Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The door had scarcely closed behind the Duke of Sinclair before Frances’ mother turned from the window with all the force of a woman who had just witnessed disaster transform, by extraordinary good fortune, into opportunity.
“Well,” she exclaimed, pressing one hand to her breast, “this must be resolved at once.”
Frances remained where she was near the terrace doors, still cold from the garden and colder still from the conversation that had taken place there. The Duke’s words had not yet settled into any shape she could properly understand. They moved through her mind in fragments only.
Marriage. Necessity. Too late.
Her father had resumed his place near the hearth, though there was nothing at all relaxed in his posture. He looked not angry now, but decided.
“What precisely did he say?” her mother asked.
Frances turned to face them both. She had hoped that speaking the words aloud might make them sound as impossible to others as they still did to her.
“He asked me to marry him.”
For one fleeting instant, silence followed. Then her mother inhaled sharply.
“A proposal?”
Frances almost laughed at the absurdity of that word. Proposal suggested warmth, choice, sentiment, and some tender degree of hope. There had been none of those things in the garden.
“No,” she clarified. “Not exactly. He said it was the only solution to the situation.”
“The situation,” her mother repeated, but her eyes were already brightening with a kind of relieved excitement. “Well, whatever name one gives it, the meaning is plain enough.”
Her father nodded once. “Indeed.”
Frances stared at them. “Is it?”
“Of course it is,” her mother said at once. “This scandal has gone far enough, and now the Duke has offered the most respectable means of ending it. It must be settled quickly.”
“The most respectable means?” Frances reiterated.
“My dear girl,” her mother sighed, coming nearer, “you speak as though this were some misfortune. It is quite the reverse. A marriage to a duke, under any circumstances, is a magnificent outcome.”
Frances felt herself stiffen. “Outcome.”
“Yes, outcome,” her mother agreed firmly. “The matter might have gone infinitely worse. Instead, it may conclude with your future not merely preserved, but elevated.”
Her father’s voice entered with calm authority. “Your mother is correct. There is no real choice here.”
Frances turned to him at once. “No real choice?”
“No.” He met her gaze steadily. “The matter must be handled properly.”
She looked from one parent to the other, scarcely able to believe how swiftly the thing had hardened from suggestion into expectation.
Only moments ago, she had still imagined herself in possession of refusal.
Now, it seemed refusal had become a kind of childish fiction, tolerated only until older, firmer voices swept it aside.
“This is absurd,” she managed to muster. “The gossip is not true. There is no affair. For goodness’ sake, I barely know the man.”
Her mother gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “Truth has ceased to be the point.”
“That is exactly what everyone keeps saying, and it does not make it any less monstrous.”
“No,” she heard her father speak, “but it does make it practical.”
Frances felt heat rise to her face. “Practical? You would have me marry a man I do not care for, to correct a lie I did not create?”
“A lie you worsened,” he reminded her almost softly, which in turn made the comment sharper. “However noble your intention may have been.”
She drew herself up. “I defended him because it was unjust.”
“And very commendable,” her mother added, in the tone of one praising a child for a generous impulse while regretting the mess it had produced.
“But what matters now is repair. Your name is already involved. The Duke’s name is involved.
Society will not be persuaded backward merely because you insist upon innocence. ”
“But I am innocent.”
Her father’s expression altered only slightly. “That may be so, but innocence is rarely sufficient once a story has taken hold.”
The quiet certainty of it struck her more painfully than if he had shouted.
She turned away for a moment, only to find there was nowhere in the room to rest her gaze without feeling enclosed by expectation.
The embroidery stand, the untouched tea tray, the neat arrangement of chairs…
everything looked orderly, fixed and composed.
Everything she was not.
Her mother moved closer. “Frances, you must see what this means. Your future would be secured at once. There would be no more uncertainty and no more whispered questions about whether you shall marry at all. Why, just imagine it, my dear… you would be a duchess.”
Frances almost said that she would rather be free.
Instead, she continued fighting. “I should not have to marry because society has invented nonsense.”
“No,” her mother agreed with maddening composure, “but since society has done so, you must be wise enough to benefit from it.”
Frances stared at her mother. That was the true injury of it.
It was not only that her parents believed she ought to accept, and not only that they believed the Duke’s offer sensible.
It was that they had so completely moved beyond the question of whether she wanted it that the matter scarcely seemed to occur to them at all.
Her father came to stand nearer the mantle, with one hand resting upon it. “Refusing him will not end this. It will make everything worse.”
“How?”
He looked at her as though the answer should have been obvious.
“Because then there is no remedy. The gossip will continue. People will say the offer was made and rejected. They will speculate as to why. They will invent new reasons. And every fresh invention will touch not only you, but this entire family.”
Her chest tightened.
“Sophia.” Her mother spoke her sister’s name softly, and that alone was enough.
Frances closed her eyes for one brief instant. She had thought of Sophia already, of course she had. Andrew had seen exactly where to wound her argument, and now her parents pressed upon the bruise without mercy.
Her father continued more gently now, as though gentleness might make the logic kinder. “You may choose to disregard your own position. You have often done so. But you cannot disregard your sister’s.”
Frances opened her eyes again.
“There must be another way,” she urged, though without conviction.
“Name it,” said her father.
She could not.
Silence fell. In that silence, she became aware with dreadful clarity that no one in the room had asked whether the prospect of marrying the Duke of Sinclair pleased her.
No one had wondered whether she might fear him, dislike him, mistrust him, or simply not wish to tie herself for life to a man who had walked into a scandal carrying mysteries he would not explain.
No one had asked whether the thought of becoming his wife filled her with dread.
The question of what she wanted hovered inside her, unheard and unspoken, until it seemed almost childish to keep hold of it.
Her mother sat down at last, as though the principal struggle had already been won. “You could do much worse.”
Frances gave a faint, strained laugh. “How comforting.”
Her mother ignored the tone. “He is handsome, wealthy, powerful, and willing, I would even say more than willing, to repair the matter. Another gentleman might have done far less.”
Another gentleman, Frances thought, might not have proposed marriage as though dictating terms of a treaty.
Yet even that bitter thought lacked strength. She was tired suddenly… tired in body, tired in mind, tired in spirit. She was tired of argument, tired of being dragged by the current of other people’s fears and ambitions, and tired of fighting a tide that rose higher each time she spoke.
Her father’s voice, when it came again, was final. “You will accept him.”
Frances looked at him. Then she looked at her mother, whose satisfaction was only half concealed. Finally, her gaze fell down to her own hands, clasped too tightly before her.
She thought of the garden, of Andrew’s grave face and of the unmistakable urgency in his voice.
This will worsen.
She thought of the child he had admitted existed, though not as his own, of all he had refused to say and of how little peace there was in any part of the matter.
And still, beneath all that, she thought of Sophia. That, in the end, decided what pride could not defend.
When she spoke, her voice was quiet enough that both parents leaned close to hear it. “Very well.”
Her mother’s breath escaped in visible relief. Frances lifted her head, though she felt none of the steadiness she hoped to show.
“I will marry him.”
The words settled into the room with the force of something both chosen and surrendered.
Her mother began speaking at once of arrangements, of discretion, of what must be done next, but Frances scarcely heard her.
She stood quite still, as if any movement might shatter the fragile control by which she remained upright at all.
She had agreed.
And though peace ought to have followed such a decision, none came. There was only the strange, hollow certainty that her life had altered in the space of a morning and that she had stepped toward it not because she wished to, but because every road behind her had quietly, relentlessly closed.