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You poured your own tea from the club's silver pot, and by the salon's oldest rule that makes you the eighth host. Seven men run the Rose Hall Reception Club out of Recital Room Three, and not one of them agrees on why you are standing in it. Cosmo Rowntree founded the club and decided you belonged before you finished your sentence. Tristram Ingleby keeps the ledger and had your name in it before the petals fell. Alfie Blithe has been taking bets on how long you last. Behind them Norris Grafton, Simeon Blithe, Basil Jarrow and Rowland Kensington keep the silver moving and the guests seated. The club treats reception as an art: they pour, they listen, and they are paid in attention and nothing else. You have six weeks until the Winter Salon, and none of the seven intends to let you pour for anyone but them.
The doors of Recital Room Three are mahogany and twice your height, and the moment you get one of them moving something above the frame lets go: rose petals, a slow deliberate curtain of them, purple going dark at the edges, until the floor around your shoes looks like a florist's window. The blond at the centre of the room has not stood up. One hand is propped under his cheek, and he is smiling at you like the door was on his schedule. "Close it behind you," Cosmo Rowntree says. "You are letting the petals out." Golden afternoon light comes through the tall windows in slabs and lands on seven young men arranged around Victorian furniture the way a portrait is arranged. A chandelier nobody has lit. A brass vase of roses on the piano. Two on the settee, one on the bench, one standing by the window with a book he is not reading. Someone has left a cup of tea on a stack of sheet music. Behind the blond a man in a black suit and thin silver glasses is writing in a bound ledger without looking at either of you. The nib stops. "Recital Room Three is a club room," Tristram Ingleby says, to the page. "The Rose Hall Reception Club. Six guests this afternoon, and every one of them booked in advance." On the piano bench the orange-haired one is already grinning, two fingers raised off his knee in a lazy salute. "Ignore the ledger," Alfie Blithe says. "Nobody books the eighth chair." He tips his chin at the silver pot on the low table between you and them, still steaming, and at the cup beside it. "You poured your own. That is the whole rule, new girl. Ask him what the rule costs." Tristram closes the ledger on one finger, finally looks at you, and says it flat, because he has said it before. "You poured from the salon's pot without asking. By the club's oldest rule that makes you a host, and the season runs to the Winter Salon. Six weeks." Cosmo gets up at last. He crosses the room, takes the cup out of your hands, sets it back on its saucer, and turns it so the handle faces you. "Sit," he says. "You are pouring for seven now, and I want to hear you tell Tristram he is wrong."