Chapter Four #2
“Oh, she is. She has opinions on everything.” Georgiana leaned a little nearer, lowering her voice with a conspiratorial air. “Sometimes rather too many opinions, if I am honest. But I suppose that is a mother’s prerogative.”
It was, Sebastian noted with mild surprise, the first truly genuine thing she had said—a small crack in the performance, revealing something human beneath it.
“Mothers do tend toward opinions,” he agreed. “Mine has prepared a very thorough set of notes on every eligible young lady present at this gathering—complete with connections, accomplishments, and probable dowries.”
Georgiana’s eyes widened. “Truly?”
“I exaggerate only slightly.”
“How terrifying.” She laughed—an unguarded sound, startled out of her before she could arrange it properly. “I mean—of course—the Dowager Duchess must only wish to be thorough.”
“She is invariably thorough. It is one of her defining virtues.”
Conversation followed more easily after that. Sebastian found himself moderately engaged. Georgiana was not foolish—merely trained to perform rather than to be. When she forgot to be impressive, she was almost pleasant.
And yet, even as he asked appropriate questions and supplied appropriate replies, part of his attention drifted.
To the edges of the room.
To the silent figures moving along the walls.
To one figure in particular.
Not a servant, he reminded himself. She was a baronet’s daughter performing a servant’s role through circumstance rather than design. Yet she moved as one who had learned invisibility—efficient, quiet, unintrusive.
She had slipped in during the second course with something for Georgiana—a shawl, perhaps, or a handkerchief—murmured a word, received no acknowledgement, and withdrawn again to the shadows near the wall.
Where she now stood, watching.
Sebastian should not have noticed her at all. The lighting favoured the table, not the periphery. But his gaze returned to that patch of shadow again and again, drawn there as silk catches on a rough edge.
She did not look at him. Her attention was fixed on Georgiana, her expression composed into perfect neutrality. Yet there was something in the set of her shoulders—in the stillness of her posture—that suggested an awareness of being observed.
Or perhaps he was imagining it. Perhaps she merely stood as servants stood, waiting to be summoned.
“Your Grace?”
He turned back at once. “Forgive me. My thoughts wandered.”
“You seemed very far away,” Georgiana said softly. For a brief instant, he glimpsed genuine curiosity in her eyes. “Is everything well?”
“Perfectly. The journey was fatiguing, that is all.”
“Of course. Mama says travel is dreadfully trying upon the constitution.”
And with that, the performance resumed. The authentic moment vanished, replaced by the familiar dance of agreeable nothings and cultivated charm.
Sebastian endured it with practised grace—while some obstinate part of him remained fixed upon the shadows at the edge of the room. Upon the woman who stood there, invisible to everyone except, inexplicably, him.
***
He escaped to the library after the port and politics had concluded.
It was becoming a habit, this retreat to rooms lined with books. Libraries required no performance. They demanded nothing but silence and offered, in return, knowledge, solitude, and the comfortable company of minds long departed—minds that could not be disappointed by him.
Lady Marchmont’s library was impressive: two tall stories of leather-bound volumes, a great fire glowing in the hearth, chairs placed where the light fell most advantageously. Sebastian selected a book at random and settled into an armchair, determined to lose himself in another man’s thoughts.
He managed perhaps ten minutes of honest reading before his attention began to wander.
The dinner had exhausted him in the peculiar way society always did—not physically, but somewhere deeper. The constant calculation. The careful weighing of every word and expression. The knowledge that everyone around him wanted something, and that what they wanted was never, in truth, him.
Miss Georgiana Ashwood wanted a title. Her mother wanted consequence. Lady Marchmont wanted the credit of a successful match. Even his own mother—who loved him in her way—wanted him to fulfil his duty to the name.
No one asked what he wanted. No one imagined he might want anything at all beyond what his position already required.
You are indulging in self-pity, he told himself grimly. You possess wealth, influence, every advantage of birth. These are the complaints of a spoiled child.
But knowing it did not dissolve it. It merely added guilt to the weight he already carried.
He set aside the book and rose. The library was handsomely arranged—classics beside novels, philosophy beside natural history—an orderly display of cultivation.
On a small table near the window, however, a different arrangement caught his eye: a neat stack of practical volumes, quite separate from the rest, as though someone meant to return to them.
Estate management. Agricultural improvement. Rural economy.
Hardly the sort of reading one associated with a house party devoted to diversion, yet these books bore signs of recent use—the faint softening of the bindings, a ribbon marking a page, a scrap of paper tucked with care between two chapters.
Curiosity pricked, he opened the uppermost volume. It fell at once to a section on drainage he himself remembered—and there, in the margin, lay a few light pencil marks. Not extensive, but thoughtful: a brief query, a reference to another work, a quiet correction of an error.
The hand was small and precise. Feminine.
He closed the book and examined the rest of the little stack. Each had been treated in the same manner—selected, marked, set aside for further thought. Not the idle dabbling of a bored guest, but the disciplined attention of someone accustomed to thinking in practical terms.
Who, at a house party, studied tenant management and crop rotation?
A face rose unbidden in his mind: the woman in grey. The cousin. A baronet’s daughter who had lost everything to an entail and an impractical father.
A woman who, in other circumstances, might have managed an estate herself.
He was being fanciful. The marks could belong to anyone—the steward, a previous guest, Lady Marchmont herself. There was no reason to connect anonymous pencil strokes to a woman he had glimpsed for mere seconds.
And yet.
He returned the volume to its place on the table and stood for a long moment, staring at the spines without seeing them.
He was thinking about her again. Miss Cecilia Ashwood. Despite his mother’s warning. Despite reason. Despite the absolute impossibility of any meaningful connection between them.
Stop, he told himself. She is nothing to you. She must be nothing to you. Think of what matters.
But what did matter, exactly? Finding a suitable wife among the interchangeable young ladies his mother had selected? Securing the succession through a marriage of convenience to someone who would never know him, never challenge him, never make him feel anything beyond comfortable indifference?
That was his duty; that was what mattered.
He reclaimed his chair, retrieved his book, and forced his eyes to the page.
He did not think of her again.
Except that he did—through the evening, into the small hours.
And when at last he slept, he dreamed of grey silk and dark hair and eyes that seemed to see far more than they revealed.