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‘Why are they only playing piquet? I’d thought baccarat and faro were popular in London, too.’
    ‘Lord, you are new, aren’t you,’ he said, laughing, and pulled a snuff box from his pocket. He was a good deal older than she – closer to fifty than forty. Old enough for dissolution to have made its mark on his face. He leaned into the doorway and snuffed powder from between his fingers before closing the box and dropping it back into his pocket.
    Lady Marmotte’s June card party will be the event of the season – has been for years. She’s the sharpest player we’ve seen in a long time, but she’ll only play piquet, and she’ll only invite whomever she pleases, devil take the rest. The young bloods in there,’ he nodded, ‘are hoping they’ll impress her and receive an invitation. I doubt she’ll even look in this evening. Do you play?’
    The boy seated at the nearest table to the door with his back to her had a quart minor – six, seven, eight and nine of diamonds – and didn’t discard his fifth card into the stock. Fool .
    ‘No, I don’t play,’ she said.
    When the man opposite raised his eyebrows she realised she had spoken with some violence.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please excuse me.’
    She meandered through the house, amusing herself by walking like she’d been given sedatives. Her father would have been struck dumb with astonishment, could he have seen her. Though it shouldn’t surprise him, as it was he who had taught her to laugh at the world.
    She didn’t see the man in black again.
    She caught a glimpse, through the ballroom door, of couples wheeling about the floor. She spied Lydia in the arms of a soldier – just an impression of a moustache and teeth bared in a laugh before they spun away from her again. Kit didn’t think Lydia had so much as danced with the Duke this evening, and she was glad for it. Perhaps the affair was all rumour and exaggeration.
    She found herself in a portrait gallery and started composing a letter in her head to her brother, because the sudden wish to have him there with her was a hard ache in her chest. Dear Tom , she would write (no ‘darling’ or ‘dearest’ though he was both those things to her), You won’t believe me when I describe this portrait to you. Some ancestor of Lord Marmotte thought it a good idea to pose astride a rocking horse – no doubt some relic of his youth – whilst striking one of those grand, conqueror’s poses. In that distant, imagined future when I have my own portrait painted, I will pose just so .
    Ah, he would laugh with her here, where the ball was a distant seashore of sound. I wish I’d been able to drag you to London with me, she would say, treacherous brother of mine. You would be sorry then, that you inflicted it on me. It’s the most absurd place on earth to come and find a husband. These men and I are from different worlds. I sometimes wish they would just offer me baubles, as they do the natives of America, and be done with it. I will come home a confirmed spinster, and dance like Rumpelstiltskin for joy!
    Except that was no longer entirely true, was it? How would she describe the man in black to Tom? Would she dare to tell him that something in her had been touched? She turned into the next room, and a faint cascade of notes reached her. The music was so unlike anything else she’d ever heard that it took her a while to realise what it was.
    She smiled, and followed it.
    This was the piano as she hadn’t even known it could be played – subdued passion that she was fairly sure wouldn’t be allowed in public. One melody tripped lightly ahead of the other, follow me . The second was slow; it would never catch the first but ran under it, as deep as an ocean.
    She had never heard anything so beautiful.
    She turned down a new hallway as the notes slowed, almost disappeared, dissolved into each other, became something new and light and tantalising. As she walked she strained her ears for one note,