Page 9 of His Haunted Duchess
“Too closely do tongues pierce where they ought to comfort. The time of those who call themselves peers would be far better spent if they acted more often as such.”
“It sounds,” she said, a little more mildly, “as though you speak as one with personal experience.”
Her voice reminded him of something—somewhere. He wrinkled his brow, searching to place it.
“I don’t mean to pry,” she hastened to add. “But I suppose I understand is what I mean to say.”
She looked at the ground again. If not for the scar on her face, Frederic might easily place her as one of the most beautiful women he had ever met.
“My experience with grief has, perhaps been more poignant than some,” he said. He looked at the stars and his mouth twisted wryly. “I suppose that comes from what fate may decree.”
Her eyes snapped to his. He read in them a growing alarm.
“I don’t put much stock in fate,” he added, “but sometimes it’s convenient to use as a scapegoat when no others are to be had.”
The alarm receded, replaced by a heavy somberness.
“I’ve come to many balls,” she said, “though fewer recently.”
She sighed, chafing her hands. He didn’t mind when she wasn’t looking at him. The curve of her profile—he blinked. He was forgetting himself. It didn’t behoove a gentleman to stare at a lady like a slab on the butcher’s table. Or a piece of art at an exhibition, he added privately. He straightened, attending her words more closely.
“Most—” the lady colored yet more deeply, avoiding his eyes, “—some, I mean, of the balls I’ve attended before have been?—”
She trailed off, looked away, and sighed. He kicked at a stone.
“If I understand correctly,” he rephrased, “past ball experiences have not been as kind to you as you might have wished.”
“I—yes. I suppose.”
He looked down at his shoes, hiding his face. How well he remembered.
“The balls themselves haven’t been so terrible,” she said, “but the patrons?—”
She turned from him a little, towards the decorative fountain behind her. Frederic needed little prompting to fill in either her incomplete answer or her discomfort in it. It had been many years since his own discomfiture had passed, since the idle taletellers had moved on to more juicy gossip—but the burn of it sat with him still.
She must have heard comments. Frederic’s irritation rekindled. Even a blind and deaf dormouse at a ball like this would have heard something—more of the palsied nonsense Felicity had repeated earlier.
How impressive, he marveled, that even with the deprecation she had suffered previously, she was willing to attend yet another event that would possibly lead to similar results.
He studied her, in the moonlight, as she turned away from him. There was something different about her—like the bottom of a deep lake speckled with afternoon sun. The little talent he possessed for art did not limit his appreciation of it, and the honesty of her experience made him feel all the more empathetic to her situation. Her eyes, finally, rose to his.
“Perhaps, at least as far as the ladies are concerned, they gossip because,” Frederic said honestly, “your beauty outshines theirs, and they cannot bear the comparison.”
The lady’s blush rose from her neck like the light before dawn. She stepped a little closer to him, turning her face so that her scar would be more prominent.
“You cannot blame them, considering how fearsome an injury I sustained,” she argued, turning her head. The lurid red line highlighted her point. “I do look—cursed.”
The word fell from her lips like a stone. Frederic shook his head.
“I could blame them for much less, but even more justly can I blame them for their utter inconsideration.” He stepped away, feigning interest in the topiary. Perhaps, he wondered, that was why topiary had been conceived of in the first place. “One who has suffered such as you have deserves no further pain, even and especially at the hands of foolish gossip.”
“I hope,” he said, turning back to her, “that you pay them no heed.”
She turned from him, then, and sidled toward the fountain.
“I have little concern for myself,” she said. “As strange as it may seem, I do find solace in better friends than those you have just seen.”
Frederic pursed his lips over those ladies being called friends.
