I glanced up at Jacob. A muscle pulsed high in his jaw and his fingers dug into the leather backrest of my chair. The indentations would have been noticeable to anyone who cared to look. I went to touch his hand to obscure the marks and calm him but he vanished. He reappeared near one of the long windows overlooking Wilton Crescent, his straight back to me.
"My dear Miss Chambers," Mrs. Culvert said, coming up beside me and standing in the exact place Jacob had vacated. She continued to smile but I now thought it stretched, almost gruesome. "How well do you know the family? Could you introduce me to Lady Preston I wonder?" Lady Preston? Who on earth was she?
"Mother," George warned.
"I believe they throw the most lavish parties," she went on. "Or they used to. There haven't been any parties there since poor Jacob died." She stopped smiling for all of a second then the beam returned, harder than ever. "Perhaps a party is exactly what they need to take their mind off their loss. What do you think, Miss Chambers? We can have one here. I'll send the Prestons an invitation but if Lady Preston refuses you simply must speak to her and insist. Tell Lord and Lady Preston their daughter needs to enjoy herself again. It's not wholesome to keep a young lady of spirit away from Society. She should be enjoying herself, attending balls and teas and meeting young men." Her gaze flicked to George, then back to me again. "She must be about your own age, hmmm?"
If I was following the conversation correctly-and that was an If with a capital I-then the Prestons were Jacob's parents and Jacob was nobility!
Good lord, and I'd been addressing him by his first name all this time. I turned to him but he'd disappeared again. Thank goodness. Apart from the awkwardness of knowing he was so far above me on the social ladder that we might as well have been on different ladders entirely, I was also beginning to feel sick on his behalf having to listen to the awful Mrs. Culvert prattle on about his family in such a heartless way.
"Mother," George said again but to no avail. She was completely ignoring him now. It was as if he wasn't even in the room.
"Thank you for the invitation," I said although I wasn't sure I was actually invited without the Beauforts or Prestons or whoever they were. "However I must decline. I'm otherwise engaged that evening."
Her smile wilted like a lily in the hot sun as my snub hit home. She hadn't given me a date.