The Soldier Duke's Spinster Bride

Chapter 1

“Do try the lemon ice, Miss Carrow. It is said to be very refreshing for ladies who have grown tired of excitement.”

Lady Cassandra Ridge said it sweetly, the way she said everything, and held out the little glass dish across the marble-topped table as though it were a kindness rather than a verdict.

Melody took it and set it before her, because to refuse would have given the table something to discuss on the drive home, and a small refusal cost more than a small surrender nearly every time, and she had finished paying the higher price years ago.

“How thoughtful,” she said. “I find I have grown very tired indeed.”

Around her the confectioner’s front room glittered with the brightness of women enjoying themselves at no one’s expense but hers.

There were six of them at the long table, and Melody had once danced and gossiped and traded ribbons with most of them, before the understanding with Lord Cole Armstrong became first an expectation, then a wait, then a thing the county discussed in the past tense.

Now four of them wore wedding rings, and a fifth wore a betrothal ring which she mentioned in every third sentence, and Melody wore gloves with a seam she could press her thumb against under the table where no one would see her do it.

The glass of lemon ice stood untouched, weeping drops of moisture against the afternoon heat.

“We were speaking of London,” said Mrs Holloway, who had been Miss Pratt until June and could not yet say her new name without a small proud pause before it. “Cassandra is to go for the little season.”

“Only if Mama can be persuaded the roads have dried,” Cassandra said. “She has a horror of arriving anywhere with mud on the hem. She says a woman is forgiven a great many things in town, but never an untidy entrance.”

“You will be the toast of it,” said another. “You always are.”

“One does not aim to be a toast. A toast is drunk and then forgotten.” Cassandra smiled. “One aims to be remembered.”

Melody set her spoon to the ice and did not lift it. The smell of it reached her first, sharp and yellow and faintly medicinal, and her stomach closed against it the way it always closed when a room had decided something about her before she arrived.

“You are not eating, Miss Carrow,” Cassandra said.

“I am savouring the anticipation.”

“How disciplined of you. I could never. Mama says I want patience.” Cassandra dipped her own spoon and considered it. “Though patience is a great deal easier, I find, when one is certain of being served.”

Melody tapped the spoon once against the rim, then a second time. The taps were a thing she could count, and counting gave her hands an occupation other than trembling.

“Miss Carrow has gone quiet,” Cassandra observed. “I do hope town talk does not bore you. We forget, sometimes, that not everyone finds the prospect of a season so very thrilling.”

“I find a great many things thrilling, Lady Cassandra. I simply ration my displays of it. Enthusiasm is like sugar. A little sweetens. A great deal makes the company ill.”

A laugh went round, uncertain whether it had been invited. Cassandra’s own laugh arrived a half-beat late, polished and unbothered. No room had ever yet turned to look at her for the wrong reason, and the laugh knew it.

“You always did have a way of putting things,” she said. “I have often admired it. There is such freedom in a clever tongue when a woman has nothing else she must protect.”

The remark landed and settled. The table took it in, the small intake of pleasure several of them indulged and tried to hide behind their dishes, and Melody pressed her thumb harder into the glove seam and kept her face arranged.

“You are too generous,” she said. “It would grieve me exceedingly to think that my conversation was my only quality worthy of admiration. It is the one part of me I have never had to pay a dressmaker to improve.”

Mrs Holloway choked on her ice. Cassandra inclined her head, conceding the point as one concedes a single trick at cards one fully intends to win.

The talk turned, as it always turned, to husbands.

“Mr Holloway has promised me a phaeton for the spring,” said the new Mrs Holloway. “Yellow wheels. He says I am to drive it myself in the park.”

“It is fast,” said Mrs Greer comfortably. “Mr Greer would never. He has taken a house in town instead, with the most beautiful yellow drawing room, and I am to do nothing in it but receive.”

“You are all so wonderfully settled,” sighed Miss Dean, who was not yet wed but expected to be by Michaelmas, and produced for the third time the existence of a letter from her intended so passionate she could not read it aloud.

“I should blush. I could not possibly. You would none of you ever look at me again.”

“Then by all means spare us,” Melody said. “I find I am quite captivated by the very sight of you.”

That earned a small laugh, and Miss Dean preened, uncertain whether she had been flattered.

“And how peaceful it must be,” Mrs Greer said, turning to Melody in the voice people kept for the sick and the very old, “to be settled in oneself, with none of this fuss to manage. I quite envy you, sometimes. The freedom of it.”

“It is a great freedom,” Melody said.

“One has so much time to read, I imagine. And to walk. And to be useful to one’s family.” Mrs Greer warmed to it. “I always say there is a particular dignity in a woman who has made her peace.”

“You always do say it,” Cassandra agreed. “Miss Carrow is admirably content with what is offered.”

There it was, said gently, said with a small approving nod, the kind of sentence that could not be answered without seeming to confirm it. Content with what is offered. As though Melody were a mantel shelf-dog given the scraps and grateful for them. The lemon ice glared up at her.

She lifted the spoon and ate it.

It was every bit as sharp as she remembered, the cold of it wrought an ache behind her clear grey eyes, while the sourness puckered the back of her throat.

She swallowed it down with her chin level and her gaze somewhere pleasant in the middle distance, because the alternative was to set the dish aside and have six women watch her not eat, and she would sooner swallow a season’s worth of lemon ice than be watched declining a single one.

It tasted, more than anything, of a garden five years gone.

She had loathed lemon ice then too. There had been an evening party at the assembly rooms, hot and overcrowded, and someone had pressed a glass of it on her, and she had stood holding the wretched thing and trying to think how to be rid of it without rudeness, when a voice at her shoulder had said, low and amused, “You look as though the lemon has insulted you.”

“It has behaved with needless sharpness,” she had told him.

“Then we shall punish it. Please allow me.” And Lord Cole Armstrong had taken the dish from her hand and exchanged it for his own, which was burnt cream, the only ice in England she actually liked, and he consumed the lemon entirely without a single flinch, whilst she looked on, unable to wholly suppress a smile.

No one had seen him do it. That was the thing she had kept of it, after everything else was taken away, that he had not done it to be seen.

“Miss Carrow.”

She came back to the room. Cassandra was watching her with the mild attention of a cat at a mouse hole.

“You were a thousand miles away,” Cassandra said. “I asked whether you mean to attend the Harbury assembly.”

“I have not yet decided.”

“You must. It is so dull when the same faces only ever appear. One longs for variety.” Cassandra turned the stem of her glass between two fingers. “Though I daresay the country must feel very small to you now. After so many years of the same lanes.”

“The lanes have the great virtue of going where they say they will,” Melody said. “I have found that increasingly rare in company.”

The front door slammed loudly, rattling the small paned windows of the shop.

A young woman came in on a gust of September air, bonnet askew, colour high, the look on her face of someone carrying news too good to be made to wait for.

It was Miss Pickett, the apothecary’s daughter, who was not quite of their set and knew it and forgave herself by being always first with everything.

“Have you heard,” she said, to the room at large, not troubling with whom she addressed, “have you heard? Lord Cole Armstrong is coming home.”

Something happened to the air of the room. Melody was aware of it the way one is aware of a draught, a small cold movement that touched the back of the neck before the mind had named it.

“Lord Cole?” said Mrs Holloway, delighted. “Oh, the soldier. The second son. Is it true? When?”

“Within the fortnight, they say. Mrs Coombe had it from the housekeeper at the Abbey herself. After all this time, can you very well imagine.” She put a hand to her breast, the gesture trailing off into wonder.

“Lord Cole?” Mrs Greer cut in, and her eyes had already begun the slow swivel that came at Melody like weather. “My dear, you are behind the times. There is no Lord Cole. It is His Grace now, and has been this twelvemonth and more.”

“His Grace,” Miss Pickett repeated, abashed at having got it wrong, and the rest of them tittered, the small cruel music of women who knew a thing a newcomer did not.

“The Duke of Greenstone.” Cassandra set down her glass with great care, as though the name deserved a clean surface to rest on.

“One must be accurate about these things. Titles are terribly unforgiving. A man may be Lord Cole one year and His Grace the next, and the difference is the whole of his life. And ours, who must address him.”

She did not look at Melody when she said it.

She did not need to. The whole table looked at Melody for her, six faces turning at once like flowers following a sun, and Melody understood with perfect clarity that this, all of it, the lemon ice and the talk of London and the peace they wished her so warmly, this had only ever been the overture.

Beneath the table, her thumb sought the seam of her glove and pressed hard against it, whilst with her other hand she smoothed a stray tress of her glossy raven hair behind her ear.

“How fortunate for England,” she said. Her voice came out even, which surprised her, a little, distantly. “I am sure the dukedom will be greatly relieved to have its master restored to it. A duke ought not to be left lying about unused. It distresses the tenants.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Cassandra laughed, the real laugh this time, brief and genuinely amused, and Melody bitterly resented the fact that she had earned it.

“And you, Miss Carrow.” Mrs Greer leaned in, kind as a knife. “Are you relieved?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“To have him home. After everything.” The everything was a small masterpiece, an entire history folded into three syllables.

“We all remember how things stood, once. It would be only natural to feel something.” She let the word hang, generously, so that Melody might fill it with whatever wound she chose.

The spoon was steady in Melody’s hand because she had made it steady. She had become, over a number of years she did not care to total, very accomplished at the management of her own hands.

“I was not aware,” she said, “that I had misplaced him.”

It was the right thing. The small silence that followed told her so, the silence of a blow that has not quite found purchase, and she held the moment by ankle and by neck and gave away none of what it cost. She tapped the spoon once more against the empty glass.

Across the room a clock she could not see ticked, and she counted the ticks, four of them, five, and somewhere around the seventh she was certain again that she would not be sick and would not weep and would not give them the single thing they had dressed and powdered and driven into town to collect.

“More ices?” said the confectioner’s girl, into the quiet.

“I think we are quite finished,” said Cassandra.

They gathered gloves and reticules and the small important businesses of departure, and the talk ran on ahead of them out the door, lighter now, released.

Melody was the last to rise. She found, when she stood, that her legs would hold her, which they always did, in the end, however little she trusted them in the moment.

She had reached the threshold, the bell over the door still trembling from the woman ahead of her, when she heard it.

Two of them on the step outside, voices pitched for each other and not for her, the way people pitch a voice when they have forgotten or have not bothered to remember that the subject of it has ears.

“Do you think he remembers her?”

“A duke?” A small laugh. “My dear. Why on earth should he?”

Melody stepped out into the cooling afternoon.

The light had gone long and gold across the cobbles, and the air smelled of coming rain, and somewhere down the street a cart was unloading apples.

She did not slow and she did not turn, only walked to the waiting carriage with the spoon-rhythm still going somewhere behind her ribs, one and two and three.

The question came with her the whole way home, set neatly in her lap where she could keep an eye on it, the way one carries a thing that has cut before and will cut again the moment it is given room.