Only a dozen yards outside of the door to this side parlor, hundreds of the rich and powerful now whirled and stamped their way through a country-dance. In the Blue Room, though, there was only Frances, and Henry, and the eagle that had seen so many of the bold seduce so many of the willing.
Frances knew she could be bold if only Henry was willing. She had only to reach him with word or touch to prove his fears misplaced.
But she wasn’t the one whose touch he wanted; her words were not the ones he craved.
“Sit, please,” she said in her most crisp, not-at-all-lust-struck voice. “In here we’ll have a bit of privacy to talk over your concerns.”
Henry’s straight brows yanked into a vee. “You sound as starchy as my brother’s butler.”
“And why not? I too am employed by the nobility.”
He gave her a searching look but said nothing. He only walked to one of the blue-velvet sofas that bordered the room, then trailed a finger over the plush upholstery. Within this room, the glitter and confusion of the ballroom were nothing but a patter of sound, as though Henry and Frances were swaddled within a cloud.
She made another venture, her voice still brisk. “So, you’re concerned about the effect of your arm on Caroline.”
Again, that searching look. “We don’t really have to talk about it.”
Left hand extended, he guided her to a seat on one of the sofas. He sat to her right, then leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. There were fine lines at their corners, burned into his skin by long days under the sun. His scent was clean, of evergreen and soap. With the deep-blue ceiling above, she could almost fancy them outside—perhaps alone in a garden at night, with a pine tree whispering in a gentle breeze.
A swell of peace made her greedy for more, to learn what he wanted, even as her body provided its own answer. As though she were a leaf, she absorbed every bit of warmth radiating from his body. She was ready to unfurl if the time was right.
“You did say you needed to speak to me,” she reminded him. It was easier to badger him when he had his eyes closed and couldn’t look back at her as if he suspected something amiss. He cracked her careful reserve, her cool governess’s voice, when he looked at her with those ocean-deep eyes.
“You’re right,” he said, eyes still closed. “I did say that. It seemed more important before the minuet.”
“You don’t need to talk to me anymore, then? Should I—” She didn’t really want to offer to leave. She made herself stop talking.
His eyes snapped open, and he stared at the cruel-beaked eagle chandelier. “How honest do you want me to be, Frances?”
“Perfectly honest, of course.” Maybe.
“To be perfectly honest,” he said slowly, “I thought you might have been piqued after our conversation last week, in which I said I didn’t need your help. I thought perhaps you discouraged Caro from returning my letters.”
She began to protest, but he raised his hand. “Hear me out, Frances. Because then I thought, well, if Caro was so easily discouraged, perhaps she never enjoyed corresponding with me. Maybe it was the intimacy of the small dinner party that convinced her she wanted nothing more to do with me, since I can’t dance or play cards.”
He rolled his head to the side, looking at her from a scant foot away. “But when we danced the minuet together, and you were so easy-mannered and lovely, I knew you couldn’t have done anything to deceive me.”
“Oh,” Frances said, not sure whether she was struck dumb by his misapprehension or by the fact that he’d called her lovely.
“No, I realized if Caro has lost interest in me, it’s because of me. It’s some shortcoming in me that she didn’t see before. And I can’t fault her for that. The fault lies within me, and it is only by some happy accident she did not see it at first.” His mouth pulled tight and grim.
“Henry, no. That’s not—no.”
Damnation, what a tangle. She had felt piqued after their conversation, and she had put a halt to the letters. But Caroline had nothing to do with that and never had. Frances had only taken Henry at his word: as he had requested, she did nothing to advance his suit with Caroline. As Frances’s every letter seemed to coax Henry deeper into Caroline’s thrall—not that Caroline noticed or cared—Frances could almost convince herself that she was doing him a kindness by ending the deception.
But there was no way to be kind about it. Not if the letters had truly ensnared him, not if stopping the letters convinced him that the world saw him as less than whole.
No, there was no way to be kind about the truth. So Frances took a deep breath and lied her head off.
“As a matter of fact, I am in Caroline’s full confidence in the matter of the letters. I usually handle her correspondence, you know, and I asked questions when I saw her write and seal letters of her own. And I asked more questions when she stopped.”
“Of course you did,” he said drily. His mouth looked slightly less grim.
“Of course I did,” Frances agreed cheerfully. “I knew about your correspondence from the time of our writing lesson, but I didn’t know the degree to which it had flourished.”
“Ah.” Henry looked self-conscious.
“She admitted to me that she wished she hadn’t begun a secret correspondence. That she… well, she admires you greatly, but she can’t give you more than she already has.”
“Because of my arm.”
“No. Because she can’t give more to any man. She enjoys having suitors, but she doesn’t plan to remarry. It was only a mark of her great regard for your family, and for you, that led her to write to you in the first place.”
There. That was a decent enough explanation. Frances vowed she would keep silent until Henry was ready to reply, even if it took minutes on end.
He turned his fine head back up to the gloating eagle. His shoulders shrugged and he tucked his left arm across his body, annoyance creasing his eyebrows. Frances realized he was trying to cross his arms across his chest, the memory of an old protective gesture he could no longer make.
“I would welcome her letters if she would consider sending them again,” he said at last. “They kept me in London when I had almost decided to leave, and they’ve been a tremendous comfort since.”
He had told her he’d lost confidence after his first call on Caroline, but she had no idea he’d been wounded so deeply as to beat a retreat. “Caroline’s letters have helped you that much, then?”
“Yes.”
“And you want them still, even if she can never give you more than friendship?”
“She might say that,” he said, “but she might not mean it. Perhaps she hasn’t met the right man yet.”
“And you believe you are that man.”
“That’s for her to decide.” He stretched out long legs and crossed his ankles. “Without the letters, though, she’ll never decide in my favor. There are too many other men cluttering up her life. The letters are the only way I may capture her alone.”
“So you do want an unfair advantage, after all.” She must have sounded bitter, for this seemed to needle him.
“It’s only unfair if no one else has the ability to write her a damn letter. Which they all do.” He sounded cross now, gathering his right arm into a white-knuckled grip. “Pardon my language, but her choice in correspondents really is up to her, Frances. Not you.”
If you only knew.