“There are no words, Frances,” he said. “There simply are no words.”

She wanted to weep then. But his mother had come forward too, and she actually hugged Frances.

“Miss Allard,” she said. “I have been to heaven and back this evening. My father-in-law and Lucius and Amy did not exaggerate when they spoke so glowingly of your talent. Thank you for coming here to sing to us.”

Lord Tait bowed and Lady Tait beamed and said she could not agree more with her mama. Emily Marshall linked an arm through Caroline’s and then smiled at Frances.

“I heard you, Caroline,” she said, “and you did superlatively well. But Grandpapa was right. One day I will be able to boast that my sister accompanied Miss Allard during her first concert in London.”

Amy, sparkling with enthusiasm, hugged Frances too.

“And I shall be able to boast to everyone I know that you were my special friend before I was even out,” she said.

Frances laughed. It did not escape her notice that she was surrounded by Lucius’s family, and that they were all looking on her with approval. It was a precious moment that she knew she would look back upon with pleasure.

And then they all stepped aside as another lady and gentleman came forward. Lord Sinclair performed the introductions. But Frances had seen the gentleman before. He was Lord Heath. She curtsied to him and Lady Heath.

“Miss Allard,” he said, “I hold one concert each year around Christmas time, as perhaps you know, at which I gather together for the delight of my friends and carefully chosen guests the very best musical talent I can attract from all over England and the Continent. I wish you will allow me to make an exception to my usual rule and arrange an additional musical evening now, during the Season, with you as the sole performer. I do assure you that everyone who has heard you tonight will wish to do so again. And word will spread like the proverbial wildfire. There will not be enough room in my house for those who will wish to attend.”

“Perhaps, then, Roderick,” Lady Heath said, laying a hand on his sleeve and looking at Frances with smiling eyes, “you should consider hiring a concert hall for the occasion.”

“Brilliant, Fanny!” he said. “It shall be done. Miss Allard, I need only your word of agreement. I can make you great in no time at all. No, let me correct that ridiculous assertion. You do not need me for that—you already are great. But I can make you the most sought-after soprano in Europe, I make bold to claim, if you will put yourself into my hands. I must enjoy this feeling of slight power while I may, though. It will not last long. Very soon you will not need either my patronage or anyone else’s.”

His words served up with them a healthy dose of reality.

It was too much to bear. Too much light had come flooding into her life in too short a time. She felt a desperate need to take a step back, to hold up a staying hand, to think. She would have given anything at that moment, she felt, to have seen the calm, sensible face of Claudia Martin in the crowd nearby. She longed for Anne and Susanna.

She was aware at the same time of Viscount Sinclair beside her, silent and tense, his eyes burning into her.

“Thank you, Lord Heath,” she said. “I am deeply honored. But I am a teacher. I teach music among other subjects at a girls’ school in Bath. It is my chosen career, and even now I long to get back to my pupils, who need me, and to my fellow teachers, who are my dearest friends. I love singing for my own satisfaction. Occasionally I enjoy singing for an audience, even one as large as this. But I do not wish to make a career of it.”

There was certainly truth in what she said. Not the whole truth, perhaps, but . . .

“I am sorry to hear it, ma’am,” Lord Heath said. “Very sorry indeed. I am afraid I misunderstood, though. When Sinclair invited me here tonight, I thought it was at your request. I thought you wished to be promoted. If you do not, I understand. I have a stepson with an extraordinarily sweet voice, but my wife keeps a very firm rein on my ambitions for him. Quite rightly so—he is a child. I respect your decision, but if you should ever change your mind, you may call upon me at any time. I have been exceedingly well blessed to have heard the purest of boy soprano voices and now the most glorious of female soprano voices all within five months.”

Frances looked up at Lord Sinclair after they had moved away.

“I may yet find myself shaking you until your teeth rattle, Frances,” he said.

“Because I do not share your ambitions for me?” she asked him.

“Because you do,” he retorted. “But I am not going to argue with you anymore. I am not going to manipulate or bully you ever again, you will be delighted to know. After tonight you will be free of me.”

She would have reached out and set a hand on his sleeve then, though with what motive she did not know, but other people crowded about, wishing to talk with her, congratulate her, and praise her performance. Frances smiled and tried to give herself up to the mere pleasure of the moment.

And there was pleasure. There was no point in denying it. There was something warm and wonderful about knowing that what one did, what one loved doing, had entertained other people and more than entertained them in a number of cases. Several people told her that her singing had moved them, even to tears.

And then some of her pleasure was dashed as Viscount Sinclair presented her to Lord and Lady Balderston and the young lady with them.

“Miss Portia Hunt,” he said.

Ah.

She was exquisitely lovely, with the perfect type of English rose beauty that Frances had always envied when she was growing up until she realized that she could never be like it herself. And in addition to her loveliness, Miss Hunt displayed an excellent taste in clothing and a perfect poise and dignity of manner.

How could any man look at her and not love her?

How could Lucius . . .

Miss Hunt’s smile was gracious and refined.

“That was a very commendable performance, Miss Allard,” she said. “The headmistress and teachers at your school must be proud indeed of you. Your pupils are fortunate to have you as their teacher.”

She spoke with well-mannered condescension—that latter fact was immediately apparent.

“Thank you,” Frances said. “I am honored to have the opportunity to shape the minds and talents of the young.”

“Lucius,” Miss Hunt said, turning to him, “I shall take the liberty of accompanying Amy upstairs to her room now that the concert has ended.”

Lucius. She called him Lucius. And clearly she was familiar with the family and with Marshall House. She was going to marry him, after all. He might deny it, clinging to the strict truth of the fact that he was not betrothed to her yet, but here was reality right before Frances’s eyes.

And did it matter?

“You must not trouble yourself, Portia,” he told her. “My mother will send her to bed when she thinks the time appropriate.”

Miss Hunt smiled again before turning away to join her parents, who were now talking with Lady Sinclair. But the smile, Frances noticed, did not quite reach her eyes.

Frances turned to Lord Sinclair to find him looking back at her with one eyebrow cocked.

“One of those excruciating moments sprung to life from one’s worst nightmare,” he said. “But behold me still alive and standing at the end of it.”

He was speaking, she supposed, of the fact that she and Miss Hunt had come face-to-face.

“She is lovely,” she said.

“She is perfect.” His other eyebrow rose to join the first. “But the trouble is, Frances, that I am not and have never wanted to be. Perfection is an infernal thing. You are far from perfect.”

She laughed despite herself and would have turned away then to join her great-aunts, but two more people were approaching, and she turned to them, still smiling.

Ah!

The gentleman, who was ahead of the lady, still looked boyishly handsome with his baby-blond hair and blue eyes and rather round face. He also looked somewhat pale, his eyes slightly wounded.

“Françoise,” he said with eyes only for her. “Françoise Halard.”

She had known before she entered the music room on Lord Sinclair’s arm that something like this might happen. She even remembered thinking that it would be a minor miracle if it did not. But from the moment she had started singing until now she had forgotten her fears—and her knowledge that she ought not to be here.

But here was the very person she had most wished to avoid seeing—unless that honor fell to the woman behind him.

“Charles,” she said and extended one hand to him. He took it and bowed over it, but he did not carry it to his lips or retain it in his own.

“You know the Earl of Fontbridge, then?” Lord Sinclair asked as Frances felt that she was looking down a long, dark tunnel at the man she had once loved and come close to marrying over three years ago. “And the countess, his mother?”

She turned her eyes on the woman standing behind him. The Countess of Fontbridge was as large and as formidable as ever, almost dwarfing her son, though more by her girth and the force of her presence than by her height.

“Lady Fontbridge,” she said.

“Mademoiselle Halard.” The countess did not even try to hide the hostility from her face or the harshness from her voice. “I see you have returned to London. When you decide to give a concert in future, Sinclair, you may wish to divulge the identity of those persons who are to perform for your guests so that they may make an informed decision about whether it is worth attending or not. Though on this occasion it is altogether possible that my son and I would not have understood that Miss Frances Allard was the same person as the Mademoiselle Françoise Halard with whom we once had an unfortunate acquaintance.”

“Françoise,” the earl said, gazing at her as if he had not even heard what his mother had just said, “where have you been? Did your disappearance have something to do with—”

But his mother had laid a firm hand on his arm. “Come, Charles,” she said. “We are expected elsewhere. Good evening to you, Sinclair.”

She pointedly ignored Frances.

Charles bent one lingering, wounded look upon Frances before submitting to being led away by the countess, whose hair plumes nodded indignantly above her head as she swept from the room without looking to left or right.

“Your own excruciating little moment sprung to life from nightmare, Frances?” Viscount Sinclair asked. “Or should I say Françoise? I take it Fontbridge is a discarded lover from your past?”

“I had better leave,” she said. “I daresay my aunts are ready to go. It has been a busy evening for them.”

“Ah, yes, run away,” he said. “It is what you do best, Frances. But first perhaps I can cheer you up a little. Let me take you to Lady Lyle.”

“She is here?” Frances actually found herself laughing. All she needed to complete the disaster of the evening now was to find that George Ralston was here too.

“I thought that she would like to hear you,” he said. “And that you would like to see her once more. I invited her to come.”

“Did you?” She smiled up at him. “Did you really? Do you not suppose I would have called upon Lady Lyle before now if I had wished for a tender reunion with her?”

He sighed out loud.

“I remember,” he said, “that on a certain snowy road several months ago I informed you that you were going to have to ride up with me in my carriage and you gave me a flat refusal. At that moment, Frances, I made the greatest mistake of my life. I gave in to a chivalrous impulse, albeit grudgingly, and stayed to argue. I ought to have driven away and left you to your fate.”

“Yes,” she said, “you ought. And I ought to have stuck with my first decision.”

“We have been the plague of each other’s lives ever since,” he said.

“You have been the plague of mine,” she said.

“And you have been nothing but sweetness and light to me, I suppose,” he said.

“I have never wanted to be anything at all to you,” she told him. “I have always been firm on that.”

“Except on one memorable night,” he said, “when you joined your body with mine three separate times, Frances. I do not believe it was ravishment.”

Oh, goodness, she thought, they were quarreling in full sight of a whole ballroomful of people. And she had just spotted Lady Lyle, sitting slightly apart from everyone else just inside the ballroom. She was looking as elegant as ever, her distinctive silver hair piled high and decorated with plumes. She was also looking slightly amused, her eyes fixed upon Frances.