Chapter 9
Maria had just dismissed her maid and was unpinning the last stubborn curl when her door opened without a knock.
Stephen stepped in.
Stephen? Was she seeing this correctly? What was he doing here?
He shut the door behind him and gave her no greeting. Instead, he started pacing the length of her rug.
“Your Grace?” Maria clutched her wrapper tighter. “You cannot be here.”
“I know.” He dragged a hand through his hair and kept walking. “Indulge me for one minute.”
“You have already taken thirty seconds.”
The sides of her mouth were threatening to twitch into a smile. It was funny, she thought to herself, just how often she kept finding herself alone with him.
“Fine.” He stopped, hands on his hips, then started again. “Do you have any other suitor?”
“What?” she replied, confused by his question.
“Plain speech, Miss Havenford. It is a simple question, and you must answer it if we are to get anywhere. Any other man? Besides Rondell.”
She stared at him blankly for a moment before gathering herself.
“No. Most men avoid me.”
“They need not,” he said immediately.
“You know why they avoid me,” she said. Her voice was without much emotion. It was something that she had learned to avoid.
He gave her a look, as if to say ‘elaborate’. She sighed heavily in return.
“Because of my upbringing.” The words came out flat. “Because gossip sticks to girls from infamous places. Not even a dowry scrubs it off. It is not a mystery, of course, and I do not need to pretend about it. I have accepted that this is my past.”
His jaw worked. “You deserve better than cowards.”
“I don’t need cowards. I don’t need a crowd.” Her chin lifted. “I don’t need another suitor at all, after all. I believe I am just fine. I’ve already found my future husband.”
He went very still.
“Mr. Rondell is lovely, really.” She folded her arms, bracing. “He is interested. He is kind. He….”
Stephen turned abruptly. There was an anger on his face that she had not seen before from him. “You have found your future husband.”
“I just said….”
“You have found him,” he repeated. “That is all I needed to hear.”
He reached for the latch.
“That is not an answer,” she said, stepping after him. “What is wrong with….”
“Go to sleep, Miss Havenford.”
“Your Grace…”
He opened the door. “Lock it.” And he was gone.
The latch clicked. Silence flooded the room so fast her head rang. She stood there with her hand in the air and no one to spend her anger on.
What a strange interaction that was.
She did not sleep that night. How could she?
Maria was groggy in the morning when she was woken up by her maid. A footman came at nine with a message: His Grace requests your presence. The His Grace did not mean Stephen. It meant Nicholas.
Violet opened the door to Nicholas’s study before Maria raised her hand to knock. Violet’s eyes were steady; her mouth was tight. It made Maria’s stomach drop.
They never look this serious. Something must have happened.
Nicholas stood behind his desk, hands braced on the blotter as if the wood might give him instructions. He looked very much like a man trying to be two things at once: a brother and a duke.
“Come in,” he said. “Sit. Or don’t sit, if sitting is worse. I cannot tell. Sit,” he decided, and came around the desk to pull out a chair anyway.
Maria sat, feeling that standing would be awkward, perhaps.
“What has happened?”
Nicholas looked to Violet. Violet gave him the smallest nod. He cleared his throat.
“The duke called on me early,” Nicholas said. “He… proposed.”
Maria blinked.
“To whom?”
“To you,” Nicholas said helplessly.
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. But she had found herself a husband already.
Violet set a glass of water on the table beside Maria’s hand and left her fingers there until Maria took it.
Nicholas kept going, not looking in her direction even once.
“He said there was a…compromising situation the other night. He said he would explain it to my satisfaction if needed, but that the explanation didn’t change the fact of the thing.
He said we had guests, and that he would rather spare you any whisper at all than argue about degrees. He was… Maria, he was very certain.”
“He told you,” Maria found her voice.
“He told me,” Nicholas nodded, carefully.
“How much?”
“That you were found in his room. That Violet walked in.” Nicholas looked at Violet with apology and gratitude at once. “That there may have been a footman in the corridor who paused at an unlucky moment, and that the details don’t matter once the wrong pair of ears are involved.”
Maria felt heat climb her face, and then shame.
Which then turned to anger. The three of them had decided that this news would not leave them. He had just betrayed her in a way.
“He had no right to…”
“Stop.” Violet’s tone was soft, but it landed. “He did not give me away. I told Nicholas last night.”
Maria swung to her, shocked.
“You did?”
“I did,” Violet said. “Because the secret was not keeping you safe. It was only making me lie to my husband.” She did not look away. “I decided I prefer us angry and honest to quiet and wrong.”
“I am not angry with you,” Maria swallowed hard.
“Good,” Violet murmured. “Because I am not angry with you, either. I am furious with circumstance.”
Nicholas rubbed a hand over his face.
“The duke said he has already spoken to the vicar. He called in a license at dawn. He asked me for the date. I told him two weeks because anything sooner will look like panic, and anything later will give people time to practice their curiosity.”
Maria stared at the edge of the desk.
“I don’t….” She couldn’t find the right sentence. The news had blindsided her entirely.
Nicholas crouched beside her.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said plainly. “I have no idea how to be the kind of brother you needed when you were a girl. But I can be the kind you need now. So I will say the thing that might be wrong.” He took a breath.
“If you don’t want this, I will stop it. I will go to him and say no. I’ll fight him if I have to. I am not afraid of another duke; I am only afraid of you thinking I chose the easy path because it is easy.”
Maria looked down at her lap so they wouldn’t have to watch what her face did. When she spoke, her voice surprised her by being steady.
“You would cancel it.”
“Yes.”
“And then what?” she asked. “I stay here forever and we wait for gossip to grow a new head every morning? Or I find some other man?”
Nicholas opened his mouth and then shut it. Violet slid into the chair opposite.
“You don’t have to decide this minute,” she said gently. “You can take an hour. Or ten.”
“An hour will not change what I know,” Maria said, surprising herself again.
She set down the water. Her hand shook only a little.
“I am disappointed. That is true. I am…hurt. That is true. I thought I had chosen. I liked that feeling. And now the choice is being made for me.” She looked at Nicholas.
“But I will not have you fight him. Not over this.” She drew in a careful breath.
“I accept.”
Nicholas’s shoulders sagged with relief and immediate guilt. “Are you certain?”
“No,” she said honestly. “But I am certain of this: he will not harm me. He will be infuriating. But he will not harm me.” She stared at the far bookcase, not seeing it. “He told me last night I had found my future husband. He was not asking.”
Violet’s brows flicked.
“He went to you?”
“Briefly,” Maria said. “He asked if I had other suitors. I told him no. I told him I had already chosen. He told me I had, and left.”
Nicholas ran a hand through his hair.
Maria rubbed her thumb over a notch in the chair’s arm.
“I wanted… I wanted the man I chose to want me back, loudly. This is not that. This is… something else.”
Nicholas moved to sit on the low table, facing her, knees almost bumping her knees.
“Then let me say the wrong thing again, and we will fix it if it is wrong.” He swallowed. “He does want you.”
“He wants to solve a problem,” Maria stared at him.
“He also wants you,” Nicholas said. “But if at any point you wish to change your mind…”
“I will not ask you to fight the world to gratify my pride,” she said. “I have enough pride for both of us.” She pushed to her feet because sitting made her feel smaller. Standing made the room behave. “What happens now?”
“Now,” Violet said, moving smoothly into work, “we choose a gown you can breathe in and we speak to Mrs. Walsh about menus and to the vicar about sermons.”
Nicholas nodded, “Yes, I should expect the two of you to figure out those details. I shall take my leave now.”
He paused at the door and looked back at Maria, awkward again.
“I’m proud of you. For what that’s worth. I wish I had been good at this earlier.”
“You’re good at it now,” she sighed.
Once the two women were alone, Violet exhaled and rubbed her brow. “How angry are you with me?”
“I am not,” Maria said. “But I wish you had consulted me at the very least.”
Wedding preparations were in full swing.
Prudence, Charity, and Temperance had formed a small barricade around Maria. It was less protection and more persuasion, but the shape was the same.
“Stop moving,” Temperance said, mouth full of straight pins. “If you breathe like that, I’ll have to let out the side seams again.”
“I’m not breathing,” Maria said, stiff on the fitting stool.
“That explains a lot,” Charity murmured, threading a needle with a neat flick.
Prudence passed Maria a glass of water.
“Drink. Or at least hold it. People bother brides holding glasses less often.”
“They bother me anyway,” Maria muttered, but she took it. Her hands were cold against the glass. She hadn’t seen Stephen since the morning he had cryptically made a strange comment about her finding a husband.
Only to act brashly the next day and ask for her hand in marriage.
The dressmaker stepped back, squinted, and tugged the front of the silk an eighth of an inch.
“There,” she declared. “The line is kinder. I believe this is better.”