“The footman standing in the doorway to the refreshment room has a cool glass of ale just for you, Washburn,” the Duke of Netherby said. “Go and drink it before it grows too warm. I shall waltz with Lady Anastasia in your place.”
“Oh, I say.” Sir Darnell’s initial look of annoyance turned to something else when he saw who had interrupted him and was attempting to take his partner away. “Decent of you, Netherby. Dancing is warm work. If you will excuse me, Lady Anastasia?”
“I will, sir,” she said, but she looked very pointedly at the duke as he drew her into his arms. “That was rude.”
“To perspire all over you and count steps instead of murmuring flatteries into your ear?” he said. “Forgive him, Anna. He can resist most temptations, but not a glass of ale.”
He moved her flawlessly into the waltz, twirling her about the perimeter of the dance floor with the other dancers.
“By tomorrow,” she said, “I shall be notorious.”
“Ah, Anna,” he said, “do the ton some justice. You are already notorious, and your aunts are just beginning to realize it.”
“If you had not been so secretive,” she said, “and had explained at the theater who he is, then tonight’s very public scene might have been avoided.”
“Remind me,” he said, “never to be secretive with you again. And remind me never to offend you. One shudders at the prospect of being at the receiving end of your displeasure, especially in a public place.”
“Have I ruined the ball?” she asked. Have I ruined my life? she wondered silently.
“That,” he said, “will depend upon whom you speak with in the coming days.”
“I am speaking with you now,” she said.
“And so you are.” He swept her around one corner of the room, twirling her twice about as he did so. “I am not bored, Anna. And I am invariably bored at grand ton affairs, especially balls.”
And he did again what he had done only once before, though she was as little prepared for it now as she had been then. He smiled fully at her and twirled her again. And she smiled back, as caught up in the magic of the waltz as she had been during that first lesson in the music room at Westcott House.
She had probably disgraced herself beyond redemption. But she would think of that later.
She would think of it tomorrow.
Fifteen
Nothing had been planned for the day following the ball. It would be a quiet time for rest and reflection, the aunts had decided, before they all gathered again to assess Anna’s debut and plan the rest of her Season.
The day following the ball did not turn out to be a quiet one.
It started with exactly thirty bouquets being delivered to Westcott House before noon.
“I am almost tempted just to leave the front door open so that the knocker does not end up making a hole in it, Miss Snow,” John Davies said from behind a particularly extravagant bouquet of two dozen red roses as he brought it into the drawing room. “But Mr. Lifford says it would not be the thing. This one must have cost a fortune.”
Three of the bouquets were for Elizabeth, twenty-seven for Anna. Two, one for each of them, were from Alexander.
“Oh dear,” Anna said, surveying the veritable garden surrounding them, though a number of the bouquets had been borne off by housemaids, to be displayed elsewhere about the house. “I do not even remember half these gentlemen, Lizzie. More than half. I surely did not even dance with half of them. How very kind they are.”
“Indeed,” Elizabeth said, fingering the petals of a cheerful daisy in one of her bouquets. “Sir Geoffrey Codaire proposed marriage to me once. It was the day after I had accepted Desmond’s offer. The notice had not yet appeared in the papers. He professed himself to be heartbroken, though I daresay he was not. And I was so in love with Desmond, I must confess I did not spare him another thought.”
“Is he the gentleman who danced the first waltz with you?” Anna asked, remembering Elizabeth’s partner for that dance as a tall, solid, sandy-haired gentleman who had had eyes for no one but his partner.
“And the waltz after supper,” Elizabeth said. “The one you started to dance with Sir Darnell Washburn and finished dancing with Avery. Sir Geoffrey lost his wife a year ago and has only recently left off his mourning. How tragic it was for him. She was trampled by a runaway horse and cart outside Hyde Park. She left him with three young children.”
“Oh,” Anna said.
But Elizabeth shook her head and smiled. “Was it not a lovely, lovely ball, Anna? Goodness, I missed dancing only one set—at my age.”
“You looked lovely, Lizzie,” Anna told her. “Yellow suits you. It makes you look like a ray of sunshine.”
Her friend laughed. “It was kind of Mr. Johns to send me flowers too,” she said. “He used to stay with us sometimes as a boy when his father hunted with Papa. I used to think him a horrid know-it-all, but he has mellowed. Or perhaps I have. But, Anna, all these admirers of yours—twenty-what? I have lost count.”
“Twenty-seven,” Anna said. “It is the first time in my life anyone has given me flowers, and now twenty-seven people have all at once. It is a little overwhelming. It is a good thing there is nothing planned for the rest of the day and no one is coming here. I am already exhausted—or still exhausted.”
She was wrong about the rest of the day, however. They had luncheon and went to their rooms to change into frocks more suitable for afternoon wear even though they were going nowhere. But scarcely had they settled in Anna’s sitting room, Elizabeth with her embroidery, Anna at the small escritoire to write letters, than John Davies came to announce that there were visitors downstairs, and he had shown them into the drawing room since there were two of them and they had not come together, and Mr. Lifford had given it as his opinion that judging by the number of flowers that had come this morning, there were likely to be more visitors and they might become crowded in the visitors’ salon especially since four of the bouquets were in there taking up most of the table space.