Chapter 13: An Invitation to Ridicule

The invitation came on a card, which was how Stephen knew it was cruel.

Nothing in the household was ever sent to a servant on a card. Instructions came by word of mouth, by a quick jerk of the chin, by a note scrawled in pencil on the back of a laundry list. A card, thick cream, embossed with the DeNova wheat-sheaf, tied with green ribbon, delivered on a silver tray by a footman who could not meet his eye, meant that someone had gone to trouble.

Lady Evangeline DeNova requests the presence of Mr. S. Albrecht at a private supper on the evening of the fourteenth, in the Orangery, to serve at table. Dress: livery.

He read it twice. He had the strong feeling that if he held it long enough it would burn.

“You’ll go,” said Garrick, watching from the doorway of the tack room with his gnarled hands wrapped round a pipe. “You’ll go, and you’ll bow, and you’ll carry the soup. And whatever she does, you’ll keep your face like a plank.”

“What will she do?”

“What they all do.” The old man drew on the pipe. “Make a game of you. They’ve been bored since the Commander left.”

The Orangery was a long glass room built against the south wall of the east wing, warm even in winter, smelling of wet earth and lemon blossom and the sweet sharp rot of fallen fruit. Candles had been set among the potted trees. A table was laid for ten, with the good silver and the Duke’s own crystal, and ten young nobles sat down to it in the amber light with the careless ease of people who had never been refused.

Evangeline sat at the head, in a gown the colour of old wine. Her hair had been coiled high and pinned with garnet combs. She looked, Stephen thought, from the door where he stood with a tureen in his hands, extraordinarily beautiful, and extraordinarily remote, like a statue of some goddess of winter that someone had dressed for a party.

She did not look at him.

He served the soup. He served the fish. He stood against the wall with a napkin over his arm and listened to ten young people discuss the failings of their parents, the engagement of a countess, and the lamentable state of the Imperial opera. He did not speak. He did not move. He kept his face as still as a plank of wood, as Garrick had said, and counted the number of times Corinne Pembry laughed, which was thirty-one.

It was at the third course that Rafe Pembry lifted his glass and said, in a clear carrying voice, “I propose a toast.”To what?” asked Julian Tavish, bored.

“To Albrecht.” Rafe grinned. “The gentleman in the grey. He has a reputation, I’m told. Reads law. Gives lectures. Turns down the Commander’s silver.” He turned in his chair and looked at Stephen over his shoulder with bright, malicious eyes. “Come. Don’t be shy. Tell us what you think of the Statute of Debtors.”

Laughter ran round the table. Stephen did not move.

“He’s shy,” said Corinne, delighted. “Oh, he is. Look, he’s gone quite dark in the face.”

“He was dark to begin with,” murmured someone, and the laughter doubled.

Stephen kept his eyes on the candle at the end of the table. He counted the flames. Twelve. He counted the petals on the lemon blossom in the centrepiece. Forty-one. He thought of his mother, and the promise, and a small, hard voice in the back of his mind said, very distinctly, Remember this.

“I have a better idea,” said Julian Tavish. He rose, a little unsteadily, and dragged a chair into the open space beside the table. “A court. We’ll hold a court of the Red Quarter. Albrecht shall be the lord. He shall hold audience.” He swept a napkin from the table and draped it, with exaggerated ceremony, across Stephen’s shoulders. “There. A mantle of state. Now sit, my lord, and hear our petitions.”

“Julian,” said Isolde Veyne, quietly, from her place at the foot of the table. “That is enough.”

“Oh, don’t be dull, Isolde.”

“I’m not dull. I’m telling you that it is enough.”

No one listened. Rafe was already on his feet, bowing deeply and offering a petition: might his lordship’s mother be induced to lower her rates? Corinne shrieked. A glass fell and shattered. Someone began to hum a bawdy tune from the Quarter, and the rest, with the casual cruelty of the young and the bored, joined in.

And Evangeline DeNova sat at the head of her own table, quite still, with her hands in her lap and her face as pale and set as marble.

Stephen looked at her.

He had not meant to. But the air in the Orangery had turned strange, thick with candle-smoke and lemon and the thin glitter of broken crystal, and his eyes, against every rule he had ever learned, went to her face. And he saw, for the first time, what she had been hiding behind the garnets and the cold green stare.

She was not enjoying it.

She was not suffering, either; he would not insult her with that. But there was something wrong in the line of her mouth, something strained and unhappy, a girl who had made a decision a few hours ago, in her own room, to prove something to someone, and who was only now discovering what the proof would cost.

Her eyes met his.

For one long, naked second, neither of them looked away.

Then Evangeline lifted her chin, and her face closed like a door, and she said in a voice as clear and cold as a bell:

“That will do. Albrecht, you may clear the plates.”

The laughter faded raggedly. Rafe sat down, sulky. Julian took the napkin back off Stephen’s shoulders and tossed it on the table.

Stephen bowed. He cleared the plates. He did it carefully, quietly, without breaking a single dish, and when the last of the courses had been served and the last of the guests had left, he went out into the cold courtyard and stood for a long time with his palms flat against the stable wall, breathing.

He did not weep. He had not wept since he was seven.

But he remembered everything. The twelve flames. The forty-one petals. The napkin across his shoulders like a joke. And a pair of green eyes, for exactly one second, doing something that had no business being in the face of a girl who could laugh at him.