Chapter 14: Arya Runs from the Drawing Room into Genuine Danger

The musical evening had been in progress for forty minutes when Arya arrived at her private calculation: that she could endure, at a conservative estimate, eleven more minutes of Miss Felicia Stokebridge's interpretation of a Florentine air before she committed some irrevocable social act that would reach her father's ears before breakfast.

She revised the estimate downward to seven when Miss Stokebridge embarked upon a second verse that the composer had not, in Arya's considered opinion, intended to survive performance.

The drawing room at Whitehall Palace was everything a drawing room in a Gothic novel aspires to be, and everything Arya had spent twelve weeks developing a considered aversion to: forty yards of pale blue silk on the walls, eight candlelit girandoles that made everyone present look gilded and slightly feverish, and approximately sixty persons arrayed in attitudes of rapturous attention that bore no earthly relationship to the expressions she could detect beneath them. Lady Myranda Royce was counting the girandoles. Lord Blount had achieved a form of open-eyed unconsciousness that Arya found almost admirable. Sansa sat in the third row with her hands folded and her face composed into an expression of genuine pleasure that was, as always, somewhat exhausting to stand next to.