Chapter 2
“Mr. Fraser! Good morning. Is the primer for the younger ones still on the shelf by the window, or has someone moved it again?” Lady Frances Pembroke asked the schoolmaster as she stepped over the threshold.
“Good morning, Lady Frances. I moved it to the cupboard last week, I’m afraid. Someone kept knocking it into the ink.”
Frances laughed and crossed the room toward the cupboard in question. The school was already beginning to fill with the morning’s noise, the murmur of children settling into their seats, and the occasional sharp whisper that preceded some minor act of mischief.
She loved this hour. She had loved it since the first morning her sister Lavinia had brought her here, two years ago now, and she had sat beside a little girl who could not read her own name and taught her the letters one by one until the girl could sound them out herself.
She found the primer and tucked it under her arm. “Has Lady Eleanor not arrived yet? I had thought she would be here before me.”
The smile on Malcolm’s face shifted, just slightly. He set down the papers in his hand and looked at her with an expression that was careful in a way it had not been a moment ago.
“No, she... she has not come,” he said. “I received a letter from her this morning.”
Frances stilled. “A letter?”
“She writes that her brother will no longer permit her to leave the house,” he said it quietly, but she could see beneath the surface that he was working very hard to remain composed. “She was inconsolable, and she wrote that she did not know when she would be able to come again.”
Frances stood holding the primer and said nothing for a moment because what she wanted to say was not at all suitable for a charity school on a Tuesday morning.
Of course, he had. She had known the moment Eleanor had mentioned her brother’s name and title at their last visit that something like this was coming.
Eleanor had been frightened then though she had tried to laugh it off, but Frances had told herself it would come to nothing.
She had been wrong.
“I see,” she said at last because she could not say what she actually though, which was that the Duke of Whitestone was the most cold-blooded, high-handed, insufferable man in all of London.
She had never met him directly; they moved in overlapping circles but had never been formally introduced. He also had never been around when she visited her friend, yet Eleanor’s descriptions over the past year had been thorough enough for Frances to form a very complete picture.
Frances watched him for a moment then turned back to her work.
But she did not stop thinking about it. Someone ought to challenge that duke.
By the time she left the school two hours later, she had made up her mind.
She told herself, as the carriage turned toward Whitestone House, that she was going for Eleanor’s sake—which was entirely true.
Eleanor was her dearest friend, and if her brother had shut her inside that house with no explanation beyond his own authority then someone ought to go and find out what had happened.
And Frances was as good a person as any.
The butler admitted her almost immediately, took her card, and led her to the drawing room.
Frances sat and waited, not fidgeting because her sister had taught her never to fidget, especially when she was nervous, and some lessons stuck regardless of how one was feeling.
She looked at the painting above the mantelpiece, then at the arrangement of the chairs, then at her own hands in her lap.
The door opened, and she looked up then her stomach knotted.
Frances had expected a butler, or perhaps a footman, to come to tell her that Eleanor would be down shortly. She had not expected the Duke of Whitestone himself.
He was taller than she had imagined, which was saying something because Eleanor’s descriptions had not exactly suggested a small man. He carried himself with a kind of authority that was not performed but simply there.
He had dark hair, a face that was perfectly controlled, revealing nothing, and piercing blue eyes that surveyed the room and her with an intensity she found instantly irritating.
So, this is the beast, she thought and then corrected herself because she was going to be perfectly civil.
He nodded which was the minimal gesture that could genuinely be called a greeting.
She curtsied. “Your Grace,” she said. “I hope I do not intrude. I came to inquire after Lady Eleanor. She was expected at the school this morning.”
“My sister will not be attending the school anymore,” he said without preamble, without softening, as though it were simply a fact he was imparting of no more significance than the weather.
“She will remain at home under my supervision going forward. If you wish to call upon her, you are welcome to do so here at Whitestone House, but she will not be returning to the school.”
Frances looked at him.
She had prepared herself for coldness. Eleanor had warned her often enough. But there was something about hearing it directly, the complete absence of any acknowledgment that Eleanor might have feelings worth consulting on the matter, that made her chest tighten.
“I see,” she said, and she meant to leave it there, she truly did. “And Eleanor is in agreement with this arrangement?”
Something moved across his face, but then it was gone. “It is not a matter that requires her agreement.”
Oh. Frances felt the words land somewhere below her ribs and discovered that being civil was rather more difficult than she had anticipated.
“So, she will be kept from the school against her will? She is a grown woman. She is capable of—”
“She is yet to be one-and-twenty,” he said. “She is still under my care.”
“Surely one might still show some mercy to his charges.”
His eyes narrowed, and he looked at her the way a man looks at something that has surprised him by being more troublesome than expected.
“Miss—”
“It is Lady Frances Pembroke, Your Grace.”
He went very still for a moment. Then he took one step toward her, deliberate and unhurried, and the effect was rather like watching something large and quiet decide to move—the room seemed to contract slightly around it.
Frances did not step back. She made a conscious decision not to step back which required slightly more effort than she was willing to admit.
“Lady Frances,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it, and just a fraction too, that made it sound less like an acknowledgment and more like a warning.
“I would advise you to have a care for your tongue. Were I to determine that your influence was not conducive to my sister’s wellbeing, I would have little difficulty prohibiting the association altogether. ”
Frances held his gaze. He would do it. She could see that clearly. The knowledge was infuriating, and he was, frustratingly, persuasive enough to have her keep her mouth shut when she would have preferred to speak.
He regarded her for one more moment, as though filing something away, and then the door opened, and Eleanor appeared in the doorway, a little breathless and looking rather as though she had been listening from the hallway and decided to intervene before matters deteriorated.
“Frances!” she said it with so much warmth. “I did not know you had called. How lovely!”
Then the Duke turned and walked out of the room without another word, and the door closed behind him with a quiet, definitive click.
Frances let out a long breath.
“He is utterly impossible,” Eleanor said the moment she was certain he was out of earshot.
They had settled together on the settee, close enough to speak in low voices which Frances suspected was a habit Eleanor had developed out of necessity. She had taken both of Frances’ hands in hers and was holding them with the particular grip of a person who needed something solid to hold.
“He told me I could no longer come to the school,” Eleanor continued.
“Just like that. No discussion. He simply informed me as though I were a child and not a woman of twenty. And when I told him that I had responsibilities there, that the children expected me, that Malcolm...” She stopped.
“He would not hear it. He will not hear any of it. He says only that I must think of my position and my future and the masquerade ball, as though a ball is any sort of answer to anything.”
“What does he intend?” Frances asked. “For your future, I mean.”
“A suitable match of course.” Eleanor’s voice carried a dry edge that did not suit her usual warmth which told Frances how long she had been living with this.
“A nobleman. Someone of rank and fortune and absolutely nothing else to recommend him. He has arranged for half of London to attend this masquerade in two days’ time, and he expects me to smile and dance and allow myself to be looked over like a horse at Tattersall’s. ”
“Eleanor—”
“I love Malcolm,” she said plainly, and that was somehow more affecting than tears would have been.
“I know what people will say. I know what Alexander says. I know the arguments, Frances, every one of them, and I have turned them over a hundred times, and the answer is always the same. I love him, and I cannot imagine my life without him, and I do not know what to do.”
Frances looked at her friend, at the unhappiness that she was clearly trying very hard to hold inside the shape of something manageable, and she felt the irritation she had carried in from the drawing room transform into something quieter and more resolute.
“We will think of something,” she said.
“Actually.” Eleanor’s grip on her hands changed, tightening slightly. Her eyes, which had been cast down, came up. “I have been thinking of something already.”
Frances recognized that expression. She had seen it before, most memorably during an incident at Lady Hartwell’s garden party three summers ago that she still preferred not to think about in great detail.
It was the expression Eleanor wore when she had conceived of a plan that was either very clever or very inadvisable, and there was often very little distance between the two.
“Ellie—”
“The masquerade.” Her friend leaned forward, her voice dropping further.
“In two days. Alexander will have invited hundreds of people. The house will be full to the walls, Frances, everyone in masks and costumes, no one quite certain who is who.” She paused, and something bright and frightened and determined moved behind her eyes all at once. “It may be the only chance I have.”
“A chance for what, precisely?” she said though she was beginning to suspect she already knew.
Eleanor’s hands tightened around hers, and the look on her face was the look of someone who had already spent several sleepless nights arriving at the only answer she could find.
“I need your help,” she said. “Will you hear me out?”
Frances thought about the Duke as he had spoken of what he would and would not permit. Then she looked down at Eleanor’s hand clutching hers.
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me.”