The Fourth Season - by Hajjar. S

Prudence Hartwell had become something of a fixture at the edges of London ballrooms. Not unwelcome, precisely, but not sought after either, the way a particularly sturdy chair against the wall is not unwelcome, merely unremarked upon until someone requires somewhere to sit.She was not unpleasant to look at. Her aunt insisted upon this point with the frequency of a woman trying to convince herself as much as her niece. Prudence had a good, clear complexion and a figure that no dressmaker had ever complained of, and eyes the colour of strong tea that nobody, in four Seasons, had ever once been moved to write a sonnet about. Her nose was a fraction too long for fashion. Her jaw had a firmness that in a man might have been called distinguished and in a woman was, more often, called stubborn. She laughed too loudly at things she found genuinely funny, and she read Latin for pleasure, which she had learned early to keep to herself, having once watched a promising young viscount's interest curdle into polite terror upon hearing her quote Ovid unprompted.Her sisters had married in their first Seasons. They were pretty, biddable girls who smiled at the correct intervals and said little that could be held against them. Prudence had watched both weddings from a pew near the back, genuinely glad for them, and genuinely aware that she was being quietly filed away in the family's estimation as the one who simply hadn't taken, like a seed planted in poor soil.By the fourth Season, her mother had stopped attending balls with any real hope and started attending them with the grim persistence of a woman completing a chore. Prudence herself had made a kind of peace with it. She had her books. She had her aunt's dogs, which she was permitted to walk in the mornings before the rest of the household woke, and which loved her without any reference whatsoever to her marriageability. She told herself, most days, that this was enough.It was at the Ashworth ball, in April, that Mr. Julian Vane trod on her hem.He was not, by any account, the most eligible man in the room. He was a second son with a modest income from a shipping concern his father had never quite approved of, more often found at the card tables than the dance floor, with a reputation for being amiable, unambitious, and entirely too fond of arguing. He apologized for the hem with a thoroughness that bordered on the theatrical, and Prudence, expecting the usual retreat once the obligatory politeness had been discharged, said, without quite meaning to, "You needn't apologize so extensively. I have four inches of hem I can well spare, and several opinions I cannot."He blinked. Then he laughed — not politely, not the practiced chuckle of a man being charming, but an actual bark of surprise, loud enough that two dowagers turned to look."What opinions?" he asked, as though it were the most natural question in the world.She very nearly did not answer him honestly. Four Seasons of caution rose up in her like a trained response. But something about the genuine curiosity in his face, not the glazed politeness she knew so well, but real interest, the kind a man might show a puzzle he intended to solve, undid her caution before she could reach for it."That Lord Ashworth's musicians are half a beat too slow for the dance they're attempting," she said, "and that you, sir, are standing on my hem again."He looked down. He was. He stepped back, laughing harder, and asked her to dance before she could think better of accepting.He was not, it turned out, a man interested in sonnets about tea-colored eyes. He was a man who liked being contradicted, who found her Latin delightful rather than alarming, who did not flinch when she laughed too loudly at his jokes but instead seemed to consider it the correct response and adjusted his jokes accordingly. He called on her three times in as many weeks, which her mother noted with a carefully suppressed hope that Prudence recognized because she felt the same hope, suppressed just as carefully, in herself."You are not what I expected," he told her once, in her aunt's garden, with the dogs circling their ankles."I am aware," she said. "I have had four Seasons to become aware.""No," he said, and there was something in his face that stopped her from making the joke she'd half-prepared. "I mean you are better. Everyone else in that ballroom is performing a version of themselves they believe will be liked. You were the only person who simply told me the truth, unprompted, about the musicians and my clumsy feet. I have been bored in ballrooms for eleven years, Miss Hartwell. I was not bored for one moment with you."She did not know what to say to that, which was, for a woman who generally had a great deal to say, its own kind of answer.He proposed in June, in the same garden, with considerably less ceremony than the occasion technically demanded and considerably more sincerity than most proposals she had heard described. She said yes before he had properly finished the sentence, which he later claimed to find the most romantic moment of his life, and which she suspected he would tell at dinner parties for the next forty years, embellishing it further each time.Her mother wept with a relief she did not bother to disguise as sentiment. Her sisters were, to their credit, genuinely delighted. And Prudence herself, walking the dogs the following morning in the pale gold light of an early London summer, found that the peace she'd made with her own plainness. That careful, guarded peace of a woman who had stopped expecting to be chosen had quietly, without her permission, become something else entirely.Not relief, exactly. Something closer to recognition. As though she had simply been waiting, all four Seasons, for someone capable of seeing her clearly enough to notice there was something there worth seeing at all.

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