Chapter Eleven #2
“You cannot answer for the necessity. That is the whole trouble. A duke may do as he likes and be forgiven. A governess may do exactly as she is told and be ruined for it. The same carriage carries us to two different fates, Your Grace. I do not complain of it. I only name it, since one of us must, and it cannot be you.”
He had no quick reply, and the rain filled the silence. Then she shivered, hard, past governing, because the muslin had drunk the whole of the western hills and clung to her like a second cold skin.
“You are shivering.”
“It will pass.”
“It will not. You are wet to the bone, and the boy needs you warm and steady, not feverish. You will be no use to him chattering.” He was already out of his driving coat, soaked on the outside, yet dry and warm within, where his body had kept it so. “Take this.”
“I cannot wear your coat. If you imagine what this carriage looked like a moment ago, imagine it now, with me wrapped in your coat. Imagine what they will make of it.”
“You may preserve propriety, Miss Wrenfield, or you may preserve your circulation. You cannot preserve both in wet muslin on a road this long. Choose, and choose quickly, for I have run clean out of patience for a world that would sooner watch you shake to pieces than risk your being spoken of.”
“And if I do not choose?”
“Then I shall choose for you, badly, as I do everything I have not done before, and you will simply have to bear being warm.”
She did not take it, but he did not wait.
Leaning across the narrow space, he laid the coat about her shoulders without letting his hands rest anywhere they were not required, and settled its heavy warmth with the same economy he had used on the boy’s ankle; a man being tender inside banks he had taught himself never to let overflow.
The coat smelled of rain, and horse, and under that, of him.
“There,” he said, and sat back to his own side, the full width of the propriety he could still afford put between them. “Now you are warm and ruined, instead of cold and ruined, which is the more comfortable of the two. And I no longer have to watch you shiver, which I discover I could not do.”
She looked down at the boy in her lap, because looking at the duke was not, at present, advisable.
“He called me his, on the slope,” she said. “Do not put me in without her. She knows. He has never said that of a living soul.”
“He says a great many things of you he has said of no one, and I have a ledger full of them in two hands, which I read more often than is good for either of us.”
“Your Grace.”
“I know. I shall stop.” He did not stop at once. “I am only observing that a man who spent seven years unable to say what he felt has found a book to do it, and has lately discovered that the book is not large enough, and does not in the least know what is to be done about that.”
“One mends the boy’s ankle,” she said, to the boy’s hair.
“One says nothing that cannot be unsaid. And one is grateful for the rain, which has at least handed us a reason to be improper that the world will half believe.”
“You make a poor business of restraint, Your Grace, for a man so famous for it.”
“I make an excellent business of restraint. You have simply never seen the size of the thing I am restraining.”
“Then restrain it a little longer, Your Grace. There is a witness on the steps who has waited two years for precisely this carriage to come up the drive with precisely this cargo in it.”
“I am aware of the witness. I have been aware of her for two years, which is rather the difficulty.” He turned his face to the dark window. “Mind the boy’s foot on the corners. We are nearly home, and the easy part of the day is behind us.”
She drew the coat closer, because she was cold, and said nothing, because the carriage walls had already heard everything that she would not say.
The carriage stopped, and the door stood open before the step was down, and Lady Cassandra waited at the top of the portico, brought home dry and early by the second carriage.
She watched Miss Wrenfield handed down from the duke’s closed carriage, in the duke’s own coat, with the duke’s hand at her elbow and the rain in her loosened hair.
Elinor felt the lady’s eyes on her.
The flicker came first, the raw young thing beneath the polish, there and gone in half a breath. What followed was worse than anger and worse than a smile.
“What a fright you have all had,” Lady Cassandra said warmly, coming down a step, all solicitude, her eyes never once leaving the coat.
“The poor child. And poor Miss Wrenfield, soaked quite through, so far from home, and nothing for it but the closed carriage and dear Vale’s own coat.
How very fortunate that you had no choice in the matter at all. ”
“There was no choice, my lady. The boy was hurt and would not be parted from me.”
“You will tell them the truth, Cassandra,” the duke said, handing Elinor down the last step.
“A child was hurt, a governess did her duty, and a man lent his coat against the rain. Should the truth prove insufficient for the county, the county may apply to me for the remainder. I shall be at home to it.”
“Of course it is the truth. No one could possibly say otherwise.” The smile arrived and reached nowhere near the arithmetic going on above it. “I shall be sure to tell everyone exactly so. Word for word. You may rely upon me entirely, Miss Wrenfield, to tell them precisely how it was.”