Chapter 4

The Lambert Ball

The ballroom of House Lambert, true to its boast of possessing the largest chandelier in Lumière, was bright as day with the thousands of candles pouring light from the ceiling, and that light bounced several times over between the white marble of the floor and the mirrors on the walls, so that wherever a person stood, their face was laid bare without a single shadow. Adelaide Crowell disliked that brightness. It was a light with nowhere to hide.

The moment the footman at the entrance announced their names, the sound in the ballroom dropped by one beat. The Lady Adelaide of House Crowell, and Sir Sion Arden of the Royal Special Knights. The string quartet did not stop playing, but the mouths of the people chatting before it all closed at once, then opened again a moment later, lower than before.

The seventh, they say.

She heard it without needing to listen for it. Adel pressed ever so slightly with the fingertips she had rested on Sion's arm, so that it would look as though a frightened lady were leaning on her fiancé's arm. Sion's arm took that pressure and stiffened faintly, then relaxed.

"My lady, are you all right?"

"Y-yes. It's just that there are so many people."

I don't mind that there are many people. The trouble is that every one of them is looking at me.

And you aren't looking only at me in this ballroom, either. You're counting the exits.

Duchess Isolde had long since taken Céline and vanished into the Marchioness's circle at the far side of the ballroom. In the carriage on the way, the duchess had said only one thing to Adel: dance once, and keep to the corner. She meant that it would be awkward if the Lady Reaper drew too much attention at an occasion meant for finding Céline a match.

Adel intended to follow those words to the letter. The corner was where one heard the most in any ballroom.

When the first piece began, Sion held out his hand before her. It was his duty as her fiancé. Adel took that hand and went out into the middle of the ballroom, and the people around them each stepped back half a pace, as if avoiding a contagion, and made room for them in a circle.

Before eight bars of the dance had passed, Adel realized that this knight had learned to dance, but either long ago or with little occasion to dance as he had been taught. His left foot lagged by half a beat, and with every turn the hand at her waist returned to precisely the same spot, far too precisely. It was closer to the stance of holding an opponent's center in a sparring bout than to dancing.

On the third turn, the toe of his shoe very nearly stepped on hers. Adel drew her foot back half an inch just before it could be trodden on, and at the same time pressed his wrist very lightly to change the direction of the next turn. To anyone who did not know how to dance, it would have looked as though the lady had lost the beat and stumbled.

Sion looked down at her. A very faint crease had formed between his brows.

"...My lady."

"I-I'm sorry. I'm clumsy at dancing..."

"Not at all."

For the remaining thirty-two bars, Sion did not once come near stepping on her foot. That was because each time, Adel changed their direction for him in advance. When the piece ended, Sion bowed his head to her, and that bow was very slightly deeper than it had been on the day of the introduction.

He's quick on the uptake.

When the dance ended, Adel went to the corner, as the duchess had told her: a long bench beside the arch leading to the card room at the eastern end of the ballroom. From beyond the arch drifted men's voices along with cigar smoke. It was customary for ladies not to enter the card room, and no one paid any mind to a lady sitting on the bench beside its entrance.

Sion seated her on the bench and left, saying he would fetch her a drink. Adel watched him walk past the refreshment table in a direction that would take him on a wide circuit of the ballroom. Looking at people's faces was evidently more important to him than staying at his fiancée's side, and that suited Adel as well.

From beyond the arch came the sound of cards being shuffled, and between the shuffles, two voices whose tongues had been loosened somewhat by drink.

"...So you never got it back, in the end?"

"Never did. How do you collect from a dead man? Old Mother Harold bolted the door and said she knew nothing of her son's debts."

"How much was it?"

"I don't even want to say. He bragged that once the Crowell dowry came in, he'd pay it all at once, so I gave him three more months. And then, barely a month after the engagement was announced, he falls off his horse and breaks his neck."

Adel moved a single one of the fingers folded in her lap, ever so slightly. Count Edwin Harold. The first line. That he had gambling debts, she had already heard as a rumor some ten days after the engagement was announced. But that he had meant to pay those debts with her dowry was a story she was hearing for the first time.

He got engaged to me to pay his debts. That's not surprising. Half the matches in society are like that.

What's surprising is that he went around boasting of the calculation out loud in front of others. Then this man wouldn't have been the only one who knew.

Inside the card room, amid the sound of cards being laid down, the voice went on.

"But that horse, though. That black he doted on. A horse that gentle doesn't just suddenly go mad."

"They say it's the Lady Reaper's doing. After the engagement, the lady visited his stables once, they say. Three days after that."

"Ha, so the horse took one look at the lady and..."

The two men laughed low. Adel did not move a finger until the laughter had died away.

Sion Arden made a circuit of the ballroom and entered the card room through its other entrance, opposite the arch where the lady sat. No one turned to look when a man in a knight's uniform entered the card room. During the Season, a few young knights always drifted into the ballrooms to watch the gaming tables.

He stood beside the fireplace, pretending to watch one of the tables, and observed the two men at a table near the arch on the far side of the room. Both were red in the face, and one of them kept slamming his card hand down on the table. Sion had been listening from the moment that man brought up Edwin Harold's name.

Count Harold had gambling debts. He had meant to pay those debts with the Crowell dowry. And after the engagement, the lady had visited the Harold stables, and three days later the horse had bolted.

Sion set those three sentences side by side in his head. If the lady had known that a man had become engaged to her for her dowry. If she had guessed how that man would treat her once his debts were paid. And if she had gone in person to the stables where that man's beloved horse was kept.

Motive and opportunity. The first two pillars an investigator raises. What troubled Sion was precisely how easily those two pillars went up. With the nobleman he had let slip some years ago, too, everything had fit together far too easily at first. And then, in the courtroom, those easy things had crumbled one by one.

He stopped watching the game, crossed the room, and went to stand beside the table where the red-faced man sat.

"Excuse me. Were you just speaking of Count Harold?"

The man looked up; it took him half a beat to recognize the knights' uniform, and another half beat to remember whom the man wearing it had come in with tonight. His red face went a little white.

"Ah, n-no, that was just talk over drinks... You'd be the, the seventh..."

"What was your relationship with Count Harold?"

"...We played cards together. That's all."

"From whom did you hear that the lady visited the Harold stables?"

"That, the Harolds' coachman said so, or no, someone heard it from one of their servants... Everyone knows it. Sir, I truly don't know anything..."

Sion asked nothing further. This was as far as a drunken gambler's mouth would go. When asked his name, the man answered that it was Gould, and Sion wrote it in his notebook. Gould, Harold's creditor, heard the stable story secondhand from a servant.

As he left the card room, he looked back toward the arch. The lady was sitting on the long bench. Head bowed, both hands folded in her lap, in a posture not a hair different from when he had left her. From that seat, the voices beyond the arch would have carried perfectly. Whatever Sion had heard, the lady would have heard as well.

And yet not a trace of surprise or fear had surfaced on the lady's face.

Sion took two glasses of lemonade from the refreshment table and walked over to her. The lady raised her head, accepted the glass, and murmured her thanks. Her gloved fingers wrapped around the glass, then slowly traced one circle around its rim.

"My lady."

"Yes."

"Have you ever seen Count Harold's horse?"

The lady's finger stopped on the rim of the glass. Only for a very brief moment.

"...Yes. Once. Sir Edwin said he wanted to show it to me. It was a very gentle horse."

"When was that?"

"About... a month after the engagement."

It was not a lie. It matched what Gould had said, too. Only, the lady did not mention that the horse had bolted three days after the day she visited those stables. Choosing not to volunteer what one had not been asked was not lying, but Sion had seen a great many people who answered that way.

The string quartet began the next piece. The lady took a sip of lemonade and bowed her head again.

Sion stood beside her and looked out over the ballroom. This time, he did not count the exits.

That night, in the study on the second floor of the east wing, Adel added a few words in small writing beside the first line of the black leather notebook.

Plan to clear debts with dowry. Boasted of it openly himself. Creditor Gould. Rumor: accident three days after my stable visit.

She set down her pen and looked at that line for a long while. Three days from her visit to the stable to the accident: the count the rumor carried did not differ from her own record by a single day.

It was true that she had gone to those stables that day. And that day, standing before the gentle black horse's feed trough, she had seen that the merchant's mark stamped on the oat sacks Edwin was so proud of was different from the month before.

That day, Edwin had patted the sack with his palm and said he had switched to better oats.

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