She was already dressed, in fact, and Betty had just put the finishing touches to her very elaborate coiffure. She would not have thought it possible to arrange so many curls and ringlets on her head in such a pleasing arrangement. And she was confident that they would remain where they were. She shook her head gingerly and experimentally, but they did not cascade down about her shoulders. There was, of course, a whole arsenal of pins hidden away under them.
Angeline got to her feet and looked at herself critically in the pier glass. She looked, she supposed, as well as she possibly could look considering two massive and unavoidable facts: first that she was compelled to wear white, and second that she was a great dark beanpole of a girl. She had had the misfortune to take after her father rather than her mother in looks, as had both her brothers. But that fact was fine for them. They were men.
Nothing was going to dampen her spirits tonight, though.
Nothing.
She took the ivory fan Betty was holding out to her, opened it, and fluttered it before her face.
“Will I do?” she asked.
“You look ever so lovely, my lady,” Betty said. She was not being obsequious. She was just as likely to say the opposite if that was what she thought. Betty often did not approve of what her mistress chose to wear.
Angeline gazed into her own reflected eyes.
Who was he?
Her heart had performed a triple somersault when she had spotted him this morning as she went thundering past him up Rotten Row.
There he was.
At last.
Looking neat and lithe in the saddle, and just a little mud-spattered.
She had been about to call out to him. But, just as he had done at that inn, he had inclined his head to her, showing that at least he recognized her, and had ridden away without a word.
His behavior had been perfectly correct, of course. They still had not been formally presented. He had saved her from the horrible faux pas of calling out to a stranger in a very public place. Tresham would have had her head if he had ever heard about it. Even Ferdinand would have been annoyed, though by that time Ferdie was almost at the other end of the Row in a race with his friends. None of them were close enough to answer the question that had burned in her mind.
Who was he?
Angeline fanned her face a little faster before snapping the fan shut.
Would she see him again?
Would he be here tonight?
She turned from the pier glass as a brisk knock sounded at the door. Betty answered it. Tresham and Ferdinand were standing out there, both tall and gorgeous in their black evening clothes with crisp white linen.
Ferdinand was grinning.
“We argued over who should come up for you, Angie,” he said, “and we ended up both coming. You look as fine as fivepence.”
His eyes swept over her in what looked like genuine appreciation.
“Thank you, Ferdie,” she said. “So do you.”
He was twenty-one, one year down from Oxford, and well on his way to being as dedicated a rakehell as their brother—or so rumor had it, and Angeline did not doubt it. Neither did she doubt that he was wildly attractive to every female who set eyes upon him, and that he knew it.
Tresham looked his habitual bored, handsome self.
“Is this really our sister, Ferdinand,” he asked, probably rhetorically, “looking quite tame and civilized and, yes, very fine indeed?”
One might wait a decade in vain for a compliment from Tresham. One ought to cherish one when it did come one’s way, then. But Angeline bristled instead.
“Tame?” she said. “Civilized? Does that imply that I am usually wild and uncivilized? What do you know about me, Tresham? Before I came to town, I saw you on precisely two occasions after you were sixteen and I was eleven. And I would hardly misbehave during either Papa’s funeral or Mama’s, would I? You abandoned me when you left home so suddenly. All you knew about me afterward, presumably, was what you learned in the reports sent you by the various governesses you imposed upon me. And they all disapproved of me because I was not a perfect mouse of a young lady. What did they expect? What did you expect? I am a Dudley, after all. But I am not wild for all that. Or uncivilized.”
Tresham regarded her steadily from his very dark, unreadable eyes.
“That is better,” he said. “Now you have some color in your cheeks, Angeline, and are not unrelieved white from head to toe. Are you ready to go down? Or do you plan to make an entrance to your own ball after everyone else has arrived?”
Ferdinand grinned and winked and offered his arm.
Oh, she adored both brothers, Angeline thought as she took an arm of each and descended the staircase for the all-important duty of greeting the ball guests in the receiving line. She adored them even though she was constantly exasperated by them. She had heard much about them even though she had not seen a great deal of them during the past seven years—though Ferdinand had come home almost every school or university holiday, even if only for a few days. She had heard about the dangerous, reckless races, the fistfights, the mistresses, the duels, though that last applied only to Tresham. She had heard of two separate duels fought with pistols, in both of which Tresham’s opponent had shot first and missed before Tresham shot contemptuously in the air. And both duels had been over the other man’s wife, with whom Tresham was dallying. Fortunately, both duels were long over before Angeline heard about them. She was very disapproving of the cause, very proud that her brother had shot into the air rather than directly at a wronged husband, and very convinced that every nerve in her body had been shattered by the news and would never function properly again.
Cousin Rosalie was waiting in the hall below and smiled at Angeline with approval and encouragement.
“You really do look very distinguished, Angeline,” she said. “Other girls are swallowed up by white. You … command it.”
Whatever that meant, Angeline thought ruefully. And she had noticed that Rosalie called her distinguished rather than pretty.
She wondered suddenly how her mother would have described her tonight. Would she have called her fine, as Tresham and Ferdinand had done? Or distinguished, as Rosalie had done? Or lovely, as Betty had done? Or pretty? Or would she have frowned, as she had done in the past, at her daughter’s gangly height or at the extreme darkness of her hair and the indelicacy of her complexion? Or, as she had done once when Angeline was thirteen, at the fact that her eyebrows did not arch elegantly above her eyes?
She had been in the middle of one of her increasingly rare stays at Acton Park at the time, even though Papa was already dead and therefore no longer to be avoided. Angeline had spent the whole of the subsequent week peering into mirrors, trying to arch her eyebrows the way Mama did. But when she had tried the new expression on her mother, Mama had told her she looked like a startled hare and warned her that she would have furrows in her brow before she was thirty if she was not careful.
Perhaps her mother would have approved of her in white, Angeline thought. It was what she had almost always worn herself. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she would have seen more clearly than ever that Angeline in no way resembled herself and would have been unable to disguise her disappointment and her conviction that Angeline would never be the daughter she must have dreamed of. Although Angeline was no longer gangly, she was even taller than she had been at the age of thirteen. And her eyebrows would still not arch.