The bell sounded for dinner, and Daisy departed. As Hugh rose to his feet, Sarah said, “You should walk in with Iris. Daniel said he would carry me. I must say I’m grateful.” Her nose wrinkled. “It’s very strange having the footman do it.”

Hugh started to say that they would wait until Daniel arrived, but the man of the hour had his usual impeccable timing, and Hugh had barely offered Iris his arm before Daniel was pulling Sarah into his and carrying her off to the dining room.

“If they weren’t cousins,” Iris said in that dry tone Hugh was coming to realize was uniquely hers, “that would have been very romantic.”

Hugh looked at her.

“I said if they weren’t cousins,” she protested. “Anyway, he’s so desperately in love with Miss Wynter he would not notice if an entire naked harem fell from the ceiling.”

“Oh, he’d notice,” Hugh said, since he was quite sure that Iris was trying to be provoking. “He just wouldn’t do anything about it.”

As Hugh walked into the dining room with the wrong woman on his arm, it occurred to him that he, too, wouldn’t do anything about it.

If a naked harem fell from the ceiling.

Later that night

After supper

“You realize,” Sarah said to Hugh, “that you’re stuck with me now for the duration of the evening.”

They were sitting on the lawn, under torches that somehow managed to make the air warm enough to remain outside as long as one had a coat. And a blanket.

They weren’t the only ones who had taken advantage of the fine evening. A dozen chairs and lounges had been set up on the grass outside the ballroom, and at any given time about half of them were filled. Sarah and Hugh were the only people who had taken up permanent residence, though.

“If you so much as leave my side,” Sarah continued, “Daisy will find me and drag me to the pianoforte.”

“And would that be so very dreadful?” he asked.

She gave him a steady look, then said, “I shall make certain you are sent an invitation to our next musicale.”

“I look forward to it.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

“This all feels very mysterious,” he said, leaning back comfortably in his chair. “It has been my experience that most young ladies are eager to demonstrate their skill at the pianoforte.”

“We,” she said, pausing to give the pronoun just the right amount of emphasis, “are uncommonly dreadful.”

“You can’t be that bad,” he insisted. “If you were, you wouldn’t be staging annual musicales.”

“That presupposes logic.” She grimaced. “And taste.” There seemed no reason not to offer the unvarnished truth. He’d learn soon enough, if he ever found himself in London at the wrong time of year.