Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
“—only stepped out for air, I am sure she has only stepped out for air, Mama, truly—”
Helena’s voice arrived a half-second before Helena did, already mid-sentence.
Dominic’s hand left Annabelle’s face as though he had touched a hot coal and only just realized it.
“Annabelle?” The gasp detonated like a cannonball.
Dominic stepped back.
Annabelle put a hand to the wall behind her and found it stone cold.
Colder than it had been when his mouth was on her thigh, and the world had narrowed to the size of his hands.
Her legs had not yet remembered how to hold her without assistance; she locked her knees and willed them steady.
Her hairpins had come loose at some point; she felt one slide and stop above her ear.
She reached up without thinking and pressed it back into place, as though that single pin might undo what was standing in the doorway watching her do it.
Somewhere behind her ribs, her heart was still going at the pace it had kept since his mouth had first found her in the dark, and it would not slow now, no matter how plainly the evening had turned.
“Annabelle!” Lady Rosenhall stood a few feet away.
Helena was half a step behind her, one arm lifted and useless, as though she had been reaching for her mother’s sleeve and missed it by an inch.
Lady Rosenhall looked at Annabelle: hair coming down on one side, color high in her face that owed nothing to the night air, her bodice not quite settled where it should be.
Then she looked at Dominic, who had retreated only as far as decency demanded, his coat still open at the throat, his cravat in worse order than it had any business being.
The dowager’s hand pressed flat against her own collarbone.
“Oh,” she said.
Helena got a hand on her mother’s arm. “Mama. Let’s go back in, we needn’t do this here, there are people not twenty feet from this door—”
“Take your hand off my arm, Helena.”
Lady Rosenhall did not look at her daughter.
She was looking at Dominic with a calm Annabelle had never once seen on her, not even the afternoon James had gone missing for an hour and a half.
Her gaze went from his open collar to Annabelle’s loosened hair and back again slowly, her mouth thin and white at the edges.
“Your Grace.” Her voice had dropped to something very flat. “You will explain to me what I am looking at.”
“Lady Rosenhall—” Annabelle started.
“I am not addressing you.” She did not raise her voice, which was somehow worse than if she had.
“I am addressing the Duke of Silverford, who has just removed his mouth from your person in my garden, in my sight, with my own daughter standing beside me as a witness to it.” Her hand pressed harder at her collarbone, the knuckles gone white where they met her own skin. “You have ruined her.”
“Mama—” Helena tried again, both hands on her mother’s arm now.
“You have ruined her.” Lady Rosenhall said it a second time, even louder. “In a place as common as a…garden!”
“Please…” Annabelle came off the wall, found her footing, and approached Lady Rosenhall, as if her own body in the space between them might absorb some part of the devastation. “Please, lower your voice. Someone will hear.”
“Someone has already seen, Annabelle, which is rather the point I am making.” Lady Rosenhall hissed with her hand still pressed to her own throat as though she might be ill.
She drew a breath, straightened her spine another inch, and turned the whole of her attention back to Dominic.
“You will do the only honorable thing left to a man in your position, Your Grace. You will marry her.”
Annabelle’s stomach dropped. The light from the open door lay across the gravel in its long yellow stripe, and within it neither Lady Rosenhall nor Dominic so much as shifted their weight. Annabelle found she was holding her own breath along with everyone else’s.
“I cannot.” He said.
It came out of him fast, before Annabelle had finished bracing for whatever answer was coming, before she had even understood that a question had been put to him at all.
“I beg your pardon?” Lady Rosenhall scoffed.
“I cannot marry her.” He said it again, steadier the second time, which somehow made it worse than the first.
He had not looked at Annabelle since they’d been found.
No, he was looking at Lady Rosenhall, his jaw set hard enough that she could see the muscle working at the side of it, both hands at his sides now, as though he had decided where to put them and meant to hold them there by force of will alone.
“She deserves a man who can offer her a household worth living in. A name without—” He stopped, started over. “A better man than I am. That is not modesty, Lady Rosenhall. It is fact, and you would do well to take my word for it, rather than my title.”
Dominic looked at her properly then, for the first time since the door had opened.
“I am not trying to spare myself, Annabelle.” He whispered, his voice meant for her alone, even with two other women standing close enough to hear it.
“I am trying to spare you a lifetime of a man like me. You do not know what that costs a woman. I do.”
“I—” she began, but Lady Rosenhall cut her off.
“Your opinion of your own character,” Lady Rosenhall continued, turning back to him, “is not the matter under discussion, Your Grace. I have always found you a man who understands consequence even when he dislikes it, Your Grace. I expect you to understand this one.” She drew a breath that pulled audibly through her nose.
“I will write to your brother tonight. He will know what is owed his sister, and he will see that it is collected. Whether you find yourself amenable to the collecting or not.”
“No.” The word came out of Annabelle before she had decided to say it, fast and small. “No, please—not Lucien. If he learns, he will—”
She could not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
A duel between her brother and the Duke of Silverford would ensue.
“I cannot to leave His Grace uninformed of his sister’s circumstances.”
“Lady Rosenhall, please,” Annabelle stepped closer, close enough now to see the genuine distress beneath the older woman’s composure, the way her hands had begun to tremble where they were folded at her waist, the way her eyes were too bright in the dim light of the garden.
“Please. I am asking you. Don’t write to him.
Whatever happens here, let it happen here, between the three of us, without—”
“Without your brother learning that his sister was compromised in a garden while I sat inside congratulating myself on chaperoning her well?” Lady Rosenhall’s voice cracked clean across the middle of the sentence.
“That is not fair.” Helena’s voice now, sharper than Annabelle had ever once heard from her. “Mama, that is not fair to her. You cannot stand there and punish her—”
“I am not punishing her, Helena, I am naming what has happened, and I would thank you not to confuse the two simply because the second one frightens you more than the first.” Lady Rosenhall did not look away from Annabelle as she said it, though her voice gentled by a fraction, the correction of a woman who noticed everything delivered with more care than its content suggested.
“I take no pleasure in saying any of this. But it remains true regardless of my feelings about saying it, and your feelings about hearing it will not change that either, however much courage you summon to argue with me.”
“Helena.” Lady Rosenhall turned, and her voice dropped back into the ordinary business of a chaperone, as though she had decided, for tonight, that the argument was concluded.
“Lady Annabelle’s hair has come down on one side, and her bodice has slipped at the shoulder.
See to both before we go back through that door, because I will not have her walk past Lady Harcroft looking like exactly what she is at this moment. ”
Helena’s hands were already at Annabelle’s hair, quick and gentle, finding the loosened pins and setting them again with the ease of a friend who had dressed her for half a season of balls and knew every pin by feel.
“Hold still,” she murmured, not unkindly, working one free and resetting it higher.
Her fingers brushed Annabelle’s temple, light and steadying.
“I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly it barely carried beyond the two of them.
“I tried to slow her down. I told her you’d only stepped out for air, and she didn’t believe a word of it, and I don’t think she believed me either, walking out here so fast.”
“I know,” Annabelle said. “I-It’s all right.”
She looked past Helena’s shoulder at Dominic while her friend worked.
He was watching her, his hands still at his sides, his coat still open at the throat where her fingers had been not ten minutes before, and he said nothing at all.
He did not look away from her, and he did not come any closer either, and Annabelle understood, watching him hold that exact distance, that he had nothing left to say tonight that could change what had already been decided for both of them.
“That will do,” Lady Rosenhall said, once the last pin was set and the shoulder of Annabelle’s gown restored to its proper line. “Come. Both of you. Now.”
They had gone perhaps ten steps along the path toward the house before Dominic’s voice came after them.
“Lady Rosenhall.” He had followed at a distance that was not quite proper and not quite improper either, the distance of a man who knew exactly how far he was permitted to stand and had placed himself one pace beyond it regardless. “A moment.”
Lady Rosenhall stopped without turning fully around, one hand still wrapped around Annabelle’s wrist where she had taken hold of it somewhere between the bench and the path. “You have had a great many moments this evening, Your Grace. I think you have had rather more than your share of them.”
“I am asking you to consider what forcing this does to her. A marriage built on a chaperone’s threat and a single evening’s mistake is not a kindness to anyone, least of all to Annabelle, and I would have thought her happiness mattered to you as much as her reputation.”
“Both matter to me, Your Grace, which is exactly why I am not prepared to leave either of them to your discretion.” Lady Rosenhall’s hand found the door frame and rested there, as though she required the support of it more than she would ever admit aloud.
“I am not in the business of kindness tonight. I am in the business of what remains of her future, which is considerably narrower now than it was an hour ago, and which I intend to protect by whatever means are available to me, your objections notwithstanding.”
And before Dominic could respond, Lady Rosenhall dragged her back inside the house.