Chapter 2 #2
It was not a plan, exactly. It was more of an intention.
A house told you things. The books people kept, the state of the rooms they did not show visitors, and whether the servants looked comfortable or careful.
If there was something in this house that might tell her what kind of man the Duke of Mansfield was before Amelia was expected to form an opinion of him at a dinner table, then it seemed reasonable to look.
She was considering this with some satisfaction when she turned the corner and walked directly into a wall.
Except that wall, as a rule, did not reach out and catch you by the arm.
She grabbed the nearest solid thing, which turned out to be a lapel, and found her footing just before she lost it entirely. She looked up.
The Duke of Mansfield looked down.
He was taller than she had registered from across a church, and considerably more present at close range.
He had dark eyes that were doing something she could only describe as the opposite of pleased, and he was holding her by the arm with the automatic steadiness of someone who had caught falling things before and found the experience unremarkable.
He released her the moment she was stable and stepped back precisely the correct distance.
Bethany straightened her sleeve.
Her heart was going faster than the fall warranted, which she attributed entirely to the shock of the collision and not at all to the fact that he was still looking at her with those dark eyes from a distance of approximately two feet.
She was not a woman who was easily unsettled by men. She found them, generally, straightforward and not particularly difficult to manage.
This one was looking at her as though he was reading something she had not intended to put on display. She felt it the way she felt a cold draught, suddenly, and all over.
She did not like it.
"Shall I assign you a servant," he said, "or do you make a habit of wandering through other people's houses unescorted?"
"I was looking for the receiving room."
"The receiving room," he said, "is in the other direction."
"I may have taken a wrong turn."
"You may have." He looked at her in a way that made it clear he did not believe this for a single moment. "Or you may be exactly what you appear to be, which is a woman who was snooping and is now constructing an explanation."
A pause. "Miss Shirley. Though I imagine I might also call you little mouse, given the circumstances."
He said her name as though he had known it before today, which he probably had. She had not exactly been quiet at the wedding.
Little mouse.
"Your Grace," she said. "Since we are doing introductions in corridors."
Something shifted in his expression, not quite amusement, but close enough to be irritating. "I was not warned that you would be accompanying your family today."
"I was not warned that I would need permission."
"You do not need permission. You are a guest. Guests, however, generally remain in the parts of the house they have been shown to." He looked at her steadily. "Are you always this much trouble, or is this effort you are making specially on my behalf?"
"I am no trouble at all. I simply think that a woman ought to form her own opinion of a situation rather than have one handed to her."
"And what situation did you think you were going to find evidence of down a service corridor?"
The honest answer was that she had not thought that far ahead.
His attitude was making it very difficult to think clearly at all, which was annoying, because she prided herself on thinking clearly in exactly these kinds of situations. Confrontational, close-quartered, with a man who was trying to make her feel foolish.
She was usually rather good at this. He was looking at her with a directness that felt less like rudeness and more like a refusal to pretend. Something about it made her want to either argue or leave, and she had not yet decided which.
"My sister," she said instead, "has been told very little about you or this arrangement.
Amelia is a sensitive woman who has been moved from one engagement to the next without anyone pausing to ask whether she wished to be.
If you had any understanding of what that costs a person, you might understand why someone who cares about her would want to know more before she is handed over. "
He was quiet for a moment. "She is being offered a dukedom."
"She is being offered another arrangement she did not request, by another stranger she does not know, after her family spent two years pushing her toward men who looked at her as a convenient solution to their own requirements."
Bethany held his gaze. "The title is beside the point, Your Grace. What my sister has never once been offered is a choice."
Something moved in his expression then. A brief adjustment, the look of a man who had been handed an argument he had not anticipated and was turning it over to examine it properly.
The corridor was not especially wide. He had not moved any further away. She was aware of this in the specific, inconvenient way she was aware of things she was trying not to be.
"You stood up in a church," he said, "in front of sixty people, and interrupted a wedding."
"I did."
"You are aware that what you did could ruin every one of your sisters' chances? That you are many, and the damage spreads?"
"I am aware," she said, with less certainty than she would have liked.
"Then perhaps," he said, his voice dropping just slightly, "you are less concerned with other people's sensitivity than you believe."
The words landed exactly where he had aimed them.
She felt them land. Felt the accuracy of them, the small, unpleasant truth at the center, and for a moment, she had nothing to say, which was not a state she was accustomed to.
"Bethany."
Lady Shirley's voice arrived from around the corner half a second before Lady Shirley did.
Followed by Amelia, Lord Shirley, and the butler, who had the expression of a man who deeply wished he had taken a different corridor.
"What on earth are you doing back here? Your Grace, I am so terribly sorry, she simply wandered off. "
"Yes," the duke said. "I had gathered."
He said it without looking at Lady Shirley.
He was still looking at Bethany, and there was something in his expression that was not quite contempt but was not far from it. The look of a man who had assessed a situation, found it beneath his usual requirements, and was deciding whether it was worth the remainder of his afternoon.
"Your daughter," he said to Lady Shirley, in a tone that made it sound less like a description and more like a complaint being formally lodged, "appears to be under the impression that my house is open for her personal inspection."
Bethany felt heat rise in her face.
Not embarrassment, she was not easily embarrassed, but something sharper. The specific indignation of being spoken about in the third person by someone standing two feet away, as though she had already been dismissed and simply had not yet been informed.
"Your house," she said, "is not what I was inspecting."
He looked at her then. Directly, with those dark eyes, and for just a moment, something shifted in them. A flicker of something she could not name before it was gone.
"No," he said. "I imagine it was not."
He turned to Lady Shirley. "We were becoming acquainted. Shall we go through?"
He walked ahead without waiting for an answer.
Bethany followed with her jaw set and her pulse doing something she refused to examine.
She disliked him. She was quite certain of it.
He was arrogant and dismissive and had spoken over her head as though she were furniture. The fact that her heart was still beating slightly faster than normal was entirely the fault of the collision, and nothing else whatsoever.
Amelia fell into step beside her.
"Well," Amelia said, very quietly, "he is exactly as described."
"He is insufferable," Bethany said, with more feeling than she intended.
Amelia glanced at her sideways.
Something in her expression, just for a moment, looked almost like it might become a smile.