Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Come, Hen.”
Diana and Henrietta went off arm in arm along the edge of the room.
“You did not know,” stated Henrietta.
“Know what?”
“About the Duke helping Papa. You had no notion he had done it.”
Diana shook her head.
Henrietta giggled.
“What?” said Diana. “What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing.” Her cousin’s face was pure mischief. “Only that you have no idea, my dearest darling idiot. Your husband dotes upon you. Deeply.”
Diana’s heart did the foolish thing again.
“Does he?”
“Have some cake,” said Henrietta serenely, and put a plate into her hands.
Diana took it, and turned, and caught two women by the refreshment table looking straight at her and looking away far too quickly.
“—I heard she forced herself upon the Duke. Threw herself at him and he was obliged. That is the whole reason it was done in a week.”
“Never.”
“On my honor. And they call her a lady of family. So much for noble blood.”
The plate went very still in Diana’s hands.
Beside her, Henrietta had gone rigid. “How dare they?”
She was about to step forward when Diana caught her wrist without looking away from the two women. “No. Not here.”
“Diana—”
“Wait.”
They waited. It did not take long; the pair finished their punch and drifted toward the terrace doors. Diana set her plate down on the nearest surface and drew off her gloves, one finger at a time, and found that her hands were perfectly steady.
“I want a word with them,” she said.
Henrietta was already at her shoulder.
“Then I am coming with you.”
“—shameless. Truly shameless, and there is no other word for it.”
“And the airs she puts on. Did you see her come in on his arm? Like a queen at her own coronation, and every soul in the room knowing how she came by him.”
“It is the performance I cannot stomach. If a woman is going to be low, let her be low and have done. But to stand there and play the lady—”
“May I join you?”
The terrace was cold after the ballroom, and the two women turned so quickly that one of them bumped into the other
Diana came down the steps into the lamplight with her hands loose at her sides, her face pleasant.
Neither of them said a word.
“Oh, do not stop on our account,” said Henrietta. “You were both of you so very enthusiastic a moment ago.”
The elder of the two recovered first. She drew herself up, gathered her shawl, and made to go round them toward the doors.
“Have you no shame at all?” asked Henrietta.
The woman stopped. “I know you must take your friend’s part,” she said. “That is very loyal in you, I am sure. But what is wrong is wrong, and you must forgive us if we do not care to smile upon immorality merely because it has got itself a title.”
The second woman nodded, twice, with great firmness.
“You wretches—” Henrietta spat, ready to attack.
“Hen.” Diana laid two fingers upon her cousin’s wrist. Henrietta subsided, breathing hard.
Diana looked at the two women and let her shoulders come down, and when she spoke it was gently, and with a little catch in it.
“You are quite right,” she said. “I am against such immorality myself. I always have been. There is nothing so low as a woman who forces a man’s hand.
” She drew a breath that shook, very slightly, at the end.
“And I have no way in the world to defend my name. That is the trouble with a thing of this sort. A rumor cannot be answered. One can only bear it.”
She sniffed, and touched the corner of her eye with one knuckle. Just like Octavia would
This is what she does, Diana thought, with perfect calm. I may as well learn something from the woman.
“But it is not my own name that troubles me,” she went on. “It is His Grace’s.”
The elder woman blinked.
“Only consider it.” Diana lifted her wet eyes.
“That the Duke of Rosewood was forced. That a girl of three-and-twenty backed him into a corner and made him do a thing he did not wish to do. That he was too weak to prevent it.” She let that sit.
“I do wonder how he should take it, if it ever reached him. I have not the courage to imagine.”
The second woman’s throat moved.
“Stop — stop that,” she said. “Empty threats. We know how it stands. We know the Duke was weak in the business, and that you worked upon his reputation, and—”
“And we are not speaking ill of him,” said the first, rallying. “We have said nothing against the Duke. Why in the world should we be afraid?”
“Because to speak ill of my wife is to speak ill of me.”
The voice came out of the dark at the end of the terrace. They turned. Valentine stood at the corner of the balustrade with Phillip a pace behind him. Neither man had made the least sound coming.
Both women sank into curtsies so deep and so sudden that the elder one very nearly went over; Henrietta dropped into hers, and Diana with her.
Valentine came forward and took his wife’s hands and drew her up.
“Not you, wife,” he said.
Then he turned.
“I confess I had not understood,” he said, “that my private affairs were in the keeping of two ladies whose names I do not know. It is a great relief to me. I have been laboring these days under the impression that I chose my own wife, and courted her, and married her by a license I paid for myself. It seems I was mistaken, and was forced into a corner instead. I am obliged to you both for the correction.”
The elder woman went down on her knees on the flagstones.
“Your Grace, forgive us, forgive our ignorance, we never meant—”
“We meant no harm, Your Grace, upon my life—”
The second woman was down as well now, shaking so that the beads on her sleeves chattered. But the first, even upon her knees, could not leave it.
“But we are not the only ones,” she said. “Your Grace, we are not — half of London says it. Half of London will tell you the same. It is everywhere.”
“What a very powerful rumor,” said Phillip mildly.
He came forward and looked down at the two of them with an interest that had nothing warm in it whatsoever.
“Everywhere,” he repeated. “And yet it must have begun somewhere. Where did you hear it?”
Neither woman spoke.
“Both their husbands are in your employ, Rosewood,” Phillip observed, to the night in general. “Ledgers at the Southwark works, I believe. And the other in the counting house.”
“Since there is so little respect for authority among them,” said Valentine, “they may be dismissed.”
“It was Lady Westleigh!”
The second woman’s voice cracked in the middle of it.
“It came from Lady Westleigh herself, Your Grace, at her own tea party — a fortnight since, or near it—”
“She wept,” said the first, tumbling over her.
“She wept telling us of it. She said the Duchess had always been loose, and that she had trapped you, and that the family were sick with the shame of it and could not speak of it aloud. Your Grace, forgive our ignorance, the poor woman seemed so distressed, we believed her—”
Diana stood quite still and looked at the two of them on their knees in the cold.
And you did believe her. Of course you did. My father believed her and gave her his house and his purse and both his daughters; the whole of the ton believes her and calls her an uncommonly fine hostess; and these two believed her enough to say it in a room where I could hear.
She weeps and the world opens its doors to her. I have never once been able to do it. I do not think I ever learned how.
“Stand up,” said Valentine. “Both of you. And go into the hall.”
The women looked at one another in terror and got up. He turned and took Diana’s hand and set it upon his arm.
“Let us go back in,” he said. “I shall see to this.”
“Your Grace—” She lowered her voice. “Please. Let us not make a scene of it. Not here, not at my uncle’s ball, not tonight of all nights—”
“You are quite right that four hundred people need not have it for their evening’s entertainment.
” Henrietta’s chin was up, and there was nothing soft in her face at all.
“But it will be had, Diana. There is my father’s study, off the library, nobody goes there during a ball, not even Papa.
If Uncle and that woman could be brought to it without the rest of the house being any the wiser, I do not see why the whole of London need be troubled with our family’s business. ”
She looked to the Duke.
Valentine considered it the length of one breath.
“Kingsell.”
“Already gone,” said Phillip, who had in fact already turned and was making his way back through the crowd with the unhurried.
He was gone more than a quarter of an hour.
Diana spent the whole of it walking the length of her uncle’s bookshelves without reading a single title upon them. Henrietta paced the hearthrug and the two women from the terrace stood pressed into the corner by the window as though the paneling might be persuaded to swallow them, given time.
Then the door opened.
Phillip came first. Behind him, wearing the pleased and faintly puzzled expression of people who believe themselves about to be shown something agreeable, came Levi Fernside and his wife.
“There has been a little talk this evening,” Phillip said, drawing the door behind them, “which Rosewood thought better settled quietly than before your brother’s entire guest list. I hope you will forgive the want of ceremony.”
Levi’s eyes went from the Duke to Diana to Henrietta, and had not yet arrived at any notion that something was wrong.
“Talk?” he said. “What talk?”
“The talk, Uncle,” said Henrietta, “of why two women on your niece’s own terrace should believe her a seducer who trapped a duke into marriage to save herself from the shelf.”
The room went very still.
“That is a monstrous thing to say of anybody,” said Levi. “Who has said such a thing?”
“I have said it, my lord.” The elder of the two women stepped forward, white-faced, her hands twisted together at her waist. “Forgive me — I only repeated what I was told. I never meant—”
“Told by whom?”
Nobody answered him at once.
Octavia had gone very still beside her husband, her gloved hand resting light upon his sleeve.
“By whom,” Levi said again.