Chapter 10 #2
“Jesus Christ,” Jacob said with feeling.
This was, alas, as good a reason to blaspheme as any.
“As I said, I do have a strong idea of who she will be,” Aaron offered.
“Jesus Christ,” Jacob said again. “Right. I—right. I see. I mean, I don’t see. But you are going to tell me more, and eventually, I will get there.”
So, Aaron told him. He kept to the bare bones of it—he wasn’t going to spread his suspicions about Miss Hannah, not even to Jacob, who he knew wouldn’t let it go any further, not when a woman’s reputation was at stake. He did, however, confess his qualms about Phoebe.
“She’s really unbelievably headstrong,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck when he thought about the way she narrowed her eyes at him while they quarreled, like she was looking for any minute chink in his armor to stab her poisoned blade.
“And right now, that mostly seems to be exercised in defense of her sister which is rather admirable, but I do shudder to think what she might do with that stubbornness later.”
“Oh, yes,” Jacob said mildly. “Stubbornness. I see.”
“And she is extremely clumsy. I’ve had to stop her from falling more than once in our short acquaintance!”
“I see,” Jacob said at that same time. “Clumsy. How terrible.”
“And,” Aaron went on, because he was beginning to suspect that his friend was willfully misreading the situation, “I had to drag her bodily out of a snowstorm!”
“You—I beg your pardon?” Jacob no longer sounded quite so sanguine.
“It’s fine,” Aaron said dismissively. “I was merely rescuing her from her own misguided efforts to freeze to death.”
“I simply do not know what to say to that,” Jacob proclaimed. He was on his second whisky at this point, and he was getting a telltale flush on his cheeks. He had never been one to hold his liquor.
“I’m certain that it will be just fine,” Aaron said. He felt as though he might be arguing with himself at this point, but that was fine, too. He was reaching a point of clarity on this whole issue, and for once, the Duke and the soldier found themselves in accord.
“I will just go to her,” he said, feeling rather pleased with the decision, “and tell her that I accept her offer, so long as she behaves in the appropriate way as befitting my duchess. And if she can agree to my rules, I do not see why we cannot have a perfectly acceptable, mutually satisfactory marriage.”
Jacob was looking at Aaron with wide, astonished eyes.
“Yes,” he said eagerly. “Oh, yes, Warson. Do exactly that. And my friend?”
“Hm?” Aaron asked through his mental self-congratulation.
“When you do, please come back to me and report every single word that she said.”
Phoebe regretted…
Well, everything, honestly.
She supposed she probably didn’t need to go all the way back to the day she was born to start counting those regrets, but, frankly, if that hadn’t happened, then none of the subsequent things that had led her to standing in a gazebo with the Duke of Redcliff would have ever happened, either. Why not paint with a broad brush, then?
Because this was ridiculous.
And to think that she’d been relieved when the Duke had first arrived.
That morning, the atmosphere in the Turner household had been tense to say the least. Hannah had kept to her bedchamber, citing a headache that Phoebe suspected was feigned, and Lord Turner had paced restlessly around the house, silent except for the beleaguered harrumph he let out every time he crossed paths with Phoebe.
Phoebe had almost determined that she should just give up and go for a walk about Regent’s Park—snow be damned; surely it was better to freeze than to listen to one more of her father’s sighs of lament—when Hannah raced down the stairs with an energy that confirmed that, yes, that headache had been utter shite.
“He’s here! The Duke of Redcliff! He’s here!”
“Well, I’m glad you’re excited now that it’s not your marriage we’re discussing,” Phoebe muttered, though she did make sure that she didn’t say it loudly enough for her sister to hear.
She didn’t want to make Hannah feel guilty, not really.
Hannah hadn’t forced Phoebe to offer anything, or at least, she hadn’t done so intentionally.
Phoebe was just… tired.
But she did her duty, which felt like the only thing she had been doing of late. She didn’t have a good attitude about it, not necessarily, but she felt it was rather beyond the pale to ask her to help everyone out and have a good attitude about it.
So, she met the Duke with a scowl.
“Good to see you as ever, Miss Turner,” he said archly.
Phoebe could have tried to say something polite, but her father was there, so there wasn’t any point—nor any chance.
“Phoebe is of course glad to see you, too, Your Grace,” Lord Turner hastened to reassure the Duke. “Very glad. It’s just that young ladies can be so very emotional about matters of matrimony. You mustn’t hold it against her. It’s just a weakness of her sex.”
The Duke turned and looked at Lord Turner. He didn’t say a word. He just looked.
Phoebe found that suddenly, she could face this adventure with a smile. It was simply too amusing to watch her father practically collapse in on himself under the force of that stare.
When Lord Turner was little more than a smudge on the marble floor of the entrance hall to the house, the Duke finally spoke.
“Right,” he said. “I would like to speak with Miss Turner. Alone.”
“Um,” her father objected quietly, “I’m not sure that that is, I mean, entirely proper?”
Phoebe applauded him for making it through that sentence, even if the words did get quieter and smaller as they went on.
The next look from the Duke was much shorter, but only because Lord Turner gave in.
“Yes, of course, as you say, Your Grace.”
Phoebe was not entirely unsympathetic to her father, even with his manifold faults.
“We’ll go out to the garden, Father,” she suggested, undertaking a heroic effort to avoid laughter. “It will be perfectly respectable.”
Now, the Duke glared at her.
“It’s snowing,” he told her acidly.
“Keen observation, Your Grace,” she said brightly. If he thought his grouchy glare was going to have an effect on her, he was destined for disappointment. She’d had a lifetime of surviving angry looks growing up under her father’s roof.
He frowned.
She beamed.
Lord Turner looked like he wished himself anywhere else.
“Fine,” the Duke snapped after a long moment. “But for God’s sake, get your cloak this time at least.”
“You’re so sweet to me,” she simpered. But she did get her cloak and a thick, woolen scarf, which she wrapped three times around her neck until she was covered practically up to her nose.
“Happy now?” she asked him.
Her father had been so thoroughly quashed that he didn’t even object to this display of pertness.
“Ecstatic,” the Duke said dryly. “The garden, then.”
The weather outside was almost idyllic. Snowflakes fluttered to the ground, where they lingered for only a moment before melting against the pebbled path.
London snow was a very different creature from countryside snow, and the frigid wind that blasted through the calm every few minutes seemed determined to make that clear to anyone who dared poke so much as a toe outside.
This was what Phoebe got for trying to attend to her father’s sensibilities. She should have stayed inside, propriety be damned.
But she was not going to start this potential marriage by giving the Duke a chance to say I told you so, so she persevered until they made it to the questionable shelter of the gazebo.
She turned to face him and—oh, there it was. The I told you was written all over his face.
She sighed a theatrical sort of sigh that put all of her father’s moping and whining to shame. Apparently, such things were heritable.
The Duke’s smile was infinitesimally small, but it was there.
“Right,” Phoebe said. “What did you want to discuss then?”
The smile vanished, though he somehow looked more comfortable with this return to business rather than any camaraderie—fragile though it was—between them.
“I’m glad you asked,” he said briskly. “I have come to discuss the terms of what any potential marriage will look between us.”
He said this with such businesslike aloofness that Phoebe felt her eyebrows creeping up her forehead.
“The terms?” she repeated.
A slight nod of his head. “Just so. You have assured me that there is no scandal poised to break over your head—” Phoebe was not at all certain that she had reassured him of any such thing, but this didn’t seem to be the time to bring it up.
“—but I nevertheless must express my sincere concerns about certain aspects of your conduct.”
Fascinatingly, he did not seem to realize that this was rude. That and only that made Phoebe interested enough to see where things would go next.
To that end, she only offered him a noncommittal, “Oh?”
“Indeed,” he said in that same tone. “Once you are my duchess, you shall have to behave with unimpeachable behavior. You will do duty to your name.”
“Will I?” Her tone was slightly less noncommittal this time. He still didn’t notice.
“Yes.” He seemed pleased with how this was going. That made for one of them.
“So, I shall, what? Host balls?” Her words were clipped. Her iciness could have put the Duke’s usual tone to shame.
“That would be a typical duty of a duchess, yes,” he said. “Really any Society wife, but a duchess is included in those ranks.”
Phoebe didn’t have the impression that the Duke was a foolish man—she hadn’t thought so before, and she didn’t think so now—but she was rather amazed at his tenacity.
It was like he was wearing those blinders he put on horses.
Truly remarkable. Nothing she waved at him could distract him from his course.
“And I’m sure I shall do other duchess-like things,” she observed. “Speak only when spoken to, carp and bow at your every word, sit quietly and wait for orders, and move only to ply thread to cloth in lovely, pointless patterns?”