It was not as crowded as the night they had opened. She had heard that Queen Victoria was in attendance at the Italian opera tonight before she left for Coburg, and most of society would be gathered there to curry her favor. But they still had quite a crowd at the club, people who were becoming regulars, who would prefer the thrill of winning and losing on the turn of a card to staring at the young queen and her stern German husband. Lily rubbed her lace-gloved hands over her bare arms as she listened to the laughter and chatter and the clack of the roulette wheel spinning. She saw it all and took it all in, but she didn’t feel as if she were really there. She felt like she had been wandering in this strange half-waking state ever since the incident at the park yesterday. Her nightmares of the past and Dominic’s hints that she should spy on the Huntingtons, it was all tangled up in her mind. She worked to pull her usual calm coolness around her, tried to lose herself in account books and the club, but it all hovered there at the edge of her thoughts.
