Chapter Three #2
Philippa’s expression softened. “Then you are already in danger, my dear. And I can only pray that you emerge with your heart intact.” She squeezed Eliza’s hand once before releasing it.
“I do not say these things to be cruel. I say them because your mother asked me to protect you this Season, and protecting you means ensuring you understand what Hollowshade is. He is not a puzzle to be solved. He is not a wounded soul waiting for the right woman to heal him. He is a man who has made a deliberate choice to use women for pleasure without ever offering them anything in return.”
“You make him sound monstrous.”
“He is not monstrous. That would be easier.” Philippa rose from her chair; the conversation apparently concluded.
“Monsters are obvious. We know to fear them. Hollowshade is simply… hollow. Charming and intelligent and utterly empty where it matters most. And that emptiness will consume you if you let it.”
She crossed to the door, then paused, turning back.
“I know you will think about him anyway,” she said.
“I know my warnings will likely make him more intriguing rather than less. That is the perverse nature of desire, it craves what it should not have.” Her smile was sad.
“But please, Eliza. Guard your heart. It is the only one you have, and once broken, it never quite heals the same way again.”
She left.
Eliza sat alone in the morning room, her tea growing cold, her thoughts tumbling over each other like autumn leaves in the wind.
She should have felt warned. Chastened. Appropriately alarmed by the portrait her aunt had painted of a man who collected women the way other men collected snuffboxes, admiring each acquisition briefly before setting it aside for the next.
Instead, she felt…
She did not know what she felt.
Curiosity, certainly. The story of William’s childhood, his mother’s abandonment, his father’s collapse, the lonely years of being raised by servants, had added dimensions to him she had not anticipated.
The man at the ball had seemed so controlled, so assured.
Now she wondered what that control was concealing. What it cost him to maintain it.
Do not do this, she told herself firmly. Do not make him into a tragic figure. That is precisely what Aunt Philippa warned you against.
But the image would not leave her mind: a boy of eight, watching his mother choose another man over her family. Watching his father crumble. Learning, in the cruellest possible way, that love was a vulnerability to be avoided at all costs.
What did that do to a person?
What did it feel like to move through the world armoured against connection, taking pleasure where you could find it but never allowing it to touch you?
She thought of his eyes, grey as storm clouds, watching her with an intensity that had felt personal but might have been merely practised.
Had he looked at all his conquests that way?
Had they all truly believed, as she had believed for those few breathless minutes, that they were the only woman in the room?
Probably.
Almost certainly.
And yet…
She crossed to the window and looked out at the grey London morning. Somewhere in this city, the Duke of Hollowshade was probably sleeping late, not thinking of her at all. She was a brief conversation to him. A passing amusement. Perhaps he had already forgotten her name.
She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed her eyes.
I will avoid him, she told herself. I will be polite but distant. I will not dance with him. I will not seek his attention. I will protect myself from his charm, and when the Season ends, I will return to Devonshire and forget I ever met him.
This was the sensible course. The safe course. The course that would preserve her heart and her reputation and her chance at a respectable future.
She repeated it to herself three times, like a prayer.
It did not stop her from seeing his face when she closed her eyes. And it did not stop her from understanding, with a clarity that terrified her, that avoiding the Duke of Hollowshade was going to be far more difficult than her aunt imagined.
Because Eliza did not want to avoid him. She wanted to understand him.
And that, she suspected, was exactly the sort of wanting that led to ruin.
***
The afternoon post brought an invitation to Lady Marchmont’s garden party, scheduled for three days hence. Beatrice was delighted. Lady Marchmont’s events were famously elegant, and attending would solidify their position among the Season’s social successes.
Eliza accepted the news with outward composure and inward turmoil.
Garden parties meant crowds. Crowds meant circulating. Circulating meant the possibility, the probability, of encountering people she might prefer to avoid.
“You should wear the blue muslin,” Beatrice declared over dinner. “It brings out your eyes.”
“My eyes are brown.”
“Then it contrasts nicely with your eyes. The point is to be noticed, Eliza.”
I have already been noticed, Eliza thought, but did not say. I have been noticed by precisely the wrong person, and I am not at all certain I want it to stop.
She retired early that evening, pleading a headache that was not entirely fabricated. In the privacy of her room, she sat at the small writing desk by the window and attempted to compose a letter to her mother.
Dearest Mama, she wrote. The Season continues apace. I have made various acquaintances, and the weather has been tolerably fine.
She paused, pen hovering over paper.
What else could she say? I have met a notorious rake who makes my pulse race? I have been warned, explicitly and at length, about his dangerous nature? I find that I cannot stop thinking about him despite knowing everything I know?
Her mother would be on the next coach to London, armed with smelling salts and a lecture on virtue.
She crumpled the letter and began again.
Dearest Mama,
London is overwhelming, and I am not certain I am suited to it. I miss home. I miss the quiet of village life, where one knows what is expected and need not wonder what lies beneath every smile.
She paused, then added:
I have made an acquaintance.
Eliza stared at the sentence until the words blurred.
An acquaintance. That was safe. That was accurate, if not entirely honest.
She dipped her pen again.
He is not the sort of gentleman you would advise me to trust. Indeed, I have already been advised against trusting him. He is handsome, accomplished, and very much accustomed to being admired.
She stopped there.
To write more would be to admit too much, even to herself. She would not tell her mother that one conversation had unsettled her. She would not confess that a look, a touch, a few careless words about ferns, had occupied far more of her thoughts than they deserved.
She set down her pen and pressed her fingers to her temples.
No. She would not send this letter. She would destroy it and write something cheerful and unrevealing about the quality of London’s parks.
But as she reached for the paper, intending to consign it to the fireplace, she hesitated.
Because putting it in words, even words no one would ever read, had revealed something.
She had not written the truth.
She had written around it. Softened it. Hidden it beneath propriety and caution and sensible phrases.
She was not simply intrigued by the Duke of Hollowshade. She was not merely curious about his tragic past or interested in the gap between his reputation and the man she had glimpsed.
She was attracted to him.
Physically. Viscerally. In a way that made her body respond without her permission, that made her skin tingle at the memory of his touch, that made her wonder again, with a curiosity that should have shocked her, what it would feel like to be kissed by him.
She had spent her entire life being sensible.
Being practical. Being the sort of woman who made good decisions and avoided unnecessary risks.
And now here she was, barely a fortnight into her first Season, unable to sleep for thinking about a man her aunt had explicitly identified as her probable destruction.
Perhaps this was what all those novels had been trying to tell her.
Perhaps desire was not something one chose. Perhaps it simply arrived, unwelcome and undeniable, and one could only decide what to do with it afterwards.
When she finally climbed into bed and closed her eyes, she dreamt of grey eyes and strong hands and a voice that seemed to see right through her.
The dream began in the rose garden.
Eliza knew it was Lady Marchmont’s garden, though she had never been there, knew it the way one knows things in dreams, with absolute certainty that defied logic. The roses climbed high on every side, their blooms impossibly lush, their fragrance thick and intoxicating in the warm night air.
She was alone.
And then she was not.
He emerged from the shadows between the hedges, the Duke of Hollowshade, though in the dream she thought of him only as William, and he was looking at her with those grey eyes that saw too much, that stripped away her defences and left her trembling and exposed.
“You should not be here,” she whispered, though she did not move away. Could not move away. Her feet seemed rooted to the soft earth beneath them.
“Neither should you.” His voice was low, intimate, wrapping around her like velvet. “And yet here we both are.”
He stepped closer. In the dream, there was no propriety to observe, no chaperones to evade, no reputation to protect. There was only the darkness and the roses and the impossible heat of his body as he drew near.
“They warned you,” he murmured, and his hand came up to cup her face, bare skin against bare skin, his palm warm against her cheek. “Told you to stay away from me.”
“I tried.” Her voice came out breathless, strange. “I cannot seem to—”
“I know.” His thumb traced her lower lip, and she felt the touch everywhere, in her chest, in her belly, in places she did not have names for. “I cannot either.”
He kissed her.