CHAPTER TWO #3
Mrs. Dalton returned with the address book in her hand. She took in Ellen’s face, the roses, the empty doorway, and the hand pressed to her cheek.
“Well,” Mrs. Dalton said mildly, “the Frobishers live in Bedford Square after all.”
Ellen lowered her hand. “Do they?”
“They do.”
“How fortunate.”
“Exceedingly.” Mrs. Dalton returned to the writing table and opened the address book. “You may wish to put that rose in the jug before it expires of neglect.”
Ellen looked down. She was still holding one rose by the stem.
“Oh.”
“Indeed.”
Ellen placed it in the blue jug, entirely in the wrong position, and found herself smiling at it as though the poor bruised thing had done something charming.
She thought of Charlotte Whittaker.
Charlotte had wedded last month. A widower of three-and-sixty, with a good house, bad teeth, and a daughter older than the bride.
Charlotte had cried at her own betrothal breakfast, openly into the eggs, while all the women present pretended not to see and all the men present became fascinated by toast. Afterward, in the carriage, Charlotte had sat with her hands folded and her face white and still, like a small animal being carried to the surgeon, knowing the direction and unable to do anything about it.
Ellen touched the place on her glove where Vance’s thumb had rested.
“Thank Goodness,” she whispered.
Mrs. Dalton looked up. “What was that, my dear?”
Ellen smiled down at the roses. “Nothing, Cousin.”
It was not nothing at all, whatever she had told Mrs. Dalton.
It was everything.
She was not her dear friend Charlotte, being carried away to a man whose name chilled the breakfast table and made every woman present suddenly grateful for her own condition. Ellen was the luckiest girl in London, and no one in London knew it, and she had him.
***
The street door slammed.
The sound came too hard and at entirely the wrong hour.
Ellen set down the teacup she had only just lifted, so carefully that the china barely spoke against the saucer, and stood in the middle of the carpet listening as the house seemed to gather itself around the disturbance.
The boot heels coming down the hall were not the footman’s borrowed, uneven tread, and they were not Vance’s step either, which some foolish part of her thought she might have known blindfolded and half asleep.
The morning-room door opened without a knock.
Henry stood in the doorway, white to the lips.
He was not drunk, which made it worse, because drink was a form of trouble Ellen understood. He had been crying and had not washed his face, and there was a wildness about his eyes that she had seen on him only once before, on the morning their father died.
“Henry,” she said, moving one hand to the back of the nearest chair, though she did not remember deciding to steady herself. “Whatever is the matter?”
He looked at the roses first. Then at the color Vance had left in her cheeks. Something passed over his countenance and vanished so quickly that, had she cherished him less, she might have missed it.
“Ellen,” he said, and his voice made a poor attempt at ordinary news. “I have to tell you something.”
“Then tell it,” she replied, and the calmness of her own voice frightened her more than Henry’s entrance had done.
He came two steps into the room and stopped, as though the carpet had become a boundary he could not quite cross. “I have been to see the Duke of Rosanne.”
“The Duke of Rosanne?” Ellen repeated, watching his hands flex at his sides. “Why would you go to him?”
Henry drew in a breath and forced the words out quickly, all together, the way a man pulls a splinter before courage can fail him. “He will settle the debts. All of them. And you are to enter into matrimony with him. In three weeks.”
The room held very still around them.
Ellen heard the clock ticking on the mantel, then a cart in the street, then a dog somewhere beyond the window, then the impossible insistence of her own pulse.
A laugh escaped her, one short, disbelieving sound, because Henry had plainly got something wrong.
It was a misunderstanding, or a cruel jest badly timed, or fever talking through a brother who had come home with death in his face.
Then she saw him properly, and the laugh stilled upon her lips before it could become anything else.
“Say it again,” she whispered.
Henry’s mouth trembled. “The Duke of Rosanne will settle the debts. All of them. You are to be wedded to him in three weeks.”
Ellen stared at him, her fingers tightening on the chair until the carved wood pressed into her palm. “Who is to wed him?”
“You are.”
“Do not answer as if I am being slow. I am asking because what you have said cannot be true.”
“It is true.”
“The Duke of Rosanne,” she said carefully, as though the title itself might betray the absurdity if spoken with enough precision.
“Yes.”
“I have never met the Duke of Rosanne in my life.”
“No,” Henry said, lowering his gaze.
“He has never called upon me.”
“No.”
“He has never spoken to me, written to me, danced with me, or even been introduced to me.”
“No, Ellen.”
“He has never set eyes on me.”
Henry hesitated. “No.”
She did not correct him, and afterward she could not have said why.
Something stirred at the edge of her memory and refused to come forward neatly.
A man in the hall, three days past. She had seen him for half a second from the turn of the back stairs, a tall gentleman standing very still by the newel, and she had taken him for a creditor before going on with the vases.
For one cold instant she wondered whether he had been something else entirely, then stopped herself, because that wondering led down a stair she could not yet make herself descend.
“Henry,” she said, and the sound of his name had changed in her mouth. “What have you done?”
He lifted both hands slightly, helplessly. “I have tried to save us.”
“No.” She shook her head once, slowly. “That is the sentence men use when they have done something they cannot bear to name.”