CHAPTER FIVE
“Hold still, child, or I shall pin your ear to your scalp and let the milliners take the blame for the fashion.”
Ellen held very still.
Lady Augusta stood behind her at the glass with a pin between her lips, her gloved fingers moving with brisk, pitiless competence through the curl at Ellen’s temple. She loosened it by a fraction, frowned at the result, and drew it back again.
“If I am to be disfigured,” Ellen said quietly, watching the pin flash near her ear, “I should prefer the blame to fall upon someone more deserving than the milliner.”
Augusta removed the pin from her mouth. “That is the first spirited thing you have said all evening, and I shall reward it by preserving both your ears.”
“You are very kind, my lady.”
“I am many things. Kindness is the least useful of them tonight.”
Ellen tried to smile, because Augusta plainly expected some answer, and because smiling gave her face employment while the stranger in the mirror continued looking back at her.
The gown was the color of deep water, rich enough to shame every candle in the room.
The housekeeper had chosen it, the duke had paid for it, and Ellen could not look at the silk without reckoning what it would have done for the Middleton household in a hard winter.
Perhaps two winters.
The thought must have shown, because Augusta’s hands stilled upon her shoulders.
“Do not look at the gown as if it has committed a crime,” Augusta said.
“It has cost a great deal.”
“Most good armor does.”
“It does not feel like armor.”
“That is because you are accustomed to making armor out of pride and old gloves. Silk is merely a more expensive version.”
Ellen lowered her eyes to the dark gleam of the skirts. “It feels like a costume for a part I do not know how to play.”
“You know how to stand upright, how to answer without babbling, and how to look through a rude person as if the wallpaper behind him were of greater consequence. That is nearly the whole of society.”
“Nearly?”
“The remainder is knowing when to leave a room before someone mistakes cruelty for wit.”
Ellen drew in a careful breath. “Then I shall hope Your Ladyship does not leave me.”
Augusta’s expression softened in the mirror, though her voice remained dry. “There. You will do. You will more than do, which is the trouble. A plain duchess is forgiven. A handsome one is studied.”
Ellen looked up despite herself. “Handsome?”
“Do not fish. It is vulgar.”
“I was not fishing. I was startled.”
“Then recover quickly.” Augusta adjusted the curl one last time, then tapped a finger beneath Ellen’s chin. “Chin up. They will look at you like a horse at Tattersall’s tonight, every last one of them, and you will let them. You will give them nothing back except your own good opinion of yourself.”
Ellen met her own eyes in the glass and found very little there she trusted. “I have very little of that left to give, my lady.”
“Then you must allow me to lend you some of mine,” Augusta replied without hesitation. “I find myself with a great deal to spare.”
Ellen’s laugh came softly and unexpectedly. “I believe you do.”
“I have cultivated it for sixty years. A woman must have a hobby.”
The sound of a door below reached them, followed by the muted shift of a household preparing itself around a duke’s departure. Ellen’s brief amusement faded. Augusta saw that too, of course. Augusta saw everything.
“Your husband will be waiting,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do not let him make you colder than you are.”
Ellen turned from the mirror. “I do not think he tries to make me anything.”
“That may be the trouble.”
***
Theodore was in the hall when they came down.
He looked up at the stairs, and Ellen felt the glance travel over the gown before it returned to her face. It was no more than a moment. He did not stare. He did not smile. Whatever moved behind his eyes came and went without reaching the rest of him.
“You are ready,” he said.
Ellen’s fingers tightened on the banister before she released it. “I believe so, Your Grace.”
Augusta descended behind her with an audible little breath that might have been disapproval or only age.
Theodore offered his arm. “Then we should go.”
Ellen placed her gloved hand on his sleeve and thought that a man might have found one warmer word in the whole of the English language if he had cared to look for it.
“Your Grace,” Augusta said from behind them.
Theodore glanced back. “Aunt?”
“She looks very well.”
His eyes returned to Ellen. For one suspended instant, she thought he might answer as a husband. Then his face closed again with that practiced composure that made her feel as though she had reached for a door and found only painted wood.
“Yes,” he said evenly. “She does.”
It ought to have been praise.
Somehow, from him, it sounded like a fact entered into a ledger.
***
The whispers found her inside the first half hour.
They were not meant to be heard, which was the cruelty of them, since a thing not meant to be heard could not be answered without making oneself ridiculous. Ellen caught them in pieces as Theodore steered her through the rooms, one gloved hand at the small of her back, steady and unhurried.
“That is the new duchess,” a woman’s voice murmured near a bank of flowers. “The Middleton girl.”
“Bought with the brother’s debts, every penny of it,” another replied, and the little laugh that followed seemed to slide beneath Ellen’s skin.
A gentleman answered in a tone of idle amusement. “They say the brother lost twenty thousand at faro. Rosanne must have wanted an heir very badly indeed.”
“Or a wife very cheaply.”
“She is a pretty enough thing at ten paces,” the first woman said. “Look closer. There is nothing there.”
Ellen kept her face exactly as it was.
She had learned that face over two years of creditors and cut acquaintance, the face that gave a room nothing. She wore it now as carefully as Augusta had arranged the curl at her temple and let the pieces slide off it.
Theodore’s hand remained at her back.
It did not press or caress. It was simply there.
Yet she was aware of it with an uncomfortable clarity. Every whisper seemed to sharpen the sensation of that gloved hand resting lightly against her, as though the room watched not only her humiliation but his reaction to it.
He guided her away before any one knot of talkers could become a scene, and Ellen understood without being told that he had heard every word. Her jaw set against it. She could not decide which would be worse, for him to acknowledge the insults or to ignore them altogether.
He did neither.
He would no more remark upon them than he would remark upon the heat of the candles, and she could not tell whether that was kindness, discipline, contempt, or the simple fact that such words could not touch a man who had long ago made himself unreachable.
At the doorway to the second room, a worse whisper found her.
“And there was an officer last Season,” a woman said, her amusement soft and sharp together. “Before the ruin.”
Another voice asked, with delighted interest, “Was there indeed?”
“A Lieutenant Vance. Quite the little flirt, that one. She was half-promised, people said, until the money went and he remembered he had somewhere else to be.”
For one dreadful instant the noise of the room seemed to recede, and she was conscious of nothing but Theodore beside her, the people around them, and the listening ears waiting to see whether the duke’s purchased bride would blush.
Ellen’s step did not falter.
It cost her something it had not cost her before, and she paid it. Her chin remained where Augusta had set it.
Beside her, Theodore’s hand shifted once against her back, so slight a movement that no one else could have seen it.
She did not know whether he meant to steady her or move her on.
Perhaps he did not know either.
In the second hour, as they approached the card room, a man came toward them through the crowd, and Ellen felt the change in her husband before she saw the cause of it.
Nothing obvious altered. His hand at her back did not move, his stride did not break, his face kept the same severe arrangement it had worn all evening.
Yet the quality of his stillness changed.
It was no longer the easy stillness of a man who owned every room he entered.
It became something held in check, something braced behind polished manners.
Ellen had spent three weeks learning the small weather of him, because she had little else to study in a matrimony made of flowers, closed doors, and silence. She noticed the change at once.
“Your Grace,” she said softly, without looking at him, “is something amiss?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly for a man who usually took his time with words.
She glanced ahead. “Then something is unwelcome.”
His gaze did not leave the approaching gentleman. “That is not the same thing.”
The man was tall and silver-haired, dressed with the particular care of someone who intends to be looked at and wishes the looking to seem accidental. He bowed. The bow was a study in itself, low enough to satisfy the strictest eye and still a half-degree shallow of warmth.
“Rosanne,” he said. “And the new duchess.”
His voice was warm.
His eyes, resting on Theodore, were not.
“You are to be congratulated,” he continued, turning the warmth upon Ellen with such skill that she trusted it even less.
“The whole of the ton is occupied with the business. I have heard your matrimony discussed in three separate drawing rooms this week, which is two more than my own ever managed to provoke.”
Theodore inclined his head. “You are kind to keep count.”
“I keep count of a great many things.”
“I have never doubted it.”
The gentleman’s smile deepened, as though Theodore had complimented him rather than warned him. He turned fully to Ellen and bowed again, this time with more softness and no more sincerity.
“You will be at Wrenfield for the shooting, I expect, Your Grace.”
Ellen felt Theodore’s hand become still at her back.