The Unnoticed Lady the Duke Chose (Marriage and Duty #5)

Chapter One

“Cecilia, the chocolate is bitter again.”

The words floated down the breakfast table with the weary inevitability of sunrise, and Cecilia Ashwood—who had prepared the chocolate exactly as she had prepared it every morning for the past five years, which was to say exactly as her Aunt Lavinia demanded it—set down her own cup of rapidly cooling tea and summoned a patient smile.

“I shall speak to Cook directly, Aunt.”

“I cannot fathom why it must prove so difficult.” Lady Ashwood pressed a hand to her temple, as though the offending chocolate had conspired to ruin her morning single-handedly. “One would think, after all this time, that the matter could be managed without constant supervision.”

One would think, Cecilia agreed silently, that after five years of preparing chocolate to your exacting specifications, I might be trusted to know the recipe. And yet.

“Perhaps a trifle more sugar?” she suggested instead. “The weather has turned cold; sweet things are ever more welcome in such weather.”

“Do not patronise me, Cecilia. I know perfectly well what I taste.” Lady Ashwood took another sip, grimaced with theatrical suffering, and pushed the cup away. “But I suppose it must do. I have not the strength to quarrel this morning. My nerves are quite shattered.”

Cecilia made a sympathetic sound. Her aunt’s nerves existed in a state of perpetual near-collapse, threatened by everything from unexpected callers to the wrong shade of ribbon upon a bonnet.

It was remarkable, really, how much devastation a nervous system might endure while still permitting its owner to deliver a steady stream of complaints.

“Georgiana, sit up straight,” Lady Ashwood continued, her attention shifting to her elder daughter, who lounged over her toast with the elegant indifference of a young woman perfectly aware of her own prettiness and wholly unwilling to exert herself before noon.

“No gentleman desires a wife who cannot maintain proper posture.”

“There are no gentlemen present, Mama,” Georgiana replied, not unreasonably.

“There might be. One never knows when a gentleman might call.”

“At half past eight in the morning? In Hertfordshire?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

Cecilia rather doubted that—Hertfordshire lanes were notably devoid of eligible gentlemen making dawn social calls—but she kept the observation to herself.

Five years in this household had taught her the value of strategic silence.

Speech invited attention; attention invited criticism; criticism invariably concluded with the assignment of some additional task to prove her usefulness.

Usefulness was Cecilia’s sole currency. It was the coin by which she purchased her place at this table, her small room on the upper floor, her continued existence within the walls of what had once been her home.

Thornfield. The very name still caught in her chest, a small sharp hook of grief.

She had been born in this house, had taken her first steps along its corridors, had pressed flowers from its gardens into books that now belonged to someone else.

The entail had seen to that—the legal contrivance by which her father’s modest estate had passed, upon his death, to his nearest male relation, leaving Cecilia with nothing but her education, her mother’s pearls, and the dubious charity of cousins she had scarcely known existed.

“Cecilia.” Her uncle’s voice emerged from behind his newspaper.

Horace Ashwood was a man of middling height, middling intelligence, and middling ambition—qualities that might have rendered him perfectly pleasant, had they not been coupled with a profound reluctance ever to contradict his wife.

“There is a letter here from Lady Marchmont. It requires a response. My handwriting is not what it was.”

Your handwriting was never what it was, Cecilia thought, but she rose obediently. “Of course, Uncle. I shall attend to it directly after breakfast.”

“See that you do. The woman is a fearsome correspondent. She will notice if her letter goes unanswered.”

Cecilia did not ask about its contents. She would discover them soon enough, when she sat down to compose a reply that would bear her uncle’s signature but none of his words.

This, too, formed part of her usefulness: the ability to write a coherent letter, to keep accounts from descending into chaos, to smooth the rough edges of a household which had somehow acquired a baronet’s daughter without acquiring any corresponding notion of how she ought to be treated.

She was not a servant. Servants were paid.

She was not a guest. Guests were welcomed.

She was something between—present yet unacknowledged, necessary yet unvalued, existing in the margins of a family portrait from which she had been neatly cropped.

Breakfast proceeded in its customary fashion.

Dorothea, the younger daughter, ate her eggs in anxious silence, casting the occasional furtive glance at Cecilia that might have signified guilt—or merely indigestion.

Georgiana studied her reflection in the back of a spoon and appeared satisfied.

Lady Ashwood catalogued her ailments—a headache threatening, her joints aching with the change in weather, a general malaise that would certainly require rest—while simultaneously issuing instructions regarding dinner, the linen-cupboard, and the draft in the morning room which must be addressed immediately.

All of these instructions, Cecilia noted, were directed at her.

“The Hendersons are calling this afternoon,” Lady Ashwood announced, apropos of nothing.

“Georgiana, you shall wear the blue muslin. Dorothea, the yellow. Cecilia—” A pause, during which her gaze swept over Cecilia’s plain grey morning dress with eloquent disdain.

“Cecilia, I believe you had better see to the arrangement of the drawing room. Fresh flowers, if any remain at this season. And pray ensure the good tea service has been properly polished.”

“Of course, Aunt.”

“And speak to Cook about luncheon. Nothing too heavy—Mrs Henderson is forever remarking upon her digestion.”

“Yes, Aunt.”

“And the fire in the morning room—”

“The draft. Yes. I shall see to it.”

Lady Ashwood’s eyes narrowed. There was something in Cecilia’s tone—not quite impertinent, nothing that might be openly reproved, but a certain flatness that suggested she had heard these instructions before. Which, indeed, she had. Daily. For five years.

“You seem tired, Cecilia,” Lady Ashwood observed, in a manner that contrived to make concern sound like accusation. “Perhaps you are not sleeping well. An excess of sleep may be quite as debilitating as a deficiency, you know. The physician says—”

“I am quite well, Aunt. Merely eager to begin my tasks.”

It was the proper reply—industrious, grateful, entirely devoid of personality. Lady Ashwood accepted it with a gracious nod, as though Cecilia’s eagerness to serve were a gift rather than a strategy for survival.

“Very good. You may be excused.”

Cecilia rose, dropped a small curtsey—neither too formal nor too familiar—and made her escape.

***

The morning room was cold.

This was not the fault of the draft—which was largely imaginary—but of the simple fact that coal cost money, and Thornfield’s finances were no longer what they had been.

Cecilia knew this better than anyone: she was the one who balanced the household accounts, who bargained with tradesmen, who performed the quiet economies that kept the family afloat without obliging them to acknowledge they were economising at all.

She stood now at the window, gazing out upon the October garden with its fading blooms and yellowing leaves.

This view had been her mother’s favourite.

Eleanor Ashwood had spent countless hours in this very room—reading, embroidering, teaching a small Cecilia the names of the plants visible from this precise angle.

That is a late-blooming rose, my darling. See how it persists, even as the others fade? Some things are stronger for having to fight for their place in the world.

Cecilia touched the chill glass. Her mother had been gone ten years now, though it seemed at once longer and shorter.

Longer, because the grief had settled into a constant undertone beneath all she did; shorter, because some mornings she still woke expecting to hear her mother’s voice calling her to breakfast.

Her father had never recovered from Mama’s death.

Sir Edmund Ashwood had been a gentle man—scholarly, impractical, more devoted to his books than to the mundane business of estates and entails.

He had loved his wife with a devotion that left no room for prudence, and when she died, some essential part of him had died with her.

Cecilia had been twelve. She had become, overnight, the manager of a household whose master was present in body but absent in spirit.

She had learned to consult with the steward, to review the accounts, to make decisions that should have been far beyond her years.

She had done it all without complaint, because her father needed her, because someone had to, because useful people were not abandoned.

And then her father had died too, five years ago, and she had discovered exactly how much her usefulness was worth.

Nothing. Usefulness required context—and hers had been swept away by the inexorable tide of an entail that cared nothing for grief or competence or the simple fact that she had been raised as the daughter of this house.

Horace Ashwood inherited everything. Horace—who had visited Thornfield perhaps three times in Cecilia’s entire childhood.

Horace—who had never troubled to learn the tenants’ names, the rhythm of the harvest, or any of the thousand small details that kept an estate alive.

Horace—whose wife had taken one look at Cecilia, at her education, her capability, her quiet sorrow, and seen an opportunity rather than a person.