Chapter Five
“It says I was found in your library after midnight.”
Giselle held the sheet at arm’s length, the way she might hold a page she suspected of carrying fever. Royce had come in at the sound of her voice and stood by the cold hearth, dressed and upright and lying with his whole posture about the wound beneath his coat.
“Read it to me,” he said. “All of it. I would rather know the exact shape of the knife.”
“It does not use my name or yours. That is the cleverness of it.” She turned the sheet to the light.
“A certain learned young person, lately taken into a great northern house, has been remarked coming and going from its library at hours no respectable instruction requires. The master of that house is known to society chiefly for the marks he carries and the company he does not keep. One trusts the young person’s education proceeds by daylight.
One fears, for her sake, that it does not.
” She lowered the sheet a fraction. “There is a second paragraph, but it is only the same wound dug deeper.”
“Dig it.”
“It wonders aloud whether a scholar so very alone in the world might not find a scarred and solitary duke a convenient sort of patron, and whether the arrangement is one the parish that raised her would recognise.” Her voice held flat, the effort of it knotting in her jaw.
“It does not call me a fallen woman, Your Grace. It is far too well-bred for that. It merely invites every reader in London to call me one for it, and to feel charitable while they do.”
“Give it here.”
“You will only crumple it, and then there is nothing to show anyone.”
“There is one person I will not need to show. Beatrice will have read three copies of it before her chocolate.”
“Who is Beatrice?”
“My godmother. My mother’s dearest friend while my mother lived, and the one soul in London who has never once been afraid of me, which makes her either very brave or very foolish, and she is not a fool.
” He held out his hand regardless, and she put the sheet in it, and he did not crumple it.
“She will be on my step within the hour, uninvited, as she has been at every disaster of my life since I was breeched. You will like her, which will annoy you, because you have decided to like no one in this house.”
He read it once, his face going to the smooth blankness she had learned in two days meant the opposite of calm.
“He wrote this before he came. He sat in my drawing room, taking your pulse with this already written. The visit was not the threat. This is the threat. The visit was for him to see whether you were worth the cost of it.”
“And was I?”
“You were tedious and unbreakable, and you turned his own warning back on him in front of me.” He set the sheet down on the mantel, flat, smoothing it with two fingers as though the smoothing mattered. “Yes. You were worth it. I am sorry to be the one to tell you so.”
The word sat oddly in her. She had been worth a wage to four households and worth nothing to the parish that bred her, and now she had become worth the trouble of killing, which was a new and terrible promotion.
To be overlooked had at least kept her safe, and until this morning, she had never understood that being seen at all, by the wrong eyes, was its own kind of sentence.
The door opened without a knock, which in Calder House meant one of two people, and it was not Crispin.
“Do not stand up on my account, either of you; I have come up two flights, and I intend to collapse with dignity into the first chair that will have me.” Lady Carlisle arrived the way weather arrives, all at once and impossible to argue with.
A short round widow in expensive black with eyes that missed nothing and forgave most of it.
She had a sheet of her own already crushed in one gloved fist. “Calder, you look like a corpse that has been overruled, and do not tell me it was footpads. I stood at your christening, and I knew when you were lying since before you could form the words. And you will be Miss Linfield, who has set the whole town alight without, I am told, doing one single thing to deserve it, which is the very worst way to be set alight, because there is nothing to repent and therefore no end to it.”
“Beatrice,” Royce said. “You read it.”
“I read it at half past nine, which means the rest of London read it at nine, and by this evening there will be three versions and by tomorrow a song.” She dropped into the chair and fixed Giselle with a look of frank, unhostile appraisal.
“Sit, child; you are vibrating. Now. You did nothing improper; I can see that on you. You have the face of a woman who has been wronged and not the face of a woman who has been caught, and after thirty years in those rooms I know the difference better than I know myself.”
“I bound a wound,” Giselle said. “He was shot. I was the only one he would let near him. That is the whole of the impropriety, and even that is not in the sheet.”
“Of course it is not in the sheet. The truth never sells half so well as the suggestion.” Beatrice waved the crushed copy.
“It does not matter what you did. It has never once in the history of the world mattered what a woman did. What matters is that you are unprotected, clever, and standing in this man’s library, where a great many people would prefer the only women to be portraits.
They will eat you, Miss Linfield, and they will call it concern while they chew. ”
“Then I shall leave London. I have left cities before. I have left them with less than I came with and survived it.”
“And go where, child? You cannot take a post in a respectable house with this following you, and a respectable house is the only kind that pays a woman to think.” Beatrice shook her head, not unkindly.
“A sheet like this does not stay in London. It rides the post. It will reach Edinburgh before you do, and it will be waiting in the housekeeper’s parlour with the tea, and it will cost you the position before you have taken off your bonnet.
They have ensured that nobody will hire you in a single morning, and they have done it so that you have nowhere to go but here, which is the cleverness of it.
Veyr does not need to find your packet if he can simply make this house the only roof in England that will have you. ”
Royce crossed to the window and stood looking down at the street for a moment, and when he turned, he had arranged himself into the man who closed bargains, and the shift in him moved through the room like a draught and reached her before she could put a name to it.
“There is one thing that ends it,” he said.
“Today. Tonight, if the licence can be obtained quickly, and it can, because I have done favours that will have to be repaid now. A scandal about a duke and his unprotected archivist dies the instant the archivist becomes his wife. A duchess may keep whatever hours she pleases in whatever library she pleases. There is no scandal in a man being alone after midnight with the woman he has married.”
The room held very still.
“Say the rest of it,” Giselle said. “You have offered me a solution to a problem you helped create, and you have offered it the way a man offers to buy back the vase he knocked from the shelf. Say the rest. Say what I become.”
“You become the Duchess of Calder. You become a name no paper will touch and a rank no foundling house can be used against. You become unreachable to Veyr through scandal, which is the cheapest of the doors he has and the first he will try.”
“I become a thing you have acquired.” She rose, and the printed sheet on the mantel seemed to her the smaller insult now.
“You found me in a sale catalogue, the recommendation of the Strattons, exacting about paper and cheap to keep. You suspected a name. You brought me here to read your dangerous box, and when the danger arrived, you wrapped it around me.” She drew a breath that did not steady her.
“Now you propose to file me under your own arms where Veyr cannot reach me, and you call it protection, and perhaps it even is. But do not stand there and pretend you are not also solving the inconvenient question of what to do with a woman who knows too much, by the simple expedient of marrying her.”
“I am not pretending anything of the kind.” He had not moved towards her, and the stillness of him was its own argument.
“You are correct in every line of that but one. I did not bring you here to read the box. I brought you here because the Strattons said you were the finest archivist in England and my library was a disgrace, which it was, and which you have been telling me with great freedom since the moment you opened your mouth.” He drew a slow breath against the wound.
“The name was a fear, not a plan. I hoped I was wrong. I have spent two days discovering, to my considerable inconvenience, that I am not wrong about anything where you are concerned, and that I would marry you to keep Veyr off your throat even if it cost me the use of my own name forever.”
“You flatter me. You have a gift for proposing and insulting a woman’s prospects in the same sentence.”
“I have a gift for telling the truth badly, which you yourself diagnosed in this room not an hour ago.” Something that was almost a smile moved at the corner of his mouth.
“I will say the flattering part plainly, since you accuse me of avoiding it. I do not find the prospect of you across my breakfast table for the rest of my life a hardship, Miss Linfield. I find it the only part of this entire ruinous business that I have looked forward to, and I have been ashamed of looking forward to it, because a man should not enjoy the terms a woman is being forced to accept.”