Chapter 2
Chapter Two
"They say he locks his sister in her room," Amelia said.
The carriage rolled over a rut in the road, and everyone lurched sideways in unison.
Rain streaked the windows in long diagonal lines, and the sky beyond was the shade of grey that suggested it would not end soon.
"They say a great many things," Bethany said. "They also said Lord Pembury kept a bear in his cellar, and that turned out to be a very large dog."
"This is different."
"Is it? You have not met the man."
Bethany did not say this unkindly, but she heard it land wrong.
Amelia's profile went still in the way it did when she was being careful not to show something.
Bethany looked at her sister properly then. At the set of her hands in her lap, folded too neatly. At the slight tension around her mouth that had not relaxed since yesterday, since the church, since the moment Lord Shirley had come back inside with that smile.
The truth was that Amelia had barely spoken since they left London.
She had sat with her gloves folded and her gaze fixed beyond the rain-soaked hedgerows with the expression of a person mentally rehearsing something they were not looking forward to.
Not nerves, Bethany knew Amelia's nerves. They made her talk too much and eat too little. This was something quieter and more resolved. This was a woman who had been here before and was bracing.
I did this. I stood up in that church, and I did this.
She had meant to save her sister. She had meant to buy Amelia time, breathing room, the possibility of something better.
What she had actually done was remove one stranger and replace it with another. And in the process, had so thoroughly ruined the family's standing that this stranger was now not an option but a necessity.
There was no other offer coming. She knew that. Anyone who might have been considering the Shirley daughters before yesterday's spectacle was reconsidering now, behind closed drawing room doors, with the relish of people who had witnessed a scandal and were not required to suffer its consequences.
The Duke of Mansfield was not rescuing them out of gallantry. He was the only door still open, and he knew it, and they all knew he knew it.
The thought made her feel slightly ill.
"He is a duke," she offered, because she had to say something. "That is something."
"Is it?" Amelia turned from the window. Her eyes were very clear, very calm. "Lord Featherby was a viscount. That was also something."
"Lord Featherby never looked at you once. This man came to a ruined wedding and made an offer within the hour. That suggests at least minimal competence."
"Or considerable desperation."
"Bethany," Lady Shirley said sharply from across the carriage, without looking up from her needlework. "That is enough."
Bethany subsided.
Amelia turned back to the window.
After a moment, very quietly, so their mother could not hear over the rain: "Mama said I was getting too old. That my best years were behind me, and if I did not take Lord Featherby, I would have nothing left worth taking."
Bethany went still.
"She said that to you?"
"She said it to Papa, while I was in the next room." Amelia's voice was entirely even. "She did not use lowered tones."
Bethany looked at her sister's profile. At the careful neutrality of it, the years of practice it represented, and felt something tighten in her chest that was equal parts fury and grief.
"You never told me."
"What would you have done?"
Stood up in a church.
Which she had done anyway, only too late, and for reasons that now felt both entirely right and catastrophically insufficient.
"I am sorry," she said. "For what Mama said. And for, " she stopped. Started again. "I thought I was helping. Yesterday. I genuinely thought I was."
"You were helping." Amelia turned to look at her, and her expression was not accusatory. That was almost worse. "You always are. That is not what worries me."
"Then what does?"
Amelia was quiet for a moment.
Outside, the rain thickened against the glass, and the carriage swayed on an uneven stretch of road.
Louiza whispered something to Olivia at the far end of the seat that made her twin press her lips together very hard.
"I have been engaged twice," Amelia said finally, in a voice so low Bethany had to lean forward to catch it.
"I have sat in two different drawing rooms while two different men explained to my father what I was worth to them and what they expected in return.
I have smiled and nodded and said yes because I was told there was no other answer available to me.
" She looked at her hands. "And now I am in a third carriage going to a third man's house, and the only thing that has changed is that this time the family cannot survive if I say no. "
Bethany had nothing to say to that. Because it was true. Because she had made it true.
"What I need to know," Amelia continued, "is whether you think he is safe."
"I think, " Bethany chose her words carefully. "I think he is not cruel. I think he is cold, and direct, and probably difficult to live with, and I think he will expect a great deal and show very little in return. But I do not think he is dangerous."
"That is not quite the same as safe."
"No," Bethany admitted. "It is not."
Lady Shirley set down her needlework. "What you both ought to be feeling," she said, in the tone she used when she had been listening longer than she had let on, "is gratitude.
The Duke of Mansfield made this offer immediately after the most embarrassing scene this family has produced since Marina threw herself into a lake. He did not have to do that."
"Which is precisely what concerns me," Bethany said. "A duke, proposing to a family in disgrace, within the hour. That is not gallantry, Mama. That is desperation wearing a very good coat."
"Bethany."
"I am only saying what everyone is thinking."
"You are saying what no one with any sense is thinking, and certainly not out loud in a carriage on the way to the man's home.
" Lady Shirley picked up the needlework again.
"When Amelia is settled, your time will come.
Until then, I will thank you to keep your opinions where they cannot do any damage. "
"And when my time comes," Bethany said, "will I also be bundled into a carriage and delivered to someone's country manor without being consulted?"
"You will be grateful for whatever Providence arranges, like a sensible girl."
The threat settled in Bethany's chest like a stone.
Not because she feared it exactly, but because she knew her mother meant it.
Her mother's version of arranged meant a carriage very much like this one, a country house very much like the one at the end of this drive, and a man who had not been consulted about her opinions.
She was, she thought with grim clarity, looking at her own future. Just with a different sister's name on the door.
"And Louiza and Olivia?" she said. "Shall we begin selecting their husbands now, or wait until their debut next season to narrow the field?"
Louiza, seventeen, fair-haired and sharp-faced like Amelia, looked up from the corner with an expression that suggested she had opinions about this and was exercising considerable restraint in not sharing them.
Beside her, Olivia - identical in every respect - caught Bethany's eye and gave her a look that communicated, with the efficiency only twins achieved.
Don't make it worse.
"The twins," Lady Shirley said sharply, "are exactly why you must stop this. They come out next season. If you continue to behave as you did in that church, no family of standing will come near any of you, and your sisters will pay for it."
Bethany said nothing.
There was nothing to say that would not make it worse, and she was honest enough with herself to recognize that her mother was not entirely wrong, which was the most irritating kind of wrong there was.
The carriage slowed.
She leaned toward the window and saw the gates of Mansfield Manor through the rain. Iron and tall, and beyond them a long drive lined with oaks stripped bare by autumn.
The house at the end was large and grey and absolutely serious about itself in the way that only very old houses could be.
It did not look like a house where people were locked in rooms. It looked like a house where people simply did as they were told and found it easier not to think about it.
Amelia looked at it without speaking.
Then, so quietly, Bethany was not certain she was meant to hear it: "I cannot do this again."
Bethany took her sister's hand under the folds of their skirts and held it.
"You will not have to," she said. "Not alone."
They stepped out into the cold, the wind coming off the open grounds with enough force to press Bethany's pelisse flat against her.
A footman appeared with an umbrella that was immediately inverted by a gust.
Amelia held her bonnet with both hands. Lady Shirley swept toward the front door with the focus of a woman who had not come all this way to be inconvenienced by weather.
Lord Shirley followed, saying something cheerful about the drive being very fine for this part of the country.
Bethany followed last.
The entrance hall was warm and high-ceilinged, with dark wood paneling and portraits at regular intervals that all appeared to disapprove of visitors in a quiet, ancestral way.
A butler appeared and gathered coats with quiet efficiency. Then her family was being led through a set of doors toward the receiving room. Her mother's voice already carrying back in fragments, something about the plasterwork being very fine indeed.
Bethany stopped.
She looked left. A corridor ran alongside the main hall, narrower, lined with closed doors. The kind that connected one part of a house to another and was not, strictly speaking, intended for guests who had not yet been introduced to their host.
She looked right. The butler's back was just disappearing through the double doors.
She went left.