Chapter 4
“I…” Frances fumbled to answer, but no defense immediately came.
“I should have known.”
She flinched. His arm was still around her waist, and his voice was very quiet, and the combination of those two things was somehow more alarming than if he had shouted.
“Your Grace.” She put her hands against his chest, not pushing exactly, more the gesture of someone establishing that there was supposed to be a distance between them, and she felt him release her immediately, which was both a relief and, inexplicably, slightly worse.
She took a step back. Her legs were not entirely steady.
“Please. If you will allow me to explain—”
“Where is my sister?”
“She is safe.” Frances kept her voice as even as she could which was not very even at all. “She is not in any danger, I promise you that. She asked me to help her, and I agreed, and she is... she is with someone who cares for her, and she is perfectly—”
“She is with the schoolmaster.” It was not a question.
“She is safe,” Frances said again because that was the part that mattered, and she needed him to hear it before anything else.
“And you,” he said. “You have spent the entirety of my ball impersonating my sister.”
“I... yes.” There was very little to be gained by denying it.
“In my house.”
“Yes.”
“In front of two hundred guests.”
“I am aware of that.”
His jaw tightened. He opened his mouth to say something that Frances suspected was going to be thorough and unpleasant, but before the words could move past his lips, a gasp came.
Followed by, “Good heavens! What do we have here?”
This was the moment when Frances became aware of the light and the chance in the air.
She turned. At the top of the garden steps, spilling out from the open terrace doors, were the shapes of several people, guests who had drifted outside or been drawn by the sound of running.
They were standing in a loose cluster, looking down into the garden, and the light from the ballroom behind them was enough to illuminate the Duke of Whitestone standing in the dark with a young woman in a disordered dress, her mask gone, his hand still raised from where he had pulled it away.
Frances felt the blood leave her face.
Oh no. The full shape of it arrived all at once, not just what had happened but what it looked like. Oh, this is very bad.
The Duke did not look at her. Of course, he would not. He looked past her and up at the steps, his eyes narrowing and jaw hardening. “A misunderstanding,” he said to no one in particular and to everyone. “The lady was taken ill.”
“Oh, she does look it,” someone murmured.
Frances hesitated before moving toward the stairs because there was nothing else to do, and her legs still felt unsteady. She focused intensely on not letting any of her feelings show on her face when she heard her name.
“Frances.”
Frances closed her eyes for half a second, then turned.
The Countess of Montfort, her maternal aunt, was descending the garden steps with composure.
She was a tall woman, handsome in the manner of someone who had once been beautiful and had decided that dignity was a more reliable asset in the long run.
She moved through the cluster of guests at the top of the steps with the ease of a ship through smaller vessels.
The guests parted for her. They generally did.
“Come,” she said when she reached her. She took Frances’ arm and turned her toward the steps without looking at the Duke at all, which was either magnificent composure or a calculated slight, and with Lady Montfort, it was generally both.
Frances went with her because she could not think of a single alternative. She could feel the eyes of the people on the terrace as they climbed the steps, but she kept her chin up, her gaze forward, and thought very firmly about not crying.
At the top of the steps, Lady Montfort paused.
She turned slowly and looked back at the Duke of Whitestone, who had not moved from where he stood in the garden below. “Your Grace,” Lady Montfort said, “I trust you understand what the proper course of action is, following what everyone here has witnessed tonight.”
She did not wait for a response. She steered Frances through the terrace doors and through the edges of the ballroom which was still full, the music still playing, most of the guests still entirely unaware that anything had occurred which somehow made it worse.
The carriage ride from Whitestone House to Evermere Hall, where she lived with her sister, was not long. It felt extremely long. Frances sat rigidly with her hands in her lap and her mask still dangling from one finger where she had not thought to put it down.
She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. It did not help, especially.
“Oh, do not weep,” Lady Montfort said, not unkindly. “Your face will be dreadful in the morning.”
“My reputation will be dreadful in the morning,” Frances replied, which came out rather more broken than she had intended.
Lady Montfort was silent for a moment. Frances wiped her face with the back of her hand and tried to compose herself, and she was halfway through when she noticed that her aunt’s expression was not that of a woman in the grip of social disaster.
It was, if she was reading it right, something almost the opposite.
“Aunt,” she said slowly, “why do you look like that?”
“Like what, my dear?”
“Like you are, pleased.”
Lady Montfort settled her hands in her lap with the composure of a woman arranging something to her satisfaction. “I am simply considering the possibilities.”
“The possibilities?” Frances stared at her. “My reputation may be in ruins, and you are considering the possibilities?”
“Your reputation is not in ruins. It is at a crossroads.” Her aunt tilted her head slightly. “There is a significant difference, Frances, between a young woman whose name is ruined and a young woman whose name is shortly to be attached to that of the Duke of Whitestone.”
Frances felt the full meaning of this arrive and immediately wished it hadn’t. “No,” she said.
“The Duke is a man of honor. He will do what society expects of him.”
“Aunt—”
“He has little choice, and neither, frankly, do you.”
“I will not marry him.” Frances heard her own voice, very clear and quite certain despite the tears still drying on her face.
“I will not marry a cold, autocratic, entirely heartless man simply because he found me in his gardens. There are other solutions. We could say I was taken ill, or we could say that he was and that the whole thing was misrepresented, that—”
“Frances.” Lady Montfort looked at her with a patient expression. “He is a duke.”
“I am aware of what he is.”
“He is one of the wealthiest men in England. His name would repair every remaining shadow over your family’s reputation in a single morning.
” She paused. “I have waited a long time to see you well settled. I had begun to fear it might not happen. And now, through what I can only conclude is the particular providence that watches over impulsive young women, you find yourself in precisely the situation most likely to bring it about.”
Frances opened her mouth.
“This may be the luckiest thing that has ever happened to this family,” her aunt continued. “I may yet see another of my nieces married to a duke.”
“I would sooner—” Frances stopped herself because she was not entirely sure she could finish the sentence coherently, given she was still crying intermittently.
“He is cold,” she said instead. “He is rigid and cold, and he cares for nothing but his own authority, and I will not, even if he asks me, Aunt, which he will not. I will not say yes.”
Lady Montfort smiled. “We shall see, my dear,” she said.
The carriage turned through the gates of Evermere, and Frances looked away from her aunt’s expression because it was making her feel things she did not want to feel. Chief among them was the terrifying suspicion that Lady Montfort was not entirely wrong.
She went straight upstairs when they arrived without bothering to stop in the hall to look for Lavinia or Tristan.
Her maid helped her out of the costume in near silence. Frances was not capable of conversation, and Miss Ripley had learned, over several years of service, to read the difference between moods.
Frances then sat at the vanity in her nightdress and stared at her reflection. She was still sitting there when the knock came.
She said nothing, hoping that whoever it was would assume she was asleep and go away, and she could sit here in the quiet without having to put any of what had happened into words for at least one more night.
“Frances.” Lavinia’s voice, low and careful, from the other side of the door. “Are you well? I saw you come up. You were... You seemed distressed.”
I am perfectly well, she thought. Go to bed, Lavinia. I will tell you in the morning, and it will be just as terrible then, and at least one of us will have slept.
Lavinia did not leave and instead opened the door and stepped into the room.
She took one look at Frances’ face and came forward to take both of her hands and draw her to her feet which was exactly what Frances had expected and exactly what she needed though she would not have been able to say so.
Lavinia looked like herself, like the person who had been more mother than sister for as long as Frances could remember, and the familiarity of her was enough to make Frances’s throat tighten all over again.
“Sit,” Lavinia said, guiding her to the small chair by the fireplace and drawing up the other one across from it. “Tell me what happened.”
So, Frances told her. All of it: Eleanor’s plan, the costumes, the ball, the garden, the fall, the mask, the crowd on the terrace, Lady Montfort’s rescue, and her confidence about what was going to happen next.
Lavinia listened without interrupting which was one of the things Frances had always loved most about her.
When she finished, Lavinia’s expression was not entirely clear. The alarm was evident, Frances could see it clearly, but she held it carefully, the way Lavinia handled most difficult things—behind the part of her face that stayed calm for other people’s benefit.
“Come here,” Lavinia said and opened her arms, and Frances leaned into them the way she had when she was very small, and the world had been confusing in a different way, and for a moment, neither of them said anything.
“It will look better in the morning,” Lavinia said at last, her chin resting on the top of Frances’ head.
Frances said nothing. Her sister had raised her after their mother’s death during Frances’ birth. Even when their father fell ill and their fortunes were exhausted by debts, Lavinia stood strong and proud for her.
“Society has a short memory. People will talk for a week, and then something else will happen—”
“Lavinia.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Yes,” her sister said quietly. “I know.”
They both knew this was greater than they feared.