Chapter 13
“You are wearing your thinking face again. The one with the little crease. Are you quite well?”
“Perfectly.” Rosaline smoothed the crease away with a gloved fingertip and did not meet her sister’s eyes. “Only warm. It is close for May.”
Beatrice, who was walking arm in arm with her down the long parade of market stalls, clearly did not believe a word of it, but she let it go, which was a great mercy.
Ahead of them, Samuel set the pace, greeting the right people and ignoring the rest, and behind followed Ivy with her governess, Miss Dean, stopping every third stall to press her nose toward something.
The trouble was that the thinking face had a subject.
The subject was a six-foot Scotsman who had winked at her across a hall two nights ago and then, according to Beatrice’s exhaustive report, spent the remainder of the evening being aggressively charming to a dowager in the corner and had not once looked her way again.
Rosaline had told herself she was relieved. She had been telling herself so for two days, with diminishing success.
“Rosaline.” Ivy caught up to them, breathless, her cheeks pink under her bonnet. “Rosaline, there is a sweet shop. Just there, the one with the blue door and the jars in the window. Miss Dean says the lemon drops are famous. May we? Oh, may we, please?”
“Certainly not,” Samuel said, without turning around. “We have the milliner, and then we are expected at your aunt’s. We have no time to stand in a shop, watching a child eat sugar.”
Ivy’s face fell, the light going out of it, and something in Rosaline that had been coiled tight for two days simply refused to bear it.
“I will take her.” The words were out before she had weighed them.
“You and Beatrice go to the milliner across the street. Ivy, Miss Dean, and I will visit the shop, and we will meet you at the milliner’s in a quarter of an hour.
It is ten steps, Samuel. She will hardly be ruined between here and the lemon drops. ”
Samuel turned. He looked at the shop, at Ivy, at Rosaline, weighing it all with that flat assessing gaze that priced everything.
“A quarter of an hour,” he allowed. “You will keep Miss Dean with you, and you will speak to no one, and you will be at the milliner’s door before I have finished with the hats.” He was already steering Beatrice toward the crossing. “Do not make me regret it.”
Rosaline caught Beatrice’s eye as they parted, and for one instant, her sister’s face creased with something that stung, a small clear look of you would rather have Ivy than me.
Then it passed. Beatrice gave her the smallest nod, mouthed something that might have been go on, then, and let Samuel lead her away toward the milliner.
Rosaline would make it up to her. She always did.
“Thank you,” Ivy breathed, seizing her hand, and towed her toward the blue door, with Miss Dean hurrying behind.
The bell above the door gave a bright little jangle.
The shop opened up warm and dim, smelling of caramel and hot sugar, glass jars floor to ceiling, trays of macarons, marzipan, and sugared violets laid out under the counter like jewels.
Ivy let go of her hand and darted forward with a gasp of pure joy.
And ran directly into the back of a very large man.
“Oh! Oh, I do beg your pardon, sir, I did not—”
The man turned.
Rosaline stopped three steps inside the door.
The Duke of Greythorne looked down at the small, breathless girl who had just collided with him, and whatever he had been about to say rearranged itself into something gentler.
“No harm done, wee one.” He crouched until his eyes were level with Ivy’s, which did not seem to trouble him at all. “Though I’ll tell ye, ye came in like a cannonball. I nearly went straight through the toffee.”
Ivy giggled. “I did not mean to. It only smelled so good.”
“Aye, it does. It’s a dangerous shop. A man could lose his whole afternoon.
” He tilted his head, studying her with mock gravity.
“Now, what’s this?” He reached out and, with a small frown of concentration, drew his hand back from behind Ivy’s ear.
There, between his forefinger and thumb, sat a wrapped lemon drop.
“Ye’d better have a care. Ye’ve sweets growin’ out yer very head.
That’s a rare condition. Caused by thinkin’ about them too hard. ”
Ivy’s mouth fell open. She clapped both hands to her ears as though to check for more, and then to her mouth, her eyes wide. “How did you do that?”
“Magic.” He pressed the lemon drop solemnly into her palm. “Scottish magic. We’re famous for it. That, and the weather.”
“Do it again.”
“It doesnae work twice in a day. Ye have to save it up.” He straightened up, and it was only then that he noticed Rosaline standing frozen by the door. Something moved behind his eyes that he put away. “Lady Rosaline.”
“Your Grace.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
Ivy was turning the lemon drop over and over in her hand as though it were spun gold.
She dipped into a small, careful curtsy.
“Thank you very much for the sweet, sir. And the magic.” And then, the manners discharged and the wonder of the shop reasserting itself, she was gone, flitting toward the jars along the far wall with Miss Dean in patient pursuit, calling back over her shoulder, “Miss Dean, come and see, there are violet ones…”
Which left Rosaline standing beside the Duke among the toffees, close enough to speak, but far enough to be two strangers who had exchanged a courtesy.
“What are you doing here?” she muttered.
“I might have a sweet tooth.” He said it without shame. “A great and shameful one. I came for the marzipan, and I’ll thank ye nae to tell a soul. It does nothin’ for the reputation of a savage.”
Rosaline pressed her lips together against a smile and lost. There was something disarming about it, this enormous Scot with shoulders that filled the little shop, bending over a tray of pastel macarons with the grave attention of a man selecting a horse.
“I shall take it to my grave,” she said somberly.
“See that ye do.” He selected a green macaron and considered it.
“Ye did well, the other night at the musicale. I watched the whole of it. Ye had Bracewell and the other three eatin’ out of yer hand within a quarter of an hour, and ye never once turned to stone.
” He glanced at her sideways. “It was well done, Lady Rosaline. Truly.”
The warmth crawled up her neck before she could stop it, and she busied herself with a tray of sugared violets so that he would not see all of it.
“Thank you,” she returned. “It was your instruction, Your Grace.”
“It was yer nerve. I only pointed at the door; ye walked through it.” He set the macaron down. “Which brings me to a matter of business, since fate’s been kind enough to put us in the one quiet shop in London. Ye owe me a lesson, lass.”
Rosaline quickly glanced around. Ivy and Miss Dean were wholly absorbed at the far wall, deliberating over a jar of barley sugar.
The shopkeeper was weighing something for an elderly gentleman at the counter.
The two of them stood alone among the trays, and to any passing eye, they were nothing but a lady and a lord debating the merits of marzipan.
“Here?” she whispered.
“Where better? We browse. We murmur. No one thinks a thing of it.” He picked up a different macaron, held it up as though asking her opinion, and lowered his voice beneath the hum of the shop.
“I’ve a meeting in three days. A man whose help I need and I cannae afford to set wrong in the first five minutes the way I set every other man in this town wrong.
Ye promised me the rules. I’m callin’ the debt. ”
“Which man?”
“An old one. Titled to the teeth, traditional to the bone, the sort that decides whether he likes ye in the time it takes ye to cross a room and never revises the verdict after.” He turned the macaron in his fingers. “Pompous. Easily offended. Quick to judge, and slow to forgive the judgment.”
Rosaline nodded slowly, thinking. This, at least, she knew.
“Then you do not walk in as yourself,” she advised.
“You walk in as the version of yourself he expects to dislike, and you disappoint him. You bow first, lower than you think necessary, because a man like that counts the inches. You call him My Lord early and often. You ask after his health, his estate, and his hunting in that order, and you let him talk, and you do not under any circumstances offer an opinion he has not asked for.”
“I’m to say nothin’.”
“You are to say a great deal, all of it about him. You avoid politics until he raises it, you avoid Scotland entirely, and you never once make a joke at your own expense, because he will not understand you are doing it and will simply believe the unkind thing you have said.” She warmed up to it.
“Flattery, but never anything he can catch as flattery. You do not tell him his estate is fine. You ask him how he manages such a fine estate, so that the compliment arrives disguised as a question and he may answer it for twenty minutes and think you the cleverest man he has met all year.”
The Duke was quiet for a moment, turning that over. “That’s genuinely diabolical.”
“It is manners.”
“It’s the same thing, dressed for church.” But he was nodding. “Show me. Play the old goat. I’ll come across the room.”
She did. She drew herself up into the querulous, chin-lifted hauteur of every dreadful earl she had ever curtsied to, and Magnus came toward her with his hand already extended.
“Me Lord, fine to meet ye at last. I’ve heard—”
“No.” She dropped the character. “You do not shake his hand like a farmer sealing a sale. You bow. And it is not fine to meet you; it is an honor. And you do not say you have heard of him, because then he’ll wonder what you have heard, and half of it is unflattering. Again.”
He tried again. He bowed too shallowly, and she made him redo it lower. He said an honor, Me Lord, and it came out flat as a board, and she made him find the warmth in it. He offered his opinion on the weather unprompted. She caught him at it, and he grumbled and did it over.
By the fourth try, he crossed the invisible room, bowed low enough, and said, “An honor, Me Lord. I’ve long admired how ye keep the north woods at Harrow. However do ye manage it?” with such smooth and plausible deference that Rosaline nearly applauded.
“There,” she said. “That. That is the man who gets the meeting.”
“That,” the Duke responded, “is a man I’d cross the street to avoid. But I get yer point.” Something shifted in his manner, the pupil giving way to the tutor. “Now, since we’re tradin’, I’ve one for ye in return. A good one. Better than lashes.”
“I did not agree to another—”
“Ye’ll want this one.” He glanced toward Ivy, who was still deliberating, and lowered his voice further.
“Next time ye’re with a man, and there’s food or drink to hand—at a supper, a picnic, whatever it may be—ye’re nae to simply eat.
Ye eat like ye mean it. Slow. Sensual. Ye make a small event of it.
” He nodded toward the tray. “Take one. Go on.”
Rosaline picked up a small pink macaron and took a quick, self-conscious nibble at the edge of it.
The Duke watched, his lips twitching.
“Like a wee frightened deer,” he said. “Aye, that. That’s a lass hopin’ nobody will notice she’s eatin’. We want the opposite of that.” He took a macaron of his own. “Watch.”
She watched.
He raised it and bit into it, slow and clean. She found her attention drawn against her will to his mouth, to the deliberate way he took it, the brush of his thumb at the corner of his lip after a crumb that was not there, the unhurried press of it.
It was the most ordinary thing in the world, yet he made it look like a secret being told.
For one alarming instant, Rosaline was no longer thinking about macarons at all. She was thinking about what it would be like to have that same attention turned on the bare skin at the inside of her wrist, on the column of her throat.
The thought was so sudden that she blinked hard and felt her face go scarlet.
“Ye’ve the idea,” the Duke said, his voice rougher now, as though he had followed her exactly where her mind had gone. “Now, yer turn.”
She lifted the macaron again, slowly this time. She was aware of her own mouth in a way she had never been in her life, aware of his eyes on it. She bit into the macaron, unhurried, and swallowed lazily.
The Duke went very still. She heard him swallow, though he had nothing in his mouth.
“Aye,” he said, his voice uneven. “Ye’re a—ye’re a very apt pupil, Lady Rosaline.”
“Rosaline!” Ivy came skipping back with Miss Dean and a small paper twist of lemon drops clutched to her chest. “Miss Dean says we must go. It has been ever so long, and I have got both the lemon and the violet ones, and—oh, are you buying the pink macarons? You should. They are the prettiest.”
The Duke straightened at once, and the tutor and everything under it folded away, ceding place to a duke who had happened upon a lady and her youngest sister in a shop.
“Lady Rosaline. Lady Ivy.” He bowed to Ivy with as much gravity as he had given the imaginary Earl, which made her giggle all over again.
“Mind that condition of yers. Sweets in the ears. Very rare.” And to Rosaline, with a look that lasted precisely one beat longer than courtesy allowed, “Good day, My Lady.”
On his way past the counter, he laid down a sum that could have bought the whole tray, told the girl behind it to send the rest to Lady Ivy’s carriage, and did not wait to be thanked. Then the bell jangled, and he was out the blue door and into the bright street.
Rosaline stood among the toffees with a half-eaten pink macaron in her hand and her pulse thundering like a drum, with no earthly idea how she was going to walk to the milliner’s and pretend in front of her brother that nothing had happened at all.