Chapter 2
The wait outside the Duke’s house as they disembarked was, in Phoebe’s opinion, excessively long. Inconsiderately long, given the weather. She looked back up at the line of staff waiting to escort them inside. Their faces were exceedingly impassive.
A footman was there to hand them down from the carriage, which was good, as Phoebe suspected her father would have preferred to shove her directly into the snow than offer her a helping hand.
She did notice, however, that there was only staff to greet them. Well, wasn’t that nice? What a warm welcome.
Or perhaps it only felt that way because her father spent the entire time lecturing her. Possibly without even taking a breath.
“Now,” he said, clapping his hands briskly together, ignoring the servants that milled around them entirely.
This was, unfortunately, typical. “Hannah’s little rebellion is finally dealt with.
” He had the audacity to sound irritated that his daughter had had questions about an impromptu engagement. “So, Phoebe…”
He said her name the way he’d always been saying it lately—like it was a stand-in for a much ruder word.
“As you know, were it my choice, you would never leave the house again.”
For a man who loathed dramatic displays, Phoebe thought, he really was prone to them himself. She had heard this particular declaration a dozen times or more in the past few weeks. It was starting to take on the intonation of an actor who had over-rehearsed his lines.
“But, fortunately for you, the Duke insisted that the whole family come to this parlay.”
She couldn’t resist. “‘Parlay?’ Father, have you been reading novels?”
He scowled as intensely as if she had accused him of kicking small dogs just to make babies cry.
“This is precisely the kind of nonsense I am trying to warn you about, Phoebe,” he said hotly.
“I know that you seem to think that everything is one big lark. I know that you don’t care at all about your family or our reputation.
I know that you derive some sort of perverse pleasure from humiliating me. ”
This was, as a point of fact, wrong on all three counts. The thing that Lord Turner did not know was that Phoebe had been extraordinarily cautious for the bulk of her, ahem, exploits.
She couldn’t help that he had wrongfully assumed that the time he had caught her had been the first time. She could have corrected that assumption, perhaps, but discretion had seemed, notably, to be the better part of valor in this case.
Phoebe bit her tongue now accordingly. She bit it so hard that her mouth started to taste metallic.
“Nevertheless, you will not do anything to compromise your sister’s betrothal,” he declared imperiously. “If you do, I shall ensure that you are so thoroughly confined to the house that you never see sunlight again.”
Hannah, despite her tumultuous emotions this evening, was not so absorbed in her own troubles that she did not protest this pronouncement.
“Father!” she cried. “You cannot.”
“I can,” he said smugly.
“You really can’t,” Phoebe said. “You could withdraw your financial support, but I would still have my inheritance from Grandfather.”
Their maternal grandfather had left each of the girls a small annuity. It wasn’t enough to live in high fashion, but it was enough that Phoebe had always maintained an element of security against her father’s machinations.
“Fine,” he said. “I would withdraw my financial support. You could no longer go out and about in Society without that.”
He sounded triumphant.
“I’ve never actually wanted to go to balls and events, you know,” she said.
It was astonishing how easily he could forget the dozens of arguments they’d had in which he’d forced her to attend this soiree or that musicale on the basis that it was what young ladies did.
“And, again, you really cannot stop me from seeing my friends.”
Her father blustered for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Your friends!” he said. “Do you really think your friends will still want to associate with you when you are without fortune? Some of them are duchesses, Phoebe.”
“And yet I remain confident in their friendship,” she said. She found herself looking longingly at the house out the window, for all that it had not grown any more cheerful in the intervening moments.
“We shall see about that,” her father said, though he did not sound quite as smug as he had before.
Phoebe stifled another sigh. She could feel a headache coming on, and they hadn’t even arrived at what promised to be the most trying portion of the evening. She was so very weary of having this argument over and over again.
The facts of the matter were that Phoebe was her own person, and her father loathed that, but his loathing was not enough to actually materially change her circumstances.
So, when he had discovered her doing the things she wanted to be doing, he had been unfortunately reminded of his relative powerlessness over her. And it had been driving him positively insane ever since.
“You will be polite,” he said, taking his usual tack, which was defaulting to orders that Phoebe couldn’t argue with, not even when she was feeling her most unreasonable.
“You will not make reference to any of the sordid details of your reputation. You will not reference the war. You will not ask questions.”
“No questions? Well, I was going to open with ‘How do you do?’ but I suppose I can come up with another plan.”
Her father’s voice was distinctly unamused.
“You will not ask any impolitic questions,” he revised acidly.
“Are we joining the man for dinner or for a war?” she asked sarcastically. She was fed up to her eyes with this nonsense, but at least they were finally pulling up in front of the house. She wondered if this was how inmates felt as the end of their sentence at the gaol approached.
“That is precisely the kind of thing you are not going to say to the Duke.” Her father was practically spitting the words. “Now.” The carriage rolled to a halt. Finally. “You will not say anything or do anything or even bloody think anything that will compromise this betrothal, do you hear me?”
Phoebe used the cover of darkness to roll her eyes, but she said nothing.
“Thank you for coming, Lord Turner,” said a man who had to be a butler as the three new arrivals mounted the front steps. Phoebe and Hannah each had their cloaks held tight around them against the swirling snow. The wind was picking up now, too. It seemed as though a proper storm was brewing.
“If you would accompany me to the drawing room,” the butler said in sepulchral tones, “His Grace will be along shortly.”
Hannah huddled close to Phoebe, and Phoebe let her, all discord from the carriage forgotten.
Such was the joy of sisterhood—their love would always overcome any petty disagreements.
Besides, Phoebe could stand to steal a little comfort, too.
The butler gave off an aura that suggested that he hadn’t smiled this century.
Beyond which, the house was strangely… empty. Most old houses like this were cluttered with the various acquisitions of the last dozen generations or so.
Even the Turner house—both their city townhouse, where they spent most of their time, and the country house where they’d spent the last years of Lady Turner’s life—had those markings of long history, and their family title was only a viscountcy.
A dukedom should have been positively overflowing with things.
But this house was bare. It was extraordinarily strange.
“Rather chilly in here, don’t you think?” Phoebe muttered to her sister when they were in the drawing room, which had furniture and nothing else. No pillows. No art on the walls. No curtains.
She said it to make Hannah laugh as her younger sister was so tense that Phoebe worried that she might shatter like an icicle, but it was not Phoebe who responded.
“The fires are all lit in anticipation of the future duchess’ arrival,” said a voice from behind her that was twice as icy as the weather outside. “This is as warm as the house gets.”
Oh, Phoebe’s father was going to murder her.
Phoebe very carefully rearranged her face into a polite smile, not so much to appease her father but because it was unforgivably rude to come into someone’s house and start insulting the place. She might not be overly attached to Society’s rules of propriety, but she did have her own code.
Phoebe pasted a smile on her face before she turned.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Your Grace, that isn’t at all what I—”
But that was as far as she got. She turned, but this strange, bare room with its floors devoid of carpeting was not kind on her wet half-boots. The melted snow made her slip. She wheeled her arms, trying to regain her balance, but it was to no avail.
She landed in an ungainly heap on the floor. It was not at all comfortable, but worse, it was humiliating in the extreme.
“Can you not show even a moment’s decorum?” her father scolded, not extending so much as a hand to help her.
Phoebe ignored him because if she didn’t, she would say something she oughtn’t. Instead, she looked up at the Duke.
He looked down at her, distinctly unimpressed.
He was a handsome enough man, though far too rough to be called beautiful.
He was broad, built heavily with more muscle than was fashionable for a gentleman, but which seemed well suited for a soldier.
For all his comments about anticipating the future duchess’ arrival, he hadn’t bothered to shave; his jaw was coated in a fine layer of stubble that blended upward into his dark brown hair. And his eyes were completely impassive.
“Is this the kind of display that I am meant to enjoy for the rest of my life?” he asked, a slight curl to his lip that quickly vanished into impassiveness.
Something about that barely-there sneer made Phoebe’s humiliation rise to new heights. She scrambled awkwardly back to her feet.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tripping over her words. She wanted to rub at her sore, bruised behind, but that really would be a step too far. “The floor was slippery; I swear, that I am not usually quite so clumsy—”
She broke off as the rest of his words registered.
“Wait,” she said. “You aren’t marrying me.”
There was an excruciating silence.
The Duke looked at her for a long moment, then, with purposeful slowness, turned to look at Hannah. Hannah froze like a rabbit being stalked by a wolf. Without comment, the Duke turned his eyes back to Phoebe.
“I am confused,” he said, his tone implying that this confusion was someone else’s fault. “Are you already married?”
Phoebe resisted the urge to squirm beneath his gaze. Did they teach that in the Navy? Or was this stare the reason why he had been promoted?
“I am not,” she said as levelly as she could manage.
This time, the Duke’s stare went between Phoebe and her father, but it did land on Phoebe again. Phoebe wished she could enjoy her father’s discomfort more, but she was too busy still trying not to fidget.
“This is irregular,” the Duke said. “Why would the eldest not marry first? Propriety dictates that the eldest sister must marry first.”
Phoebe supposed this was technically a rule, though not one that anyone followed.
However, she had seen a particularly raunchy adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that made a great deal of humor out of casting an octogenarian man in a dress as the ‘elder sister’ in question.
Phoebe had never seen so much naked wrinkled flesh before or since.
Nor, she supposed, was she ever likely to again, now that her father had caught on to her… excursions.
Still, Phoebe was trying to do her very best to be her very best, so she offered the Duke an easy way out of the conversation.
“I’m not certain that rule is much followed these days,” she said. “Though it speaks well to your parents’ ability to instill good manners.”
The Duke apparently felt no such compunction to put his best foot forward, for he only scowled.
“Is there a reason you aren’t married?” he demanded.
“Um,” Phoebe said. And then, because she simply could not come up with anything better, she tugged her sister in front of her. “May I please present my sister, Miss Hannah Turner?”
The Duke gave Hannah the same disapproving look that he had offered Phoebe.
“We are already late for dinner,” he said. “There’s no point bickering now. Please, follow the footman. I shall meet you in the dining room anon.”
And then he turned on his heel and left, leaving the three Turners for once in total unison as they gaped after him.