Henrietta felt as though her mind and body were divorced, and only those aspects of her brain which controlled movement and simple tasks were working. She was struggling with a concept so important that it threw everything else into the vague distance. What she really needed was not sustenance, but somewhere to think, and think alone. She let Lord Henfield lead her to supper, but could not recall afterwards having taken a single mouthful, or placing anything upon her plate. She was preternaturally conscious of his proximity, and both excited and, in a peculiar way, appalled.

For her part, Caroline had no appetite at all, and Lord Martley had to coax her to eat anything.

‘You must, for otherwise you will fall in a dead faint during some dance with another fellow, and I could not bear to think of you in another man’s arms,’ he whispered.

‘Oh, how beautiful!’

‘Not at all. How awful.’ He managed a grin in his more normal mode, and she smiled, although she felt she would far prefer to cry with a mixture of happiness, relief that her affections were returned, and fear that, for all his brave talk, the dream would remain the dream.

The advantage Lord Martley had over Lord Henfield was that he was dancing with Miss Gaydon immediately after supper, and his lack of repartee was not noticed. Lord Henfield withdrew into a brown study, from which he was reluctantly drawn by Lady Jersey, to dance with a nervous young lady with a slight stammer, who found his footwork excellent but his manner rather cool and strangely forbidding. Lord Martley, rather more accustomed to the social whirl, managed to make a recovery to the point where he could entertain three partners who were presented to him, but then quietly left, not, as most would have assumed, to end the night carousing with gentlemen in less refined surroundings than Almack’s, but to go to bed, where he lay for some time veering between elation and trying to solve a seemingly insoluble problem. Miss Felbridge favoured him, had declared she loved him, and it made him inexpressibly happy. Yet at the same time the desired consequence of their mutual affection was no closer to being a reality. He had to think of something. ‘Thinking of something’ was not an occupation that had taken up much of his lordship’s time, until now. Falling in love, he told himself, as the arms of Morpheus finally claimed him, presented huge challenges. He dreamt of slaying dragons that kept telling him he was a ninny.

CHAPTER ELEVEN