But he had Anna to his right as the guest of honor for this evening and the Dowager Countess of Riverdale to his left as the lady of highest rank after his stepmother. He set about entertaining them, dividing his attention roughly equally between each. Anna had Molenor on her other side, he noted, again a clever move on his stepmother’s part, since Thomas was mild-mannered and kindly disposed and not likely to frighten Anna or tie her tongue in knots when she would need it to eat her food.
Not that he could imagine Anna frightened. She ought to have melted into a greasy pool of agony when she stepped inside this house on that very first day, but she had been as cool as her name. He would guess that had been the most frightening moment of her life so far. He must ask her. He was conversing with the dowager when the thought popped into his head. Or perhaps it was yesterday’s presentation to the queen, at which she had acquitted herself well, according to his stepmother.
“It is to be hoped,” he said a few minutes later when the dowager turned toward Alex Westcott on her other side and Molenor turned toward Lady Matilda on his, “that you have exhausted all there is to say about the weather we have been having and may hope to have in the near future, Anna. I may be able to make a few more observations on the subject if I must, but I doubt any of them would be original, and I hate not to be original.”
“The subject is exhausted,” she said.
“I am delighted to hear it,” he said. “Tell me, Anna. What has been the most frightening moment of your entire life so far?”
She stared at him for a short while, her fork suspended above her plate. “Where did that question come from?” she asked him.
“From my brain,” he said, “via my mouth.”
The corners of her mouth quirked into a near smile, and her brow furrowed in thought. Her fork remained suspended. “I think,” she said, “it must be something I do not remember with my conscious mind, though my whole body recoils with a nameless dread when I try to recall what it was like.”
Ah. It was too bad of him to have assumed she would choose one of the two moments he had imagined. Now what had he stirred up?
“I think it must be the day I was left at the orphanage,” she said. “The man who took me there was gruff and impatient with me, I believe, but at least I must have known who he was and what connection he had with me. But then—the sheer terror of abandonment and the unknown when I had experienced security and happiness up to that point. Perhaps it was not so at all. Perhaps I was quite happy to arrive at a place where there were other children to play with. Certainly I have no really bad memories of my life there. Perhaps that almost-memory is not a memory at all.”
And perhaps it was. Well, this was wonderful conversation for a festive evening.
“Eat your dinner, Anna,” he said, and the fork finally found its way to her mouth.
“And what was yours?” she asked him. “The most frightening moment of your life, that is.”
He considered a flippant answer and decided upon honesty. “Similar to yours in a way,” he said. “When I was taken up to the dormitory I was to share with seven other boys on my first day of school when I was eleven, it was to find that I was last to arrive and the only boy who had not been there before. The hush that fell on the room was deafening. And then one of the boys said, Oh, look, Paddy. Your father has sent your baby sister to join you. And they all cackled like hens—or like budding cockerels, I suppose. That night they kept me awake as I cowered beneath the bedcovers with unexpected bangs and ghost noises and muffled laughter. But it was not ghosts I feared. It was them.”
She was gazing intently at him. “Oh, poor little boy,” she said. “When did you change?”
“Avery,” the dowager said from his left, “I have been told that you are a severe disappointment to the ladies at every ball you attend. Apparently you dance two or three times with the prettiest girls and then disappear to the card room or off the premises entirely. I hope the card room does not see more of you tonight than the ballroom does.”
He turned his attention back to her, and Anna resumed her meal and was soon conversing with Molenor again. He never, Avery mused, talked about his childhood and boyhood with anyone. But he had just done so.
“I have new dancing shoes,” he said. “And though my valet has worked tirelessly upon them, they need to be properly broken in. I shall dance every set even if have to go to bed with ten blistered toes and two blistered heels.”
*