Cassidy crouched and found a clear view into the room between two pairs of white-stockinged legs.
The first thing she noticed was the vast number of people, squashed into every part of the room, between potted plants and artificial columns and in every corner. The music came from the far end, emerging from behind a row of shrubs; the players were nearly invisible.
Then she saw her gentleman. He stood just inside the door, minus his overcoat and hat, very still. His hair, she saw, was not gray at all, but a salt-and-pepper mingling of black and white. As she watched, he seemed to sweep the room with his gaze, fixing at last on one particular spot just our of Cassidy’s sight.
That was when it became very quiet. The hum of voices and the laughter trailed off as heads in the room turned, one by one, toward Cassidy’s gentleman. The hush itself had a life of its own, ominous and stern. Someone tittered and was cut off instantly. The music died with a whimper.
It was because of her stranger. Tyger, Tyger, burning bright. They were staring at him, a sea of pale faces above gorgeous costumes, the lustrous colors of the ladies and blacks of the gentlemen. They stared as if they had never seen him before.
Her gentleman began to move. He walked forward, slowly, with a grace and authority as much a natural part of him as his brilliant eyes. Magically the crowd parted in his path like so many half-wild calves dodging a vaquero with a branding iron.
Cassidy craned her neck to see the object of her gentleman’s interest. A small cluster of women were gathered in the far corner of the room, so bunched together that Cassidy couldn’t tell one pale, rich dress from another.
But one of the women was subtly different from her companions, and Cassidy knew she was the object of the stranger’s interest. The lady was a few years older than Cassidy, with a slender figure and a striking if not beautiful face crowned by golden hair. Her white, nearly bare shoulders gleamed in the soft light as if she had stepped out of the pages of one of Aunt Harriet’s fashion magazines.
Just as Cassidy’s gentleman was about to reach her, an older and much stouter woman intercepted him. She spoke in a low, pleasant voice pitched for him alone, but her body in its heavy gown all but shouted fear. Cassidy’s gentleman hesitated for only a few seconds, murmuring a short string of words to the older woman. She fell back, visibly shaken.
Abruptly the young blond woman stepped away from her friends, chin high and back very straight. Cassidy’s gentleman met her in a circle of silence, and they stood face-to-face, alike only in the air of absolute control that each possessed.
“Rowena,” Cassidy’s gentleman said, his voice deep and assured, as smooth as velvet and cold as a desert night in winter. “It’s time to come home.”
The lady didn’t answer, but her face might have been carved like the statues Cassidy had seen in the hall. Without haste she turned back to her friends, touched hands and spoke with the faintest of smiles. Then she returned to Cassidy’s gentleman, who offered his arm. She took it, barely resting her gloved hand on his sleeve.
The silence lasted until they were halfway back across the room, and then the murmurs started up again, hushed whispers that gradually gained volume as the ladies and gentlemen flowed back into the empty space.
“Blimey! I’d never o’ believed it. The earl ‘imself, ‘ere, givin ’em all a fright. And the lady—”
Cassidy remembered the men standing above her just as they stepped hastily back out of the doorway. The one who’d spoken stumbled over her before she could scramble aside, and he stared down in blank amazement.
” ‘Ere, now, who’re you? What’re you doing in ‘ere?”
He made a grab for her, but she shook him off and sprinted for the stairway. On the way down she passed several other soberly dressed men and women, but none of them were fast enough to stop her.
She flung herself out the door and pelted down the stairs, looking for a place to hide. She found a sunken alley to either side of the stairs, partly surrounded by an iron railing. She braced herself and jumped, landed on her feet, and backed into a shadowed alcove.