The Duke’s Hidden Duchess (The Untamed Nobles #6)

Chapter One

The fan stopped moving first.

Lady Bracken had been working it in short strokes for the better part of a minute while she inspected Selina like a length of cloth of uncertain weave, turning her a little towards the light, and it was the stillness of the fan rather than the question that told Selina the interview had already gone wrong.

“Can you keep silent when corrected?” The fan lay shut across the lady’s knuckles.

“That would depend entirely upon whether the correction is accurate, madam.” Selina kept both hands on the reticule in her lap and did not move them.

The assembly room at Harcourt House had been arranged for exactly this. Chairs in rows for the impoverished gentlewomen, small tables for the ladies who came to inspect them.

“I beg your pardon?” The fan had not moved again.

“You asked whether I can keep silent when corrected, and I answered honestly. A false correction deserves a reply and a true one deserves attention. I am capable of both. I confess I cannot promise the first without knowing which sort you intend to offer.”

A silence spread across the little table, brief and total. Behind Selina, a chair scraped, and a matron laughed at a joke that had nothing to do with her.

“You are insolent,” Lady Bracken said.

“I am accurate.” Selina met the look and held it. “The two are frequently mistaken for one another by people who prefer to be agreed with.”

“My last companion never once contradicted me in eleven months.” The fan came open again and went faster than before.

“Then I imagine you were wrong at least once in that time and never had the benefit of hearing so, madam.” Selina let a moment pass. “I mention it only because you asked.”

Lady Bracken drew herself up, and the two feathers in her turban trembled with a wrath the rest of her was too well-bred to show. “You may go, Miss Gray. I require a companion, not a debating society.”

Selina rose from the low chair without hurry, inclined her head at precisely the correct depth, and gathered the plain reticule that held everything she still owned worth carrying.

Rising made the room tilt a little at its edges.

She waited for it to right itself and did not touch the back of the chair.

“Then I wish you a companion who keeps silent, madam.” She was already turning as she said it.

She walked away before Lady Bracken could summon a reply.

The grey gown she wore had been chosen for its power to make her unremarkable, wool the colour of a rainy afternoon, and six months of wearing it had taught her to cross a room without troubling it.

Most days she managed. Today her tongue had betrayed her twice before noon.

She found a place against the far wall where a tall window let in the thin light of a London morning, and pretended to study the street below. Carriages passed. At the corner, a crossing-sweeper worked with his head bowed, clearing a path through the wet muck for pedestrians who never came.

She counted her money in her head, a habit she despised and could not break.

Two more weeks of the lodging house. Bread at six that morning, the end of the loaf, and coffee behind her now on a charity table with little iced cakes ranged around the urn, and the smell of it reached her at the window and closed a hand around the back of her throat.

She kept her face to the glass. After that, a decision she had been refusing to name for a fortnight and would have to name by Tuesday.

“You did not want the position.”

The voice came from her left, low and dry. A gentleman stood perhaps three feet away with his hands clasped behind his back, tall, dark-haired, dressed with a restraint that had cost more than display would have. His face was not kind. It was attentive, which was rarer.

“I wanted the salary, sir.” She turned only as far as she had to. “The position was merely attached to it.”

“And yet you spoke yourself out of both inside a quarter hour,” he said.

“A mistress who cannot bear an honest answer at the interview will bear one still less across a year of employment.” Selina drew her glove smooth at the wrist. “It seemed economical to disappoint her now rather than by degrees.”

The corner of his mouth moved in a way that was not quite a smile. “You are either very foolish or very tired.”

“Must it be only one?”

He looked at her a moment longer, and Selina held his gaze. Around them, the assembly murmured on, and the urn hissed, and a spoon rang against a saucer.

“You watched all that,” she said. “From over there, beside the pillar, with your hands clasped behind your back and your judgement already formed. I do not care to serve as an entertainment, sir.”

“You were not an entertainment.” He appeared to consider whether to continue, but ventured no further than, “You were the only person in the room worth watching.”

“And now you have come to inspect the specimen more closely.” Her chin had risen, and she made no effort to lower it.

“I have come to offer you employment.” He paused, and when he continued, his tone held something very like a warning. “I would not spend the next several minutes insulting the only person here who has approached you with kindness.”

She inclined her head, conceding the point. “Then you have the advantage of me, sir, which I imagine is a condition you find agreeable.”

“I am Wexford.”

The name arrived with weight. Everyone had heard it; the Duke of Wexford who kept to his estates and his committees and was said to have buried whatever softness he owned in the same year he buried his father.

She had not expected him to be so young.

Four-and-thirty at the outside, and looking at a dismissed companion as if her answers were worth collecting.

“Then I am fortunate that you overheard my disgrace,” she said, “since a duke can have no possible use for a debating society either.”

“On the contrary. I have a sister who is sorely in need of one, and a house that has grown too quiet to argue with itself.” He turned slightly towards the window. “Will you sit?”

He indicated a small table set apart from the others, half concealed by a potted palm which some optimist had placed there in the hope of lending the room the air of a conservatory. Selina hesitated.

“You do not know my name, Your Grace.” She made no move towards the chair.

“You gave it as Gray.”

“I did.”

“Then let us begin there.”

He sat and waited for her to do the same. Selina took the chair opposite him. The palm cast its ragged shadow across the cloth in long, divided fingers. She folded her hands in her lap, beneath the table where he could not see them, and prepared to lie.

“How long have you been seeking a position?” he asked.

“Six months.” She had the answer prepared, yet it still cost her something to give it.

“And in that time?”

“Three offers, two of them withdrawn. Ladies find me unobjectionable until they discover that I read, at which point they conclude I must be concealing an opinion, which I generally am.”

“And the third?”

“It came from a gentleman whose intentions proved not to be secretarial. I declined in language he found memorable.”

His expression did not change. The set of his shoulders did.

“And before those six months?”

Selina straightened the cuff of her glove, though it required no attention. It had been darned twice at the wrist. The work was neat, but she covered it with her other hand nonetheless. “A situation in the country. Suffolk.”

“Doing what?”

“Acting as companion to an elderly lady who neither went out nor received visitors. I read to her. I answered such letters as came, which were few, and wound the clocks, of which there were a great many.”

“For how long?”

“Three years.”

“And the situation ended?”

“She died.” Selina allowed the two words to rest between them for precisely as long as they were worth.

“Her family had no further use for me. They were very civil about it. A character, a fortnight’s wages, and a place on the carrier’s cart as far as the Norwich road.

The gate had shut behind me before the horse had even turned. ”

He waited, but she did not fill the silence. Three years stood behind that account, and none of them belonged to him. She had no intention of handing them across the table while the salary remained unnamed.

“You do not care to speak of Suffolk,” he said.

“There is nothing in Suffolk to speak of. That is rather the point of Suffolk, Your Grace.”

He let the matter rest, which surprised her, and therefore made her distrust him.

“Where were you raised?”

“In the country.” She turned her hands over in her lap. “In a modest establishment. My father held some land.”

“Held?”

“He is no longer in a position to hold anything.” The words emerged flatly, and she left them where they fell.

The duke turned his untouched glass of claret a quarter turn upon the table.

The movement was so slight and deliberate that it could only have been intended to grant her a moment.

Selina watched the wine settle. She had not eaten since six o’clock, and the sight of it left her light-headed, so she shifted her gaze to his hand instead.

“You have his eyes.”

“I could not say.” She resisted the impulse to touch her face. “I have never seen the resemblance myself.”

“The Earl of Merrow had grey eyes and a way of holding his chin that suggested the room had been arranged for his convenience.” He did not raise his voice for it, or lower it. “His daughter, I am told, inherited both.”

The window light seemed to grow colder. Selina kept her hands still in her lap, one thumb pressed hard into the opposite palm under the table, and did not permit her face to move.

“You were Lady Selina Calvert.”

“I was.”

“And now?”

“Now I am a woman in need of employment.”

For a long moment he said nothing. The assembly went on behind them, the small commerce of ruined gentlewomen and the ladies who purchased their attendance, and Selina waited for the thing she had waited for at every interview for six months, the tightening, the swift retreat.