Chapter Five #2
She had been looking for writing paper, as she wanted to send a letter to Rosalind, to assure her sister that she had arrived safely and that Westmere Park was every bit as overwhelming as one might expect.
Mrs Prescott had mentioned a writing desk in one of the smaller rooms off the main corridor, and Helena had set out to find it.
She had found a study instead. Masculine, comfortable, lined with books and furnished with the kind of well-worn leather chairs that suggested actual use. A desk dominated one corner, covered in papers and ledgers. A fire burned low in the grate.
And on the desk, propped against an inkwell, was a letter with a London solicitor’s address in the corner.
Helena hesitated.
This was Edmund’s private study. She had no business being there, no right to examine his correspondence. The proper thing would be to leave, to find Mrs Prescott, to ask for writing paper through the appropriate channels.
But the letter was sitting there in plain view. And the word Vane seemed to leap out from the text visible on the page.
She was still standing there, frozen in indecision, when Edmund’s voice came from behind her.
“I see you have found my correspondence.”
Helena spun around. “I wasn’t, I was looking for writing paper, I didn’t mean to.”
“Helena.” His voice was gentle. He moved past her to the desk, not bothering to hide the letter or shuffle it away. “It is quite all right. You have every right to know what it says.”
He picked up the letter. He contemplated it for a second, his features betraying no emotion whatever. Then he held it out to her.
“Read it.”
She took the paper. Her gaze moved across the parchment, her intellect analysing the formal language with long-accustomed skill.
…formal preliminary challenge…fraudulently contracted…solely to satisfy the requirements of the late Duke’s will…ordinary qualities of a lawful matrimony…shared domestic arrangements…bona fide union…
The words blurred and sharpened and blurred again.
Reginald Vane had filed a challenge. On the first day. Before Helena had even unpacked her trunk.
“He claims the matrimony is a farce,” she said slowly. “That it exists only to satisfy the will.”
“Yes.”
“He is demanding evidence that it is genuine. That I actually function as your wife. That we share a life, not just a legal document.”
“Yes.”
Helena set the letter down. Her hands were steady, she was proud of that, but something inside her was shaking.
“He is going to be watching how I manage this household,” she said.
“Every decision I make. Every interaction I have with the staff. He is hoping I will fail. That I will be a cipher Duchess who does not engage with the actual running of things, which would look exactly like the kind of convenient sham he is arguing for.”
Edmund was watching her with that quiet, intent expression. “Yes.”
Helena met his gaze. “Then I had better not fail.”
Something shifted in his face. Surprise, perhaps. Or admiration. Or both.
“No,” he said softly. “I do not believe you will.”
She looked around the study, at the papers on his desk, the ledgers stacked in corners, the evidence of an estate that required constant attention and management.
She thought about the housekeeper with her assessing eyes, the servants waiting to see what kind of Duchess she would be, the frozen Dowager who had offered the smallest of olive branches.
She thought about Reginald Vane, circling like a vulture, waiting for her to stumble.
“I will need access to the household accounts,” she said. “And I will need to meet with Mrs Prescott properly, not a formal introduction, but a working meeting. I want to understand how this household operates. Every detail.”
“Of course.”
“And I will would like to have dinner with you. Not at opposite ends of a ballroom table. Actually together. If we are to convince anyone that this matrimony is real, we should probably be able to hold a conversation.”
The corner of Edmund’s mouth twitched. That almost-smile she was beginning to recognise. “I would like that as well.”
***
Dinner that evening was an exercise in absurdity.
The dining room was cavernous, designed to seat thirty, at minimum, with a table that stretched the entire length of the room and enough silverware to stock a small shop. Helena had been escorted to one end by a footman; Edmund, she assumed, had been escorted to the other.
She stared down the length of polished mahogany at her husband, who was approximately a quarter mile away.
“Do you always dine at opposite ends of a cricket pitch?” she called.
Edmund’s voice carried back to her, slightly muffled by distance. “I generally dine alone. This is an improvement.”
“Is it? I cannot tell if you are smiling or grimacing. You are too far away for me to read your expression.”
“I am smiling.”
“How reassuring. I shall simply have to trust you on that, since visual confirmation is impossible.”
She saw him rise from his chair, pick up his place setting, plate, silverware, and wine glass, and carry it down the length of the table to where she sat. The footmen watched with expressions of carefully suppressed astonishment.
Edmund set his things down across from her.
Close enough to touch, if she reached across the table.
Close enough to observe his features with clarity.
She saw that he smiled in truth, not with his accustomed half-smile, but with a fuller expression that imparted a sudden, unexpected warmth to his serious face. “Better?” he asked.
“Much. Although I fear you may have scandalised the staff.”
“They will recover.” He sat, arranging his napkin with the precision of someone who had been trained in table manners since birth. “I find I prefer conversation to formality.”
“A dangerous preference for a Duke.”
“So I have been told.”
They ate. The food was excellent, Mrs Barrow clearly knew her business, and the wine was better than anything Helena had tasted in years. But what she would remember later was not the meal itself. It was the conversation.
They talked about the estate. About the tenants and the farms and the endless details of running a property of that size.
Edmund asked her opinion, actually asked, as though her opinion mattered, on matters of household management.
She asked him questions about the legal challenge, about what evidence Vane’s solicitor would be looking for, and how they could build a case showing that their matrimony was genuine.
It was practical. Businesslike. Exactly the kind of conversation two partners in an arrangement might have.
And yet.
There were moments when their eyes met across the table, and something electric passed between them. Moments when his voice softened unexpectedly, or when her laughter surprised them both. There were moments when the space between them felt charged with something neither of them had agreed to.
Helena told herself it was the wine. The strangeness of the day. The disorientation of finding herself in that peculiar, grand and impossible place.
She told herself it meant nothing.
Later, alone in her enormous bedroom, Helena sat at the writing desk and composed a letter to her sister.
Dearest Rosalind, she wrote,
I am a Duchess. The house is beautiful and under siege simultaneously. The Duke is,
She paused. Stared at the word she had just written. What was the Duke?
, strange. Kind. Alarming.
She thought about the way he had moved his chair. The way he had shared the letter without hesitation. The way he had looked at her when she said she would not fail.
I am fairly certain he told his housekeeper my tea preferences before I arrived.
She stared at the letter. Then, on a separate line, she added:
He moved his chair.
She did not know why that felt like the most important thing she had written.