Chapter 2
“Please, please open,” Anna muttered under her breath.
The door knocker came down three times, rapid and urgent.
Oh, please be home… You are my only hope…
Anna had ridden hard until the horse began to flag, and then she had walked him into London.
When he could go no further, she had left him at a stable yard, hoping the beautiful steed would find his way to his master again.
She made the rest of the distance on foot, through back streets where the morning deliveries were still underway.
No one looked twice at a woman with mud on her ivory hem; they were too busy to notice. She had not let herself think about where she was going until she was nearly there.
The knocker wrapped a fourth time, and a butler opened the door to Rathbourne Hall. Anna let go of the breath she was holding and gave a shy smile.
The butler was a man of immense professional composure, and whatever he thought of the white-gowned, road-dirtied young woman on the step, he kept concealed.
“Good Morning. I am Miss Anna Cartwell,” she said, because she would not say Lady Birchall, not yet, not ever if she could help it. “Is Lady Rachel at home? Please. I know it is early, but it is most urgent that I see her.”
Before he could answer, Rachel bounded down the stairs into the foyer. She was still in her dressing gown, her hair half-pinned and her face arranged for mild morning inconvenience.
“Oh, Anna!” She smiled and was across the entrance hall in a flash.
She extended her hands and took Anna’s, then she stopped and looked at her, really looked.
She took in the dress, the mud, the wrist Anna had been holding carefully against her side since the inn yard.
“What in the devil has happened to you? Are you all right?”
“I need to sit down,” Anna said, her voice shaky. “I’m sorry… I know I should have sent word, but there wasn’t anywhere else for me to go—”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Rachel said as she pulled her firmly toward the morning room, her amber eyes sharp and bright. “Come, tell me all that has happened. I will ring for tea.”
A housemaid appeared almost instantly and was dispatched for tea. Anna sat in the nearest chair and let herself stop moving for the first time in hours, and for a moment she could not speak at all.
Rachel sat across from her and waited, which was one of the things Anna had always loved best about her. She was strong, but not pushy. Smart, but never superior. It was such a small thing, patience, but it was one of the things Anna loved best about her.
She had met Rachel the first spring of her debut, and they became fast friends, sharing a love of reading and good humor.
When her mother died shortly thereafter, Anna’s cousin gave her a black crepe and a schedule for exactly how long a young lady ought to grieve in the country before she was fit to be seen again.
Rachel’s weekly letters were her only respite.
She would send news of a particularly hideous bonnet at the milliner’s or a book she had especially loved in her signature cursive hand.
Anna had never had a sister. But if she had been given the choosing of one, she would have chosen Rachel.
“Well, there was a wedding this morning,” Anna said at last. “And would you believe it was mine?” Her voice came out steadier than she expected.
“I did not know about it until I woke up. I found the dress waiting for me, and my maid handed me these awful shoes. Jonathan had arranged everything… the license, the church, the carriage… Well, Lord Birchall had the special license three days ago, apparently. Everything was already done before I could take a breath.”
Rachel’s expression had gone very still. “Lord Birchall?”
“Yes. We married this morning.” The words were strange in her mouth, like cotton on her tongue.
“At St. Clement’s. I…” She paused, considering her words.
“His reputation is not exaggerated. I tried to reason with him… but he made it quite clear what he intends to do with me. He was taking me to his estate.” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, and pulled her sleeve to cover her wrist. “I took a horse from an inn on the Oxford Road.”
The fire was beginning to catch, and Anna realized how cold she was. She extended her hands toward the flames and rubbed them together.
“He grabbed me,” she said, because she could say that much, and Rachel’s eyes dropped to her wrist before she could redirect them, the bruise beginning to show in the firelight. “Outside the church.”
“Oh Anna…”
“It is-it is fine. He did not—” She stopped.
Started again. “I know this puts you in an impossible position. I know that. I only need a little time, enough to make arrangements. I have relatives in Scotland, a great-aunt I have not seen in years, but she would take me in, or I could find work, as a governess or—”
“Stop.” Rachel stood up, sharply enough that the tea things rattled on the tray the housemaid was just setting down. “Anna. Stop talking about Scotland, and work, and arrangements. Look at me.”
Anna opened her mouth. Closed it.
“You are not going back to him. Over my dead body.” Rachel’s voice was entirely certain, the way it sometimes was when she made up her mind about something.
Her blue eyes glistened in the morning light that was filtering through the windows, and Anna somehow felt calmer. It was a quality that had always seemed at odds with her general warmth, a sudden revelation of steel underneath.
“Whatever it takes. Whatever we must do. You are not going back. I will always help you, Anna.”
“Oh Rachel, what would I have done had you not approached me at that horrid ball during my debut? Can you imagine my fate?”
“No worse than mine! You forget how much you mean to me as well, my friend. We are in this together. You would do the same for me were the tables turned.”
Anna looked at her, and her heart swelled.
Then, the door opened.
His Grace.
Rachel’s brother was dressed for riding, not for company.
He had come in through a side entrance; that much was clear, and he heard enough to redirect himself toward the morning room.
He paused in the doorway with the stillness of a man who has just arrived at the edge of something he does not understand.
One eyebrow rose. His amber eyes were sharp and assessing, his stature tall and imposing.
Anna had met the Duke of Rathbourne once.
It was a brief introduction at an operetta last spring, the sort of introduction that lasted thirty seconds and produced nothing more than a name and a bow.
He was much taller than she had remembered, or perhaps she had not been paying attention.
She had no reason to. At least not then.
His gaze moved from his sister to the tea service, to Anna’s dress, to her face, in that order.
“What exactly,” he said, “is a bride doing in my house?”
Rachel rose and moved between them. Not dramatically, just a step forward with hands folded in front of her. “Frederick. Anna has come to us because she has nowhere else to go. We must help her.”
“What of her husband?” He asked flatly.
“She was forced into marriage this morning! To Lord Birchall.” Rachel’s lips thinned on the name. “Coerced, without her knowledge or consent, and she has escaped. She needs our help…”
The Duke looked at Anna, and she looked back at him. She was not, at least at this moment, capable of being intimidated by a duke. She had endured too much in such a short morning, having used up that capacity hours ago.
“She needs to return to her husband,” he said evenly, the way a surveyor reads a map, as he averted his eyes back to his sister. “Whatever the circumstances of the marriage, it is surely legal. She cannot undo it by riding into Mayfair and—”
“Frederick!”
“Listen to what I’m saying, Rachel.” He came further into the room, but his voice did not raise.
Anna felt it did not need to; his presence demanded attention.
“I am not without sympathy for her position. But harboring a runaway bride, a married woman who has left her husband on her wedding morning, is not something I will permit in this house. The consequences to you, to your prospects—”
“My prospects?” Rachel repeated the words with a flatness that conveyed considerable opinion.
“Your reputation. Which matters, whether you choose to treat it so or not.” He looked at Anna again. “Madam, I will see to it that a carriage is made available, and fresh clothing. I will arrange for a letter to be sent ahead to your husband explaining—”
“I will not go back to him.” She said it quietly, her hands still folded in her lap.
The Duke paused and took a step toward her as though he surveyed a wounded bird.
“I am not asking you to shelter me indefinitely, Your Grace,” she continued as she rose to her feet and gave a small curtsy. “Only temporarily.”
She had thought, during the long walk through the back streets, about what she would say if it came to this.
“I am asking for a few days. Perhaps a week. Long enough for me to write to my great-aunt in Edinburgh and make some kind of arrangement. After that, I will be entirely out of your way.” She held his gaze.
“I have no wish to bring scandal to this house, or to Rachel. She is my closest friend. I would never deliberately put her in harm’s way.
Everything I am asking is designed to limit the damage to your family. ”
“If you cared about limiting the damage to my family,” Frederick said, “you would not have come here at all.”
The words landed hard on Anna’s chest. She felt them, but she did not flinch.
“She is here, Frederick,” Rachel snapped. “She has already come. Sending her away in a carriage does not undo that!” Rachel took a step closer to her brother. “It only ensures she has nowhere safe to go. And you know what Birchall is. Everyone knows what Birchall is.”
“What I know about Birchall,” Frederick said, running a hand through his full, trim beard, “is not the point.”
“Then what is the point? That the law says she belongs to him? Is that your argument? She could be your sister; would she be only property under the law then?”
“The point is that there is no clean solution here. I do not make the rules, or the law. There is no version of this story in which your friend stays in this house and walks away without some consequence.” He looked at Anna. “I am trying to limit how much damage is done.”
“Anna is already damaged.”
The words hung in the room. Anna studied him in the silence. The strong jaw beneath the beard hinted that she couldn’t easily win her case, but the amber eyes were guarded rather than cold.
He was, she noted distantly, a handsome man. She might have dwelled on it properly if her body wasn’t trembling. She drew her arms over her chest.
In her trying to soothe herself, her sleeve slipped.
Her face grew hot as she realized what was laid bare.
She did not look down but watched him look at her. It was only a moment. His gaze moved to her wrist, to the marks there, the dark mottled purple of a hand that had clamped and dragged up and down steps. Then it moved back to her face, very quickly, and something in his expression shifted.
Not pity. Not sympathy either. Something harder than both, and closer to the bone. Almost as if he understood.
Anna held very still, and said nothing.
And then, from the entrance hall came voices all too recognizable.
“Where is she? Anna! Anna, come here this instant!”
Loud and sharp, multiple, all at once, and beneath them, one, smooth and carrying, the voice of a man who considered his own volume an act of courtesy to whatever room he was entering.
Anna went cold from the feet up.
Rachel’s hand found her arm. “Is that…?”
“Yes,” Anna nodded frantically.
A door, somewhere. A butler’s voice, precise and smooth, an array of diplomatic phrases designed for stalling. And then Jonathan’s, pitched to carry.
“…entirely within my rights, and I suggest you reconsider—”
“His Grace is not expecting company—”
“You will see to it—”
“Frederick. Do not make this worse,” Rachel pleaded.
Anna watched Rachel look at her brother, her eyes bright and direct. The Duke stood in the center of the room, his expression unreadable, and his eyes still firmly on Anna.
He did not speak. She could hear footsteps now, more than one set, moving toward them down the hall.
Please.
Anna watched something move across his face, as if she could see the wheels turning. He looked again at her wrist, then back up at her face. The voices were closing in on them, but he was already moving.
“Rachel.” He gestured toward the far door, the one that connected to what Anna assumed was a library. “Take her in there. Now.”
“Frederi—”
“Now, Rachel.”
She nodded and gently guided Anna. They moved quickly through the door, into the cooler dark of the library, the sound of the crackling fire receding behind them. Rachel drew the door nearly closed, leaving just a sliver of light.
They stood together in the shadows.
On the other side of the door, Anna heard the Duke’s unhurried footsteps, and then the morning room door opening, and then his voice. It was entirely transformed into something smooth and impenetrable, the voice of a man receiving callers in his own house on a perfectly ordinary morning.
“Lord Edgeware,” he greeted. “Birchall.”