Chapter 2
Two
“Not there for your sake.”
When she returned home some time later, she still saw the words in his script when she closed her eyes.
The house felt different, and that was the first thing to distract Aurelia since leaving St. George’s.
It was not just the suspicious inactivity of the staff and the dogs, who were nowhere to be seen, or her aunt's voice behind her but far away still.
It was that the house felt different in a way she could not explain…
Until she watched the footman come and discretely pick up her chest from the entrance hall to take it back to her room. She should not have had to come back. That was it. She thought she had said goodbye for ever, and now she had returned.
Aurelia had removed her gloves by the time she reached the morning room. She didn't remember doing it. The gloves were warm, empty and limp in her hands. Entering, she placed them on the side table by the door, next to the congratulatory vase of flowers from Lady Seraphina and her family.
“I had forgotten,” she murmured to herself, thunderstruck.
It took every ounce of Aurelia’s self-control not to smash the vases to pieces against the nearest wall.
What cruel joke had that been? Roses for the bride who was never to be, sent two days before the wedding from the woman who would ruin everything.
Because she must have known, Seraphina. She must have intended to run away with Frederick all along.
This was not a decision made lightly, overnight.
And the realisation hit Aurelia like a ton of bricks.
Her aunt closed the door behind them, after whispering something to the maid who had shown them indoors.
She approached Aurelia slowly and placed a hand on her back.
“You must sit down, dear. I need you to sit down and tell me what you are feeling. Your poor nerves… Something warm to drink will help.”
“I am fine, my nerves are fine, and I do not need to sit,” Aurelia replied, removing her pelisse. “Tea will not solve anything. So help me, Aunt Violet, I will leave this house at once if you do not leave me to my thoughts.”
Violet came around to stand in front of Aurelia. She put a hand on her hip. “And where will you go, dear?”
“Perhaps to Gretna Green.” Aurelia shrugged, hating how acerbic she was being. “He will need a witness, will he not?”
Her aunt looked far from impressed. “Stop that. We will not start with japes at our own expense.” She moved to the sofa and fluffed a pillow. “Sit down, now. I’ll get you something more than tea.”
Swallowing, Aurelia marched over to the sofa and sat.
Perhaps it was for the best. She couldn’t even feel her legs.
The parlour looked exactly as it always had: the beige settees, the small writing desk by the window, the portrait of her mother above the mantelpiece that her aunt had always kept even though it made her cry on birthdays.
Everything was exactly where it ought to be, except for Aurelia.
Her aunt came back with a tumbler of brandy, and Aurelia took it while she spoke. Aurelia heard the shape of the words without quite making sense of them. “How could he… What were they thinking? The Battle family… your father would have… we must consider… and the consequences…”
Her hands were trembling again. She set down the empty glass and pressed them flat against her knees, bunching the silky fabric of her dress.
Frederick had held her hands once. He had found her during a dance last month and taken her onto the gallery to watch a cotillion.
He had joked with her about society and told her about his small bachelor apartment and how lonely he felt living by himself, lacing his fingers through hers meanwhile.
He had said he wanted to travel with someone, and why shouldn’t it have been Aurelia?
She had become a little infatuated with him then, and some more over time, but not all the way.
She had doubted she would ever love him.
He made her feel small by comparison. He was too charming and too warm with other people.
He never quite managed to ask her questions about herself.
And while Aurelia did not know much about love, she supposed the two parties had to express mutual interest in each other for there to be love between them.
It was something she had made peace with, deciding that what they had was satisfactory.
He seemed eager enough to claim her, even if he did not love her.
He had made her feel needed and excited about the future, removing him from his solitary apartment, travelling if that was what he wished, now that he was twenty-one and had money of his own. They could have gone anywhere.
And all that time, she thought, he had been picturing the future with someone else. Not just anyone else. The woman betrothed to his very own brother.
“—not listening to a word I'm saying,” her aunt finished, punctuating her last question with an unladylike expletive. “Aurelia, this is important. Did you know about Lady Seraphina? What had Lord Canterbury said about her?”
Aurelia looked up, blinking. “What do you mean?”
“The chit who got him,” Aunt Violet stressed, coming to sit down beside her.
“What did you know about her? She is the Earl of Salsburgh’s only daughter, of course.
We know Salsburgh. But Lord Canterbury… I can’t believe that he could have been a philanderer all this time.
Such a convincing liar. Did he say nothing about her to you?
Why, you must have seen them together. When you did, how were they? ”
She reached back into her memories of Frederick. There were only brief mentions of Seraphina. Her unusual name. The formal and uninspiring relationship she had with his brother the Duke. Her allergy to almonds which therefore could not be served at their wedding breakfast.
“Nothing of consequence. Nothing that would speak to… his loving her,” Aurelia replied, the suggestion making her feel sick. She leaned over, her head spinning. “I never even saw them speak together. It all seems so unlikely.”
“The Duke must have known something then,” Violet protested, ignoring Aurelia, which may have been for the best. “You cannot both have been in the dark about all this. But of course, he will suffer. But not like us, not like you. He was abandoned but not on his wedding day. And he is a man… She would have been a duchess. What was she thinking?”
“We cannot say they were thinking very much at all.” Aurelia drew in a fortifying breath, straightening. “Must we speak of this more today?”
“Oh, my dear.” Violet looked concerned, stroking Aurelia’s face. “You’ve gone all pale again. There will be callers, Aurelia. People coming to see how you are. We must have something prepared for them. We must know what to say.”
“Enough,” Aurelia whispered, rising slowly out of her seat.
“Frederick is gone. The wedding is cancelled. Our betrothal was obviously a joke to him this entire time. The only thing to be done now… is to move on. If that means I remain here with you all my life as a spinster… then so be it. I have Father’s money, what little of it there is.
And if that fails and you cast me out, I will find employment. I won’t let myself be a burden to you."
“You could never be a burden to me,” Violet said sadly. “Don’t say that.” She pressed her lips together and nodded once, which was the closest she came to compromise in a crisis. She folded her hands in her lap and said nothing, and they remained together in the strange suspended quiet.
Guilt gnawed at Aurelia until she couldn’t stand it. She was about to say something, though she wasn't sure what, when a knock came at the door.
“That will be the tea,” her aunt murmured, moving gingerly out of her seat.
Aurelia heard the door open, the sound of a tea trolley being rolled inside. But then came another sound. It was the butler speaking.
“A caller already?” Aunt Violet said, causing Aurelia to turn around. She glanced at her niece, something like pity in her eyes. “No, Mr. Lister… There will be no one today for Aurelia. Send them away. I don’t care what they will think of us.”
There were whispered words, barely audible behind the maid setting the tea and fruitcake down on the table. But Aurelia could not have missed what was said next. Her aunt, turning with a calling card, her mouth agape.
“It is the Duke of Sandacre,” she said. “He is asking to speak with you.”
The Knowles house was smaller than he'd expected.
It was a modest townhouse in Mayfair, well-kept, the brass on the door recently polished.
It was the kind of house that said, “We have standards, and we maintain them, and we would like you to know it the second you arrive.” How unfortunate for them, that the morning had unfolded in the manner it had.
Evander waited in the entrance hall, casting his eyes up the carpeted stairs.
A maid hummed to herself as she polished the bannister.
She saw him after a time, blushed crimson, and promptly disappeared.
He had hoped, almost, that it would have been Miss Knowles standing there – that he could have spoken to her informally and alone, without the aunt interfering.
He could hear the voice of Violet Hartwell from a distance.
She said his name, he could have sworn it.
Seconds later, the butler who had greeted him returned and showed him into a small beige parlour.
Evander stood for a moment, taking in the room.
The potted plants. The ash-stained brick of the hearth.
A portrait above the mantelpiece of a young woman, dark-eyed, and painted in the last twenty years by the look of it.
It was not Aurelia. Her mother, perhaps.
The resemblance was there if you looked for it.
There was the same stillness in the face, the same suggestion of someone who had decided not to give very much away…