Chapter 6
“Give me that,” Lavinia said, and took the gossip paper out of her hands with the firmness of someone removing something harmful which Frances supposed it was.
“I have already read it,” Frances pointed out. “Twice.”
“Then you do not need to read it a third time.” Lavinia set it face down on the table beside the sofa and sat close enough that their shoulders touched which was not something she did unless she thought it was necessary.
It was necessary.
Frances looked at the ceiling, pressed the back of her hand briefly to her eyes, and told herself she was not going to cry again because she had cried quite enough last night, and it had not improved anything.
“It will pass,” Lavinia said.
“You said that last night.”
“It was true last night, and it is still true this morning.”
“You also said society had a short memory.”
Lavinia was quiet for a moment. “I may have been somewhat optimistic on that particular point.”
Frances laughed despite herself which was one of the things Lavinia had always been able to do—make her laugh at moments when laughing seemed completely impossible so that the impossible thing became slightly less so.
She leaned her head briefly against her sister’s shoulder, thought about what the day would require of her, and felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
The door of the morning room opened.
Frances did not look up immediately, assuming it was a maid or Farrell with more tea, and so she was wholly unprepared for the sound that followed, the particular sound of Lady Montfort’s entrance, which was not loud exactly but had the quality of a weather event announcing itself.
“Good morning.” Her aunt swept in with the air of a woman who had dressed with great care and was pleased with the result.
She was carrying her own copy of the Lady’s Register, which she had apparently not thought to turn face down, and her expression was the one that Frances had identified last night in the carriage and had been hoping not to see again so soon: the settled, satisfied expression of someone whose predictions were proving correct.
“Aunt,” Lavinia said, rising. “We were not expecting you.”
“Of course, you were not, I came early.” Lady Montfort sat in the chair across from them. She looked at Frances, then at the upturned paper on the side table, then back at Frances. “You have read it, I see.”
“Three times,” Frances said.
“Well. Do not read it again; it is not worth your nerves.” She folded her own copy and set it in her lap with the air of a general setting aside a map she no longer needed. “Worry not, my dear. All shall be well. This scandal is quite certain to make the Duke of Whitestone do right by you.”
Frances stared at her. “You say that as though it is a desirable outcome.”
“It is a highly desirable outcome. It is, in point of fact, the best outcome available to you, and I would encourage you to appreciate it accordingly.”
“He is cold and autocratic and—”
“He is a duke,” Lady Montfort said. “One of the wealthiest in England. His name alone would—”
“I do not want his name.” Frances heard her own voice, very clear and quite final.
“I will not marry a cold, unfeeling man simply because a gossip sheet has decided to be dramatic. There are other solutions. I shall simply... I shall explain to everyone that nothing occurred, that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that he and I were barely even—”
“Frances,” Lavinia said gently.
“It is the truth.”
“It is,” Lavinia agreed. “Unfortunately, truth has rarely been society’s primary interest.”
Frances opened her mouth to say something else entirely and was prevented by the appearance of Farrell in the doorway.
“Your Grace,” he said, addressing Lavinia, “His Grace, the Duke of Whitestone, has called and asks whether the household is receiving.”
The room went very still.
And then Lady Montfort made a sound that Frances would not, in the interests of charity, call a shriek though it was definitely somewhere in that range.
“I knew it!” She was on her feet before the sentence was fully out of her mouth, her copy of the Lady’s Register sliding unnoticed to the floor.
“I told you! Did I not tell you? I said he would come, and here he is, not twelve hours later!” She turned to Farrell with the energy of a woman twenty years younger.
“Send him in quickly! Do not keep him waiting in the hall, for heaven’s sake, send him. ”
“Aunt.” Lavinia had risen. Her voice was perfectly composed, and her expression was the one she used when she was choosing her words with great care. “This is my home. If Frances does not want to see him...”
Lady Montfort’s smile faltered, and she sat back down. “Of course,” she said. “Naturally. I beg your pardon, Lavinia. If you would be so kind as to...” She gestured toward the door with barely restrained urgency.
Lavinia held her aunt’s gaze for one long moment then she turned to Farrell. “Please show the Duke of Whitestone to the drawing room. We shall be with him shortly.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The moment Farrell left, Lady Montfort was back on her feet.
“The drawing room! Very sensible and much better than in here, more formal.” She was already heading toward the door, smoothing her skirts with the briskness of a woman preparing for an important engagement.
“Come, Frances, do not sit there looking as though you are attending a funeral. Stand up; let me look at you.”
“Aunt.” Frances did not move. “He has come to scold me.”
“Nonsense.”
“I am sure he has. He is furious about Lady Eleanor and about the ball, and he has come here to express his displeasure in person, and I am going to have to sit there and listen to it, even though I would very much prefer not to.”
Lady Montfort looked at her with the expression of someone exercising significant patience.
“Frances. The Duke of Whitestone did not dress himself and come to Evermere at half past ten in the morning to scold you. Men of his position send letters when they wish to scold people.” She paused. “Now stand up.”
Frances stood. Not because she agreed but because her legs apparently decided to before the rest of her had caught up and because something in her chest was doing something uncomfortable that she was not going to examine while her aunt was watching her.
She was absolutely certain he had come to scold her.
She was so certain of it that she spent the entire walk to the drawing room constructing her response—composed, unashamed—because she had helped her friend, and she would do it again, and she was not going to apologize for it, no matter how many papers had printed his name alongside hers this morning.
The Duke of Whitestone was standing when they entered, which was not surprising, and he looked exactly as he always did, which was to say entirely composed and faintly forbidding. Frances met his eyes across the room and felt the now-familiar sensation of walking into something solid.
They exchanged greetings. He bowed to Lavinia, inclined his head to Lady Montfort, and looked at Frances with an expression she could not read at all which was his default expression and therefore not especially informative.
Lady Montfort sat down and arranged herself with the air of someone settling in for an excellent theatrical performance.
Lavinia sat beside her. Frances remained standing for a moment longer than was perhaps strictly necessary and then sat in the chair across from him because the only alternative was to keep standing, and that seemed worse.
“I wonder,” the Duke, his voice was as even as it always was, addressed to the room in general but somehow directed entirely at Frances, “whether Lady Frances might spare me a few minutes. There is a matter I should like to discuss with her in private.”
“Of course,” Lady Montfort said immediately.
“Certainly,” agreed Lavinia, half a second later.
Frances looked at him. Here it comes, she thought. The lecture. The cold, thorough, perfectly worded lecture, and I am going to sit through it with my back straight and my face composed, and I am not going to apologize for a single thing.
Her aunt and sister withdrew with varying degrees of eagerness, and then the door closed, leaving them alone.
The Duke did not sit. He stood near the window with his hands clasped behind his back and looked at her for a moment in that way he had, measuring, unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world.
Frances looked back, kept her spine very straight, and waited for the lecture to begin.
“The gossip,” he said, “will not disappear.”
Frances blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“The stories in this morning’s papers. The scene in the gardens last night.
” He said it with the brisk clarity of someone laying out a set of facts.
“Society has drawn its conclusions. In my experience, once society has drawn a conclusion of this nature, no amount of explanation or denial is sufficient to revise it. The story exists now. It will continue to exist regardless of what either of us says about it.”
Frances looked at him carefully. This was not, she had to admit, the opening she had expected. “I am aware of that,” she said.
“Then you will also be aware,” he continued, “that if your reputation and your future are to be protected, there is only one sensible course of action remaining.”
Frances frowned slightly. She turned the sentence over, looking for the part where he told her what she ought to have done differently or what consequences she had brought upon herself, and she could not find it. “I am not certain I follow, Your Grace.”
He looked at her with an expression that suggested he found her failure to follow him mildly surprising. “I am proposing that we marry.”
The word landed in the room as if it had been dropped from a height.
Frances stared at him.
Marry. She heard the word, she was quite certain she had heard it correctly, and she turned it over once and again then she looked at his face which was completely, absolutely composed, and she thought, with a clarity that was almost funny, that he meant it.
He is entirely serious, means every word of it, and is looking at me as though this is simply a matter to be resolved with marriage as the resolution he has selected.
“I can offer you protection,” he continued in the same tone one might use to outline the terms of an estate agreement. “Stability. A name that is more than sufficient to silence whatever society currently believes it has to say on the matter. It is, as I said, the only sensible solution.”
Something moved in Frances’s chest—not quite hurt, not quite anger, something that sat between the two and was warmer than either.
She had known, distantly, that this was possible.
Lady Montfort had said as much last night, and Lavinia had not contradicted her.
She had simply not allowed herself to think it through to its conclusion because thinking it through meant imagining this exact moment, and imagining this exact moment was.
.. She pushed the thought aside and focused on what was directly in front of her.
“Is this,” she said, and she was rather proud of how steady her voice was, “truly how you propose to a lady?”
Something moved across his face, very brief, very small. “I had assumed that honesty was preferable to false poetry.”
“False poetry?”
“The sort of declaration that bears very little relation to the actual circumstances and is designed primarily to produce a desired response. I have not offered you false poetry. I have offered you the truth.”
“You have offered me a business arrangement,” Frances said. “You have proposed marriage to me the way you might propose the purchase of a new horse. Sensible, practical, and entirely devoid of anything that might be mistaken for feeling.”
“We made each other’s acquaintances four days ago.”
“Three,” she corrected before she could stop herself.
The corner of his mouth moved. It was not quite a smile, and it was gone almost immediately, but she saw it, and it did something entirely inconvenient to her train of thought.
“Three days,” he agreed. “I submit that declarations of feeling at this juncture would not only be inaccurate but would insult your intelligence which I have no desire to do.”
Frances looked at him. The genuinely aggravating thing was that this was almost a reasonable argument.
She could see the logic in it. She could also see that the logic was doing a great deal of work to cover the fact that she was sitting in her sister’s drawing room, being proposed to by a man who had not once, in any of their interactions, looked at her as though she were a person rather than a situation to be managed.
And yet he came, said some quiet, traitorous part of her mind. He dressed himself and came here at half past ten in the morning. He did not send a letter.
She pushed that thought firmly away.
“This is not how I imagined a proposal,” she complained. “Not remotely.”
“I cannot speak to your imaginings,” he said. “I can speak only to the situation as it stands.”
“And the situation, as it stands, is that you have decided marriage is the logical solution, and you have come here to inform me of it.”
“I have come here to propose it,” he said. “There is a distinction. I am asking, Lady Frances. Not instructing.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She wanted to say no. She wanted to say it immediately, completely, and with enough conviction to end the conversation.
I will not, she thought. I will not marry a man who looks at me like a ledger entry and speaks of our future as though it is an estate problem to be solved.
But she also knew, with a clarity she very much wished she did not have, that wanting something different did not make her alternatives any better.
“I will think about it,” she said.
He held her gaze for a moment, and she could not tell, she never could tell with him, what was happening behind those watchful eyes.
Then he inclined his head.
“I will await your answer,” he said and turned to leave. Frances sat very still, looking at the door that had closed behind him, and she thought about how thoroughly, how completely, her life had stopped resembling anything she had planned for it.