2. Miss Linton’s Terms
Chapter two
Miss Linton’s Terms
Henry
The road to Hampstead at first light was a road that had given up.
The rain that had come down on Mayfair through the night was coming down on Hampstead still, harder now, with a wind behind it.
Henry’s coachman had served the family since Henry was a boy of twelve, and in all those years had never been known for a sour temper.
This morning his silence said what his manners would not.
Henry sat with his hat on his knee and clenched his teeth.
Frank Trowbridge, barely twenty and drunk on his newly inherited title, was proving to be a thorn in his side.
He’d have to intervene again, he was certain, judging by the boy’s lack of sense.
If the boy had not been the grandson of a founding member, Henry would have suggested they leave him in whatever snare he had set for himself.
But alas, Henry had to act as a pet Reaper once more.
The squares had given way to streets, the streets to lanes, and the lanes in time, to a wall of hedge work so unkempt that the coachman drove past the gate three times before Henry himself caught the brass plate on the stone post: THORNWICK.
The plate was green with age. The gate stood ajar on tired hinges.
There were no lamps. The drive was unraked.
It ran between trees that had grown into one another at their crowns, so that the rain came through the canopy in heavier, irregular drops where it came through at all.
The house was smaller than he had supposed any house called a manor would be. Two storeys of brick that had been red once. A single window on the upper floor showed lamplight. The remainder was dark, and the dark made the warmth of the one lit room more visible.
He climbed down. He told the coachman to take the carriage round to whatever passed for stables and to wait. The man touched his hat and turned the horses.
Henry mounted three shallow steps to a door whose paint was peeling in long curls. He used the brass knocker. It made a sound less authoritative than his knuckles would have done.
The door opened.
The man who opened it was not a butler. Henry knew this at once. He was perhaps four and twenty. He wore his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow and a jacket of a sort that Henry’s own grooms would not have worn out of the mews. His hands were calloused, with fresh cuts from the day’s work.
He looked at Henry’s coat, then at his hat, then at his face.
“Yes.” His spine remained straight.
“I have come to call upon Miss Linton.” Henry presented his card.
The man took it. He studied, without any visible hurry, the closed carriage at the foot of the drive with the Iredell crest on it.
“Wait here.” He shut the door.
The bolt shot home. Henry stood on the step with the rain finding its way under his collar, and after a moment, laughed—once, faintly. It had been months since anything had surprised him enough for that.
For a quarter of a minute, he was working out what had just happened. He had not been left on the wrong side of a closed door since boyhood, and not, in any case, against his will. He could not remember the last servant who had failed to bow to him at all.
When the bolt slid back, it was a woman who opened the door. He composed himself into the formality he had ridden in with.
The dress barely covered her ankles and had been navy once, before time and poverty had worn it into something between slate and storm.
There was white powder in her hastily pinned hair and a smudge of it marked her cheekbone.
She stood taller than he’d anticipated, her posture belonging to a grander house than this one.
Behind her, in the corridor, the man stood with his arms crossed and his face set into a hostility so plain that in any other house Henry would have laughed.
“Your Grace,” she said. “Will you come in?”
He stepped inside.
“The drawing room is this way.”
The corridor was cold enough to print breath upon.
Two paintings hung between the closed doors of unused rooms, one of a man Henry took to be the late baron, one of a woman he took to be baroness.
The walls were otherwise bare. The wainscot had not been polished in years.
He could smell, faintly, beneath the cold, the dry herbal scent of plants drying somewhere in the back of the house.
“I shall be just outside.” The man’s voice was behind him.
“Thank you, Kit.”
“Just outside.”
“Yes, thank you, Kit.”
Henry angled his body slightly toward the man called Kit to show his irritation.
The man stationed himself against the wall with his arms crossed.
The drawing room was clean. That was the chief kindness Henry could offer it.
The fire was lit and small. The chairs were cheap pine, painted to look like better wood than they were.
The settee was upholstered in a fabric so worn that the pattern survived only in places where no hand had ever rested.
She was at the bell pull. “Tea,” she said, less a question than a declaration. He did not refuse it.
She gestured toward the settee. “Will you sit, Your Grace?”
He sat, the old frame creaking under his weight, while she took one of the wooden chairs.
At the corner of his eye, the door to the drawing room remained half open.
Beyond it, in the doorway across the corridor, three young women stood in a tight cluster.
The tallest of the three had her hand pressed over her mouth.
The girls were staring at Henry with an expression of such frank astonishment that he might have been a creature escaped from the Zoological Gardens.
Miss Linton arranged herself in the chair opposite and folded her hands in her lap. The gesture was so perfectly taught, so utterly at odds with the bare room, that he found himself almost smiling.
A young woman came in with the tray. She was perhaps eighteen and had golden hair. The right gold, the gold that women paid to approximate. She set the tray down without meeting his eye. Her hands shook. The cups rattled faintly against the saucers.
“My sister Poppy,” Miss Linton said.
“Miss Poppy.”
Poppy attempted a curtsey that resembled a half crouch and withdrew. In the corridor a burst of whispering broke out and was silenced.
The tea tray sat between them, but Miss Linton did not pour. Instead, she put her hands upon the arms of her chair and looked at him.
His finger began to tap impatiently on his knee, so he leaned back against the settee to feign leisurely demeanour.
“Miss Linton. I shall be brief. There has been a story put about involving the Duke of Trowbridge and yourself, the truth of which is not at issue. The fact of it is, the Morning Post will print before the week is out. A retraction signed by you, in your own hand, will travel faster than the page. Sign it today and the thing dies tomorrow.”
She was perfectly still. “I shall sign no retraction.”
“Miss Linton.”
“His Grace of Trowbridge compromised me. I shall not put my hand to a lie.”
“Miss Linton, Trowbridge has informed his counsel that he has never met you.”
“Then His Grace is a liar and a coward.”
The fire shifted in its grate. Somewhere upstairs, a footstep crossed a room.
“Miss Linton.” He let the silence hold a half-beat. “Trowbridge will not offer for you.”
“Then the Alliance shall provide me with a husband.”
He turned his signet ring slowly. “The Alliance is not in the habit of matchmaking.”
“The Alliance can start with me. They should have kept a better eye on one of their members. The Duke of Trowbridge’s disgrace means humiliation for the Alliance, does it not?
The Alliance shall therefore arrange the natural remedy.
Failing which, I shall write directly to the gossip columns myself, with a particular emphasis on the part where a cabal of dukes elected to do nothing for a baron’s daughter who had been thrown over by one of their own. ”
“You would only hurt your own reputation by writing to the papers.”
“If you recall, Your Grace, I am already ruined. So are my sisters.”
He looked at the single candle guttering in the corner. “The Alliance could be persuaded to provide you with a dowry to attract a suitable match.”
“A suitable match.” She said the words slowly, as if he had offered her something unclean.
A crease formed between his brows. “Yes.”
“Judging by how easily you made that offer, I suspect our ideas of a suitable match differ considerably.”
He crossed one leg over the other. “Do enlighten me. Who do you have in mind, other than the Duke of Trowbridge.”
She poured tea into his cup, then her own. There was no sugar. No milk.
“If the Alliance is not inclined to force His Grace to take responsibility for ruining a gentlewoman, I am willing to accept you as my betrothed.”
Henry brought a fist to his mouth, stopping the tea from spraying his cravat. He coughed. She sat with her ankles crossed beneath her chair, as she had been taught, and waited for him to finish.
“Miss Linton, you cannot be serious.”
“I have never been more serious in my life, Your Grace. You need a wife. I need a husband. The matter resolves itself.”
“I am not the man one offers up at a baron’s daughter’s table.”
“No, Your Grace.” Her mouth curved at the corners. “You are the man no other family will allow at their table at all.”
The fire made a small dry sound. Henry stared at it.
“I shall overlook your impertinence on the grounds of recent shocks.”
“Let us be practical, Your Grace. We are both adults. You are, I hazard to guess, five and thirty? Perhaps six and thirty? I am eight and twenty. It is debatable which of us is the greater pariah.”
Henry picked up the teacup and sipped it. The taste was bitter and weak. The leaves had been used before. “I shall never remarry.”
“You will not, or you cannot?”
His jaw clenched. The humiliation of being read so easily by a woman he had known for five minutes cut deeper than the humiliation itself.