Chapter 8
“To Lord Ackerley and his bride! A love match, they tell me. Who would have guessed it?”
The toast went up across the lawn in a warm scatter of applause, glasses lifting, heads turning to find the happy pair.
There stood Lord Ackerley, flushed and pleased, and on his arm was the Dunmore girl, whom the whole of London had written off two Seasons past as too plain and too poor to trouble anyone.
She was beaming. He was beaming. It was, by all accounts, a genuine match.
Rosaline clapped with the rest, because that was the proper thing to do.
“Well.” Beatrice leaned close, under the noise. “There is hope for the overlooked yet. Perhaps they mean to marry us off in reverse order of likelihood, and you and I shall be duchesses by Michaelmas.”
Rosaline almost smiled.
Then Samuel was at her shoulder, and the smile died before it formed.
“Do you see?” He kept his voice low, pleasant for any passing eye, and it pricked her like a needle.
“Do you see her, Rosaline? Honoria Dunmore, who has neither your face, your name, nor a shilling to bless herself with, has landed a baron, while you stand at the edge of the lawn collecting dust. Two Seasons ago, that girl was a joke. Two. And she has managed in a summer what you cannot manage in three years of my time and my money.”
“That is grotesquely unfair.” Beatrice lifted her chin. “Rosaline is worth ten of the Dunmore girl, and if the men in this garden are too witless to—”
“Did I ask you?” Samuel did not so much as glance at her. “When I want the opinion of an eighteen-year-old who cannot keep a civil tongue in her head, I shall write to you for it. Be quiet.”
Beatrice went white, then red, and shut her mouth.
Samuel turned back to Rosaline. His hand found the small of her back, and it was not gentle.
“You have wasted enough of this Season sulking in corners. There.” He steered her about and pushed her toward a cluster of gentlemen gathered near the rose walk.
“That is Lord Fenwick’s set. Every man in it has land and none of them a wife.
Go and be charming. Secure someone’s interest before the afternoon is out, or so help me, Rosaline, we shall have words at home that you will not enjoy. Go.”
“Samuel, let me come with her at least, so she is not—” Beatrice started forward.
“You will come with me.” Samuel caught her by the wrist and turned her firmly the other way, toward the marquee. “You have done enough talking for one afternoon.”
Rosaline was left alone, propelled across an open stretch of lawn toward a knot of strangers, with nowhere to go but forward.
She made herself approach them, though every step cost her. The men turned as one to look at her, their conversation trailing off into a silence she was expected to fill.
“Good afternoon.” Her voice came out thinner than she meant to. “It is a… a very fine afternoon for it. The garden, I mean. The roses. They are very… erm… fine.”
A beat passed.
One of the men, fair and languid, exchanged a look with the man beside him. “They are roses,” he agreed. “Notoriously fine roses.”
Soft laughter rippled through the group, and Rosaline felt her face heat up. She reached for a cleverer thing to say, only to find her mind swept perfectly bare.
She had said a hundred clever things in the maze. She had said them in the corridor. Here, in the bright and the noise with all those eyes on her, there was nothing at all, only the roar in her ears and the sense of the ground gently tilting away.
“Do forgive her.” A young woman at the edge of the group, all ringlets and cool blue eyes, smiled sweetly.
Rosaline quickly recognized Miss Fairchild, for she had never bothered to hide her opinion of anyone.
“Lady Rosaline finds conversation rather taxing. It is well known. One learns not to expect much.”
“I only meant—” Rosaline stepped back, suddenly wanting to be gone, to be anywhere the eyes were not.
She did not see the foot. It came out neat and quick beneath the hem of Miss Fairchild’s gown, and Rosaline’s slipper caught against it.
She went down hard, one gloved hand plunging past the edge of the clipped grass into the soft watered earth of the rose bed, and her whole side with it into mud, cold and black.
The silence lasted half a breath. Then laughter broke over her, bright and delighted, and behind it the whispers, spreading outward like a stain across the party.
“Oh, how dreadful,” Miss Fairchild gasped, one hand pressed to her mouth over a smile that did not reach her eyes. “How terribly clumsy. Someone help her, please.”
No one helped her.
Rosaline pushed herself up. She did not know how. Her palm was black to the wrist, her skirt ruined down one side, wet earth clinging in a great dark smear from hip to knee, and her face was on fire.
Her eyes burned as forty people watched her stand caked in mud in the middle of a summer garden.
She gathered the wreck of her skirt in both filthy hands and hurried away from the laughter, toward the house, toward any door that would take her out of the light.
She had almost reached the terrace when Samuel intercepted her. He took one look at the mud on her dress, at her face, and something in him seemed to go cold and quiet.
“Look at you,” he said very softly. “Just look at you. The whole party is looking at you.” He did not offer her a hand, his coat, or a single kind word.
“Tell me, Rosaline. Who do you imagine will court Beatrice this Season, with a sister who has made herself the laughingstock of the ton by rolling in the flowerbeds like a farm animal? Have you thought of that? Have you spared them a single thought, or is it only your own comfort that—”
“Please.” Her voice cracked clean in half. “Please, Samuel. Not now.”
For once, he let her go. Perhaps even he could see there was nothing left to press.
She fled up the terrace steps and through the first door she found, into the blessed dimness of an empty morning room, and pushed it half shut behind her. She stood there shaking.
There was a washstand in the corner. She went to it, wet a cloth, and started removing the mud with hands that would not stay steady, scrubbing at the ruined silk as though she might scrub the whole afternoon out of existence if she only worked hard enough. Her breath came in short, broken bursts.
She would not cry. She would not give them that, even here, even alone.
“Are ye all right?”
She recognized the voice before she turned. She knew the roll of it, low in the quiet room, and her whole body went rigid over the washstand.
“Please.” She did not turn around. “Leave me alone. Whatever you have come to see, there is nothing here worth the trouble. Go away.”
“Nay.” A slow footstep came no closer than the center of the room. “I daenae think I will.”
Something in her, worn through to the last thread, simply snapped.
“Why not?” She rounded on him, the cloth still clenched in one muddy hand.
To her horror, her voice shook. “Are you enjoying it? Is that it? Come to have a closer look at the statue in the mud? You are all the same, every last one of you—bored and arrogant, starved for someone smaller to laugh at, and I am simply the afternoon’s amusement.
Well, look your fill, Your Grace, and then have the decency to leave me to it. ”
The Duke did not laugh. He did not flinch, either. He only looked at her steadily, his green eyes very dark in the dim room. He had come in with the outdoors still on him, riding gloves held in one hand, his hair damp at the temples, a man not five minutes out of the saddle.
“Ye’re wrong,” he said. “I came up the drive nae a quarter hour past. I looked for ye out there among them and didnae find ye, so I came lookin’ through the house.
Whatever it is ye think I came to see, lass, I saw none of it.
And I’m nae bored. I’ve nae been bored a single moment since a fox read me a hedge by its roots in the dark.
Bored is the last thing I am, lass, when ye’re in the room. ”
The words went through her guard before she could raise it, and she hated how they landed, hated the small treacherous warmth of them.
“Now.” The teasing had gone out of him entirely. “What happened out there?”
“Nothing happened.” She turned back to the washstand. “I slipped on the grass. It has rained all week. That is all.”
“Ye slipped?”
“Yes.”
“On the grass.” He did not move, nor did he raise his voice, and somehow that was worse. “Ye’re ruined to the knee down one side and nae the other. Yer hand’s black to the wrist. And there are forty people out on that lawn with their heads bent together like a rookery.” A pause. “Try again.”
“Please don’t.”
“Tell me.”
“It does not signify—”
“It signifies to me.” He was immovable. “Tell me, lass, and I’ll nae ask ye a second time.”
Because she was tired, and because there was nothing left in her to hold the door shut with, she told him. It came out in pieces, flat and small, her eyes fixed on the water going grey in the basin.
After she finished, she looked at him. He had not moved at all, and the change in his face frightened her more than shouting would have. The idleness was gone out of him. What stood in its place was very still and very cold and had nothing charming in it whatsoever.
“Say her name again. That vile woman who tripped ye,” he demanded.
“No.”
“Rosaline.”
“No.” She shook her head earnestly. “You will do something. You will say something to someone, and there will be a scene, and by morning, it will be my name in every drawing room in London, and my sister’s after mine. Leave it. I am asking you to leave it.”
His jaw worked. For a moment, he looked like a man setting down a weight he had no wish to set down.
“Alright,” he relented, and it cost him. “I’ll leave it. For yer sister’s sake, and nae because it deserves to be dismissed.”
“Thank you.” Her voice had gone thin again. “Now, please go. I should like to be alone.”
“Nay.”
She turned fully at that. “I beg your pardon?”
“Ye can have anythin’ else ye ask of me today, lass, and I’ll give it to ye without a word.
” He set his gloves down on the table beside him, unhurried, the way a man who meant to stay did.
“But nae that. Ye’ll nae be left alone to decide it was yer own doin’.
” His voice did not rise at all. “I’ll nae leave yer side. ”
“Why?” She would not let the warmth win. “Why do you keep appearing wherever I am, cornering me, teasing me about a thing that should never have happened? What is it you want from me?”
“I’ve no wish in the world to humiliate ye, Lady Rosaline.
” He said her name the way he always did—careful, unhurried.
“I’ve just heard what a garden full of fools did to ye today, and I’d have broken a few of them for it if I thought ye’d thank me.
Nay, the truth is far more foolish than that.
” The corner of his mouth moved. “I only like to watch ye blush. Ye’re doin’ it now. ”
She was. She felt it flood up her throat and into her face, fierce and helpless. His smirk widened at the sight of it, and that only made it worse.
“This is improper, Your Grace.”
“Perhaps.” He tilted his head. “Here’s a thing, though, and then I’ll leave ye to yer scrubbin’ if ye truly wish it.
What happened in that maze last year stays between the two of us.
Ye have me word on it, and me word’s the one thing in this rotten town that’s still worth somethin’.
Nay soul will ever hear it from me.” His voice dropped an octave.
“That being said, if ye ever wanted to continue where the two of us left off—”
“No.” She said it fast, before the thing in her chest could answer for her. “No. Absolutely not. That is precisely what I cannot do.”
“Cannot.” He paused. “Nae will not. Cannot. There’s a difference, and ye chose it carefully.”
“Do not do that.” Her hands stilled on the cloth. “Do not read me. You do not know the first thing about me.”
“Then tell me one true thing.” His voice gentled. “Ye owe me nothin’. But I’d sooner have one honest word from ye than a hundred pretty lies from every soul on that lawn.”
Rosaline turned back to the washstand, to her ruined skirt, to anything but those eyes reading her the way she read a difficult page.
“I must find a husband,” she said to the wall, and the plainness of it startled her.
“A sensible one. A respectable, unremarkable, safe man with a safe name, who will lift my family a little and never once give this town a reason to laugh. I have two younger sisters, Your Grace, and every door that opens for them opens through me. So, whatever this is, whatever you imagine we left off, it cannot happen. I have nothing to spend on wanting things. I spent it all a long time ago.”
The room went quiet behind her.
For a moment, he said nothing at all, and she thought perhaps she had finally driven him out. She told herself the hollow thing that opened inside her at the thought was relief.
“A safe man with a safe name,” the Duke said slowly, and there was something new and unreadable underneath it now. “Aye, I ken exactly the sort ye mean.”
She did not turn around. She could not have said just then which of them the words had wounded more.