“May I have the honor?” He bowed and was rewarded with a rare, true smile as Lady Sylvanie extended her hand. He grasped it lightly and turned her out into the middle of the room, joining the others who had already formed lines, and awaited the opening measures of a country dance. The reel was lively, affording Darcy no more opportunity for communication with his partner than could be had by a knowing glance and a lingering brush of fingertips, but he concluded that the lady appeared more confident of him at its end than she had been at its beginning. It was enough, in all events, to dispose her to accept the offer of his hand in the next, which was of the more stately, intricate sort and, therefore, more suited to his purposes. Seating her decorously, he went in search of refreshment for them both and encountered a beaming, expansive Sayre near the table.

“Darcy, my good friend, what a picture you and Sylvanie present!” Sayre nudged him with his elbow. “And I have never seen her in such looks, so it must be your doing.” Darcy murmured something polite, but Sayre would not have it. “No, sir! You complement each other perfectly in every way; that is easy enough to see.”

“Smooth as cream with you.” Trenholme came up from behind them and nodded in Lady Sylvanie’s direction.

Darcy feigned a study of the selection of refreshments. “Cream, Trenholme? Not precisely your description of the other evening.”

Trenholme’s countenance froze for a moment and then relaxed into a self-deprecating grin. “Foxed, Darcy! You saw me. Drunk as a lord. Don’t know what fool thing I’m saying when in my cups. Ask Sayre.” He looked meaningfully at his brother.

Sayre laughed uneasily. “You know Bev, Darcy! It’s not called Blue Ruin for nothing!” He went back to his former subject. “But Sylvanie is a beautiful woman, is she not? Accomplished, intelligent…carries herself like a queen.”

“She is beautiful,” Darcy granted him, knowing what would come next. Sayre’s smile grew wider.

“Private, as well,” he continued. “Doesn’t plague a man with demands for gewgaws or entertainments, I promise you. Quite content on her own at home. And in her own home,” he suggested slyly, “she’d keep everything in good order and her husband satisfied…in every way.”

Darcy’s grip convulsed upon the sharp edges of the cut-crystal stems of the glasses he held, barely containing an impulse to throw their contents into Sayre’s leering face. It never varied in content, this jostling for position and connections through the ironbound conventions of matrimony, only in its vulgarity. Had Elizabeth’s mother in Hertfordshire exhibited any more brass, after all, than had Sayre? He bent his will to the assumption of a casual interest in the game. “Her dowry? What could her husband expect from the marriage?”

“Five thousand clear, after the sale of some property.” Sayre had the grace to look apologetic. “I am a bit at sea at the moment, you must understand, and cannot promise more until my ship makes port. Incompetent business manager. Fired him! You know how it is, Darcy.”

He nodded. Yes, he knew exactly how it was! “Interesting.” He gave Sayre to interpret that however he wished. “But the lady awaits.” They all looked to Lady Sylvanie, who was in the midst of an exchange with her companion. “You will excuse me, Sayre…Trenholme?”

“Certainly, certainly, old man.” Sayre waved him away jovially, as if permitting him a rare treat in allowing his attentions to his sister. Trenholme’s feelings about their exchange were less discernible.

As Darcy approached them, Lady Sylvanie’s companion retreated to a dark corner of the room. Darcy offered her a polite nod and received a curtsy from her in response before extending a glass to her mistress. “My Lady,” he addressed her softly.

Lady Sylvanie’s smile was slow; he could have traced its progress from her lips and through her cheeks until it came to rest in her brightened eyes. “You honor my companion, sir,” she commented approvingly as she took the offered refreshment. “In all the time since I have returned home and of all the guests Sayre has entertained, only you have treated her in a civil, gracious manner.”

“Why should I not?” he inquired as he took the seat beside her.

Lady Sylvanie’s smile hesitated. “Indeed! But that is not the custom of Sayre or anyone else I have encountered. To them, servants are so many hands and feet, and nothing more.” She peered at him intently. “With you, I gather, it is not so.”

“How so, my lady?” Darcy wondered, caution racing coldly through his limbs. Of course! What a fool, to forget that she would have set about gathering information about him, just as he had done concerning her! The hair and bloodstained cloth in his dressing room were not the sum of what could be found out about him in a surreptitious visit. What had she discovered?

“Your valet, sir,” she returned. “In a word, a singular man.”

“‘Singular’ is an apt description for Fletcher, I grant you.” He tilted his face down to her as he brushed the edges of The Roquet. “He is somewhat of an artist in his profession, but sadly, I am a very unwilling canvas. I do not know why he stays with me.” What did she want with Fletcher? Had she or her companion discovered his other abilities, or had his interruption in the gallery merely raised their ire?

“You do not?” Lady Sylvanie’s smile returned. “The mystery is easily solved. Either you pay him a very handsome wage or he stays for love of you. I suspect that if you treat Doyle, who is nothing to you, with such care, you treat your own servants with even better courtesy.” She sipped lightly at her punch. “You have their loyalty and their love. A rare thing in this world, Mr. Darcy.”

“I suppose it is,” he answered, uncomfortable with the perspicacity of her words.

“You suppose! Ah, your reply reveals much, my dear sir.” Her intensity of manner increased. “You are so accustomed to it that you give it no thought. You do not question why your valet has taken up residence in your dressing room, for example.”

“Fletcher has his reasons.” Darcy’s mind raced for a likely excuse. “He is very particular, an artist — as I said — and found the distance between his accommodations and mine to be injurious to his standard of attendance upon me.”

“I see.” Lady Sylvanie tilted her face up to his, her lower lip caught delicately. “Do you suppose his loyalty and love will make way for your wife, should that happy lady come into being, or will he always be that close by you?”

“My wife, my lady, will have no cause to complain of Fletcher’s attention to his duty,” he replied stiffly, “nor will my valet’s wife suffer neglect for cause of his duty to me.”

“I am glad to hear it for your future wife’s sake. The jealousy of servants against their master’s new wife is a formidable obstacle to a woman’s happiness. In the end, one or the other must lose.”

Sayre’s call to the floor prevented Darcy from responding, and he did not regret the intrusion. The lady’s words were not lost on him, and he fervently hoped that his disavowal of Fletcher’s propensity for interference in his personal life had convinced her.

Darcy rose and offered Lady Sylvanie his hand, escorting her to their place in the set. Her countenance and carriage were austere as she faced him across the correct distance, but the emotions her bearing hid had unwittingly communicated themselves to him through the fingers she had laid upon his arm. She seemed inordinately excited and pleased with his partnership, more like a debutante than a practiced woman of four and twenty, and he wondered how she contained the energy that he felt pulsing through her fingertips.

Lady Chelmsford struck the first chord, and the couples bowed to each other. Darcy stretched out his hand for the petite promenade and once again was impressed by the strength of the lady’s hold upon it and the tremors of nervous energy that betrayed her outward poise at each instance of contact between them.

“I daresay you find country dances more to your taste,” he opened as they met and then circled each other back to back.

“True,” she answered. “The stiffness of the patterns is so confining. Do you not agree?”

“Confining?” he returned as he rose from a bow and took her hand. They both turned to the head of the room. “I had never regarded them so. Rather, I would call them orderly and precise, even mathematical.”

The lady smiled, a beguiling light suffusing her face. “Mathematical dancing! How droll you are, sir!” It was now her turn to pass behind and around him. Darcy could feel the air between them stir with her amusement as she performed the passé and faced him once more. “Dancing is not for the mind, Mr. Darcy; it is for the body and the expression of emotion. Do you never wish to kick over the traces, live outside of order and precision? Or is mathematics sufficient for you?”

“Do you accuse me of having no feelings, my lady?” He returned her question in a bantering tone.

“Oh, no, sir!” she hastened to correct him. “I am convinced that you are possessed of feelings — all those of the orderly and precise variety!”

“A very dull dog, then,” he concluded for her.

The lady laughed. “No, I did not say it!” She looked at him speculatively and then murmured when next they faced each other, “I think that you would very much enjoy what lies beyond the conventions, Mr. Darcy. The exhilaration, the power of riding the crest of passion, is life worth the living.”

The fierceness of her words, in combination with his suspicions of her, set the fine hairs at the back of his neck on end as cold caution seized him again. With effort he continued to draw her out. “Power, my lady?”