Chapter 9
Nine
“Oh, Rosie. You are chewing your quill again,” Emily said. “You will poison yourself one of these days, and then where will I be? Without a single sensible friend left in London... The horror...”
Emily performed a little moue, making Rosalie laugh as she looked down at her note. Yes, the quill had indeed found its way between her teeth without her permission. She set it back on the desk and tried to look halfway dignified about it.
“That tends to happen when I think too much at the escritoire,” Rosalie said.
“Well, by estimation you have been thinking too much for half an hour. Look, I got fully dressed in that time, while you only wrote... two sentences!”
Emily leaned over from the dressing chair to look, earning a sharp tut from Rosalie’s lady’s maid for moving her head.
“Dearest Anna,” Emily read aloud. “I hope you are finding the weather temperate, if not kindly. Temperate weather is so nice... And I hope—”
Rosalie groaned and put her quill back in its stand.
“That is all you have? This is all you conjure despite all that mind-numbing reading you do? Really, Rosalie... I can come up with a decent continuation right now. I hope you are not eaten by a wolf in Dumfries, dearest elder sister. I hope the husband you pilfered from Beatrice Sinclair is also not eaten by a wolf. I hope you never learn what a handsome man the Duke of Hartmere is and what I—”
“Emily Charlotte Sutton,” Rosalie warned, turning in her seat.
“I am only teasing.” Emily grinned and let her maid turn her head back into position, almost finished with her elaborate coiffure: two braids, looped around one another to resemble a flower not yet in full bloom.
“What is the trouble? It is only Anna. I doubt she will read it thoroughly anyway, that little socialite. You have written her a hundred letters and never once chewed a quill over it before.”
Rosalie looked at her two honest sentences and admitted to herself that the trouble was not knowing what to write.
The trouble was knowing what she meant to leave out.
She had begun the letter three times already before Emily had arrived before noon.
Twice she had thrown the page in the fire.
Every version came back to the same small dishonesty.
Nothing has happened here, nothing worth remarking on; you need not hurry back.
She wanted Anna to stay in Scotland a while longer rather than coming down to visit.
She wanted it with a selfishness that shamed her even as she gave in to it.
Because Anna’s return would mean Anna’s innate radiance filling every room Rosalie dared to occupy at the same time—however briefly they lingered there—and Rosalie was not sure she could handle playing second fiddle to her sister again.
Especially not now, not when she had only just discovered a space worth occupying at all, even if it was all wrong.
It was an ugly thought to have about her own sister. She didn’t pick up the quill again for a while.
“I... I am only trying to think how to describe the dinner at the Peacheys’ without alarming her,” Rosalie said, which was true enough to pass for the whole truth.
“If I write that I embarrassed myself at the table and was rescued by the Duke of Hartmere in front of thirty guests, she will order a driver to leave Dumfries immediately just to come and verify that the claim is true.” She sighed quietly.
“She would never believe anything interesting could happen to me. I don’t want all her questions. ”
“To my ear, I agree, that is an excellent point,” Emily said, fussing with her coral necklace. “But it is also not why you have been staring at the wall instead of writing anything. I saw the way he took you down to the lake. It was not to rebuke you. So what was it?”
Rosalie’s cheeks went warm. She busied her hands with the inkwell to hide her discomfort. She had not told Emily about the duke’s perverse proposal.
She could not tell her yet, not until she had decided what she meant to do about it, and certainly not while her thoughts kept slipping back again and again to the duke’s command to think on it—and of his estimation of her, which must have been low indeed, if he could ask her so flippantly into such an improper and macabre charade.
He would not ask something like this of a woman he respected, she thought. He said as much—that I am beneath him—that he would not court me in reality ever.
It didn’t hurt much. Maybe it should have hurt.
“We were just... talking. I’m sorry,” she whispered, rising from her seat. “I have a great deal on my mind, and writing won’t help at all. Or really talking about it either. I will save the note for later.”
Emily’s face changed at once. The teasing fell away, and she reached across for Rosalie’s hand.
“Is it me? I have been so wrapped up in my own troubles I have hardly asked how you are bearing the worry of it. You needn’t carry it on your own, Rosalie.
I know you fret over things you think are not your business to fret over...
It’s your most sparkling trait and also your worst trait. ”
It is not Thomas, Rosalie thought, not even close.
The thought came so plainly that Rosalie nearly said it aloud.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to let Emily believe it; nod and accept sympathy she did not deserve and let it cover over whatever new and complicated thing had taken up residence in her chest. So that was precisely what she did.
“I only worry for you both,” she said, which was not false but incomplete.
“Beatrice will not stop until she has done some real harm. We’ve seen it happen before.
And I hate that there is nothing useful I can do to prevent it.
And in the meantime you’re just waiting.
I hate all the waiting. It never ends, the waiting. ”
“Then let’s do something with the waiting,” Emily said, smiling genuinely.
“Let’s go shopping with your mother as we planned today, and buy beautiful fabrics, and stop off at the sweet store you like so much, and then...
Heavens, all right. I’ll even go to that lending library with you at the end of Bond Street, so long as you come to Magazin des Modes with me when it opens tomorrow. ”
Rosalie managed to smile and nod, letting her friend believe the matter was settled. She turned back to her half-written letter with her heart going strangely fast, because in the space of that small lie about waiting she had understood something she was not sure she wanted to know.
She did not want to give the attention away anymore, to be shelved, watching all the time, Season after Season, as a background actor in her own life.
Not for Anna, or even for Emily’s very real troubles, not even for a single evening more.
Pretending that she was happy on the path to spinsterhood had been a comfortable enough lie to live in, and her parents had been so kind as not to matchmake her earlier, but maybe that had also done her a disservice.
So when she had accidentally kissed a real-life duke, and then he had pursued her for answers.
She had discovered that she liked being pursued, even if it frightened her...
some starved part of her awakened and screamed that it had been waiting for years for someone to notice her first and want only her for a time, despite the circumstances.
So, yes. She placed her hands on the desk. The letter to Anna sat unfinished. She made her decision there and then at the escritoire, with the maid still fussing over pins and Emily already chattering about something else.
She would send the Duke of Hartmere her answer that night.
In the end, there was no need.
The dinner that evening was much smaller than the Peachey affair, and was hosted at their own home, which made it remarkably more manageable for Rosalie, even though the simple din of cutlery and a service of pre-prandial drinks brought to mind a host of uncomfortable memories. The short guest list did not help.
Lady Chipping arrived exactly on time, beaming and shimmering, dressed head to toe in burgundy Italian silks.
It took Rosalie no time at all to understand why her mother had been so pleased to reconnect with their former traveling companion.
Within minutes of arriving, Lady Winthrop and Lady Chipping fell into the easy shorthand of old friends.
By the time sherry was being poured, they were deep into a story about some evening in Vienna involving a gondola and her father losing a shoe he never actually recovered.
“I still very much owe you for that shoe, Baron Winthrop,” Lady Chipping was saying, taking a clumsy sip from her third sherry. “You and I may take a trip down Bond Street on the morrow. You bring your other shoe to the duke’s cobbler—”
Her father laughed. “The other shoe is gone, my fair lady.”
“No!”
“Why, yes. I gave it to the farrier’s dogs as a chew toy,” he managed to get out between bursts of communal laughter. He was also on his third drink. “What was the point... in having one shoe!”
Rosalie glanced at the clock. Surely dinner should have been served ten minutes ago.
She took another sip of her water and let the story wash over her.
She was grateful for anything that did not require her own participation while her nerves gathered themselves for the evening ahead.
She found herself watching the door more than was proper. Something felt amiss.
He was late in the end. That’s what they said, at least. And when she asked her mother discreetly why she had not mentioned that the Duke of Hartmere had also been invited, Lady Winthrop declared she had forgotten—that it was a last-minute change of plans, and that she was sorry.
The duke hurried into the drawing room with a wide smile to his aunt. He pressed a kiss on Lady Chipping’s cheek. He did not even bother looking Rosalie’s way, charming her parents instead with apologies mixed with greetings.