter noticed. He had observed on other occasions that Dannen liked nothing better than a captive audience for his monologues.

She looked even lovelier tonight than she had yesterday, if that was possible. She was not wearing a bonnet tonight, of course, and he could see that her hair was cut short. It hugged her head in bright, soft curls that were less fiery than red, warmer than gold, but with elements of both. She wore a cream-colored gown that showed off her hair color to full advantage.

He deliberately stayed away from her-she had made her wishes quite clear yesterday. Perhaps he would not have spoken to her at all if he had not sat down beside Miss Honeydew after supper because he saw that she was all alone. Miss Honeydew was the elderly sister of a former vicar, now deceased. She had, he suspected, never been a beauty, since her top teeth protruded beyond her upper lip, and they and her long nose and face gave her a distinctly horsey appearance. Her hair always managed somehow to escape in untidy gray wisps from beneath the voluminous caps she wore, she squinted myopically at the world through large eyeglasses that were forever slipping down her nose and listing to the left, her head seemed to be in a constant nodding motion, whether from habit or infirmity it was not clear, and there was an air of general, smiling vagueness about her.