Chapter 19
HELENA
Helena and Clara stood at the edge of the drawing room.
There were hundreds of guests milling about Gideon’s London house.
The entire main floor had been opened up for the wedding breakfast — not a formal sit-down affair, but a buffet, which suited Helena considerably better.
She had not looked forward to sitting at the head of a table with every eye upon her, watching her eat while they whispered.
The whispers at the church had quieted somewhat after the ceremony was concluded, but she could still hear them now. She could still see the mouths moving behind the fans and the teacups.
“You ought to try smiling,” Clara said. “It might quiet some of them.”
“If I smile too much, they will say I look like the cat who got the cream.”
“You did,” Clara said, with a smile of her own. “You got yourself a Duke. And one who will treat you well. Someone who likes you — who might even admire you in a way a wife deserves. The way Benjamin looks at me.”
“Do not say such things,” Helena replied, more sharply than she had intended. “I told you already. There is nothing between us of a romantic nature. Nothing whatsoever.”
“Well, the way he looked at you in the church certainly suggested he cares for you.”
“We care for one another. That is true. But not in that way.” She took a breath. “I do not wish to discuss it any further. There is already too much on my mind. I can scarcely wrap my head around the fact that I am a Duchess. Me. Helena Hartwell.”
Clara grabbed her arm. “You are not nobody. You are my dearest friend, and if anybody deserves this opportunity, it is you.” She tightened her grip. “Now come with me.”
“Where are we going?” Helena said, alarmed.
“To meet some of the people here whom you have not yet been introduced to.”
They walked across the room to what was usually the drawing room, where a number of ladies had assembled around the pianoforte, each with a plate of cake in hand. They looked up with considerable interest as Helena and Clara approached.
“So she is the tallest one of the lot,” said the brightest-looking of the group, a young woman with a wide smile and a heart-shaped face.
“The blushing bride. I do not think we have officially met. I am Evelyn — Duchess of Sinclair.” She gestured along the line.
“These are my sisters — Charlotte, Marchioness of Ravenscar, and Marianne, Countess of Wexford. And our cousin Frances, Duchess of Devonshire.”
“I have heard so much about all of you,” Helena said, and found that she meant it. “But most particularly about Frances — Gideon speaks so warmly of your husband.”
“Indeed,” Frances said, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I must say I am very glad somebody has finally taken Gideon in hand. I always felt as though he were an extra child I had not asked for.”
The group, including Clara, laughed. Helena found herself laughing too, which surprised her.
“I am genuinely glad,” Frances added, more quietly. “I wish you all the happiness in the world.”
A look passed between the women — the kind of look shared among people who have decided, collectively and without discussion, to admit someone new into their confidence.
“We are aware,” Charlotte said, “that this is an arrangement more than anything else. But do not fret on that account. Such things have a habit of becoming something rather more real, and rather more quickly than one expects. Not one of us was planning to marry her husband when she did, and we are all of us very happy now.”
“They all required a certain amount of managing, of course,” Evelyn said, which produced a laugh from everybody.
“I think of all of us,” Charlotte continued, “only Clara is marrying a man she chose for herself from the very beginning.”
Clara blushed. “Benjamin and I never had need of any matchmaking or schemes, that is true. But love can develop in all manner of ways.” She glanced at Helena with a meaningful smile that Helena chose firmly to ignore.
“You will come to appreciate Gideon’s finer qualities,” Frances said. “If you have not already.”
The truth was that Helena had already seen his qualities — had seen them from the very first week, if she was honest with herself. She simply had no intention of saying so.
“The most important thing just now,” Charlotte said, dropping her voice slightly, “is to silence the whispers. I know something about that. And the first thing you need to know is where your friends are. That, at least, is already settled.”
“When you are in town, stay close to us,” Marianne confirmed. “We know what you have been through. You can trust us.”
“We have also heard the stories about your father,” Evelyn added, more carefully.
“They are true,” Helena said. If she was going to be friends with these women, she had decided she would be honest with them from the outset. She watched their faces. None of them flinched.
“Well,” Evelyn said, with a small shrug.
“So what of it? Our father attempted to sell the three of us off to the most dreadful men imaginable. In my case he very nearly succeeded.” She paused.
“And Charlotte here was born with as fine a set of connections as anyone in the ton — much good it did her.”
“And I,” Marianne added, “was practically a nobody before I married Lucien. My connection to the Langley family was several times removed. I might almost as well have had none at all.” She smiled.
“In any case, none of us care. None of our husbands care. And these people—” she glanced briefly at the room beyond “—will not care either, once they have something new to occupy them. Which brings us to the more pressing matter.”
“You must leave them with something to talk about,” Charlotte said.
“Not rumours about your heritage — something better. You must leave them with the impression that you and Gideon are genuinely, thoroughly in love. I know exactly how to arrange that.” She set down her plate, pushed through the guests, and disappeared.
Helena looked at the others. “Should I be concerned?”
“Almost certainly,” Evelyn said pleasantly.
A moment later Charlotte returned with Gideon in tow, looking mildly perplexed. She picked up a glass, and, finding no cutlery to hand, reached for the fireplace poker and knocked it sharply against a table. The room quieted.
“I think what this wedding needs,” Charlotte announced, “is a dance. My sister-in-law Frances will play the pianoforte, and our bride and groom will show us what they are made of.”
Gideon looked at Helena. He shrugged. “I suppose we are dancing.”
“What shall I play?” Frances asked, already moving toward the pianoforte.
Helena opened her mouth to suggest the Cotillion, but Gideon was faster. “The waltz, of course,” he said. “The most romantic of dances.” Frances smiled and settled herself at the keys.
“Do you not think that is a little too intimate?” Helena murmured as he led her toward the center of the drawing room, where the furniture had been cleared back to make space.
“I think it is just intimate enough,” he said. “Evelyn tells me we need to convince everybody that we are thoroughly in love. I think we can manage a convincing performance between us. Can we not?”
She nodded, and he placed his hands on her. The room fell into a loose circle around them, every face turned their way. Her skin tingled the way it did whenever she was excited, though she should not be excited in this moment. She should be terrified.
Oddly enough, she was both.
Frances began to play, and they moved into the first figure.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
She raised her eyes to his. It did not help matters.
He leaned in slightly, his breath warm, touched faintly with strawberries and something stronger.
“We are going to convince every last one of them,” he said.
“When we leave for the country seat tomorrow, we will leave behind the impression of the happiest couple anyone has ever had the pleasure of witnessing. And by the time the season resumes, every whisper will have found something newer and more interesting to attach itself to.”
“I find that rather difficult at present,” she said. “I am so aware of everyone staring that I fear I look like a woman being marched to the scaffold rather than one who has just married the man she loves.”
“Then let us give you something more agreeable to think about. Sir Franklin is here,” he said, with a slight tilt of his head toward the door.
She glanced over. There he was, standing apart from the crowd, watching them with an expression that was difficult to read.
“He is almost certainly imagining himself dancing with you and wondering whether you have made a terrible mistake.”
“Actually,” she said, “I think he may be rather more occupied with Mary.”
He blinked. “Your Mary?”
“I saw them talking in the lane near our house a few days ago. I thought it an accidental encounter. The following day he sent flowers. To her, not to me.”
His eyes went wide. “You are not serious.”
“I am serious.”
“Well,” he said, and delight crossed his face. “I wonder whether my matchmaking skills might be called upon once more.”
“May I remind you,” she said, “that your matchmaking skills have not thus far been what one might call a resounding success.”
“I beg your pardon — you are married to a Duke as of two hours ago. I would call that a considerable triumph.”
“I was supposed to be making a match with somebody else. That was rather the original plan.”
“That,” he said, “is what is commonly known as semantics. The outcome is what matters, and the outcome is that you are married and provided for. After this dance, everyone in this room will be persuaded of how devotedly in love we are. And when we leave for the country, they will find something else to occupy them. By the time the season resumes, the rumours about your heritage and the haste of our marriage will be quite forgotten.”
“We can only hope so,” she said.
“And on the subject of Sir Franklin — perhaps we ought to invite him to come to the country. If he and Mary are developing an attachment, it could be quietly encouraged well away from prying eyes, and any arrangement they came to would be settled before the season began.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Mary does not wish to be married again. She was married once before to a man she truly loved. I cannot imagine she wishes to go through all of that again with someone she has only just met.”
He considered this. “I too was married to a woman I thought I truly loved,” he said. “And you were married to — another man.” He said it carefully, without finishing the sentence. She appreciated it more than she could say. “One never quite knows what is waiting around the corner.”
They danced on, the conversation meandering lightly between them as it always did. By the end of it she had almost forgotten they were being watched, which she suspected had been his intention all along.
When the music stopped, the room broke into warm applause. She was about to step off the floor when his hand caught her waist and held her back.
“That will not do,” he said.
“What will not do?”
“Walking away without giving them what they truly came here for.”
“Which is—”
He did not answer in words. Instead he placed one arm around her back and the other at her waist, bent her backward in a smooth, confident arc — so far that she thought for one vertiginous moment that she might fall — and pressed his lips to hers.
For a moment she heard nothing but his breathing close to her ear and the sound of her own heartbeat, which had decided, without consulting her, to conduct itself in a most undignified fashion. Her eyes had closed of their own accord. She saw nothing.
By the time he had her upright again and she opened her eyes, the room had erupted. Applause, laughter, a few appreciative cheers from the direction of where Nathaniel and Rhys were standing.
“That,” he said, with great satisfaction, “ought to do it.”
Then he took her hand and walked her off the floor, and she did not say a single word — mostly because she could not immediately locate any.