Chapter 23
“Two weeks of headaches and vapors, and I am expected to believe you are suddenly well enough for the Harcourts.” Samuel’s hand closed hard around her elbow as he handed her down from the carriage.
“Let me be very clear about what today requires of you. You have been ill quite long enough, Rosaline. You are cured. You will behave as though you are cured. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Samuel.”
The Harcourts’ mansion sat in green grounds on the western edge of the city, all clipped hedges, a great striped marquee, a lawn crowded with the very people Rosaline had spent two weeks hiding from.
The afternoon was bright and mild and merciless. There was nowhere to be a shadow here, no dim corner, no potted palm, only the flat sunlight and the open grass and her brother’s fingers biting through her glove.
He did not let her go. Not through the greetings, not through the tepid lemonade, not through a quarter hour of Lady Harcourt’s opinions on gravel. Wherever Rosaline turned, Samuel was at her shoulder, steering, correcting, his smile fixed for the benefit of the crowd and his grip fixed for hers.
She had thought she understood, over the past weeks, what it was like to be watched. She had not.
“Samuel.” Beatrice materialized out of the crowd in primrose sprigged muslin.
There was a bright, deliberate innocence to her that Rosaline recognized at once and blessed her for.
“There you are. Lord Harcourt has been asking for you this quarter hour, something about the drainage bill. He seemed to think you the only sensible man at the party, and he is quite insistent.” She lowered her voice to a murmur.
“He is by the roses. He has a great deal to say, and I fear he means to say all of it.”
Samuel’s vanity and suspicion fought a brief war across his face, and his vanity, as Beatrice had plainly wagered, won.
“Do not move from this spot,” he said to Rosaline, then walked off.
“Go.” Beatrice took the abandoned post at her sister’s side and pressed a fresh glass into her hand, her eyes already scanning the crowd for his return.
“The beverage table, by the marquee. Breathe. I will invent enough drainage to keep him busy for a quarter hour, but not a minute past. Do not dawdle, and do not, whatever you do, look as though you are enjoying yourself.” A pause, softer.
“You look like a hunted thing, Rosaline. Go and be a person for five minutes.”
“Thank you.”
With that, Rosaline went.
The beverage table stood in the shade of the marquee. She reached it and set down the glass she did not want. She pressed her fingertips to the cool linen and, for the first time in a fortnight, drew a breath all the way to the bottom of her lungs.
“Ye look terrible, lass.”
She did not have to turn. Her whole body had already told her he was there, the way it always told her, before her mind had caught up to the fact.
“Thank you, Your Grace.” She kept her eyes on the table, on the ranked glasses, on anything but him. “You have a gift for flattery. It will serve you beautifully in society.”
“I mean ye look like ye havenae slept in a fortnight. I’ve nae slept either.
I also mean I’ve endured dinners I loathed for the one chance of seein’ ye across a room, and ye never came.
” His voice was low, pitched under the noise of the party, meant for her ears only.
“Are ye all right, Rosaline? And daenae tell me ye’ve had a headache. I ken a headache. This isnae that.”
The gentleness in it was worse than any cruelty Samuel had ever managed. It threatened to undo her entirely right here, in the flat merciless sunlight, in front of everyone. She gripped the linen harder.
“We have to stop,” she said.
Silence followed.
“This. The arrangement. The lessons, all of it.” She made herself say it evenly, the way she had rehearsed it through eleven sleepless nights, because if she did not say it evenly, she would not be able to say it at all.
“It has grown far too dangerous, Your Grace. My brother suspects something. Now he watches me every waking hour. If we are seen, if there is so much as a whisper, it’s not only my ruin.
It’s also Beatrice’s and Ivy’s. It costs too much.
It always has. I was a fool to think otherwise, and I am putting a stop to it before it destroys the people I love.
” She drew in a breath. “We should go our separate ways. Cleanly. Now, while we still can.”
She felt him go rigid beside her.
“I see.” Something had crept into his voice, low and rough and bristling. “That’s yer decision, then. Made all alone, in the dark, without a word to me.”
“It is the only sensible—”
“Have ye found him?” he cut her off, and the words had an edge she had never heard from him. “Some soft, respectable lord with a fine coat and a clean name. Is that it? Have ye found the man ye mean to marry?”
Rosaline turned her head and looked at him. Whatever he saw on her face made his own go still.
“A husband will be found for me, Your Grace,” she said quietly. “That is rather the point. I will not be doing the finding.”
Before he could answer, before the thing rising in his eyes could reach his mouth, she walked off across the bright grass.
She did not let herself look back, though it took the last of everything she had.
Rosaline should never have let go of the table.
Without it under her hands, she was a wallflower again, the girl who counted windowpanes, all her hard-won armor stripped away in the space of one conversation.
When Samuel returned to collect her and steered her at once toward Lord Netherby, a dry stick of a baron with forty thousand pounds a year and the conversational range of a fence post, she could not remember a single thing Magnus had ever taught her.
“Lord Netherby admires horses,” Samuel prompted, silk over steel. “Rosaline rides a little. Don’t you, Rosaline?”
“I… um… Yes.” Her mind went blank.
Netherby looked at her, waiting for more.
The silence stretched, and stretched, before she heard herself add, “Horses are very large.”
Netherby blinked.
“That is,” she continued, “they are larger than one expects when one is close to them. Which I am. Sometimes. Close to horses.” She wanted to die. “Do you find them large?”
“I confess I had not considered it,” Lord Netherby said, in the tone of a man backing slowly out of a room. Then he bowed and left, and took forty thousand pounds a year with him.
Samuel’s smile did not so much as flicker. But his hand found her elbow, and this time his grip was cruel. He walked her at an unhurried pace along the edge of the marquee and behind a stand of yews at the garden’s edge, where the noise of the party dropped away and there was no one to see.
And then he rounded on her.
“A disgrace.” He said it very softly, which was worse than shouting, his face close to hers and perfectly composed in case any eye should stray their way.
“Larger than one expects. Do you know what you are, Rosaline? You are a stone I have carried up a hill for three years. Every door I open, you close. Every advantage I make, you squander. Netherby was prepared to overlook your age and your dullness for the sake of the connection, and you gave him horses are very large.”
“Samuel, I—”
“Be quiet.” His fingers dug into her arm.
“I am finished. Do you hear me? I am finished pretending you are capable of securing your own future. You will ruin our sisters with your sulking, your headaches, your imbecile mouth, and I will not permit it. I will choose your husband myself. Whatever wretch will have you at whatever price, and you will take him, and you will be grateful, and you will be gone from my house, my accounts, and my concern.” His lips thinned.
“God knows I have tried. God knows what I was given to work with. Our mother would be ashamed to call you her daughter if she saw the creature you have let yourself become.”
The garden tilted.
Of all the things he had ever said to her, in three years of small cold cruelties, that one went in clean under her ribs and struck something that had no armor over it at all.
Her mother. Her mother, who had smelled of orange-flower water and had let Rosaline plait her hair and had, in the last thin months of her life, pressed Rosaline’s small hand to the swell of her belly and said, “You will love her for me, won’t you? Whatever happens.”
Rosaline had loved Ivy. And Beatrice. And Samuel had just used the whole of it as a knife.
She could not speak. Her eyes burned. Samuel saw it, and something like satisfaction settled over his features.
“That is enough.”
The voice came from behind her. It was not loud, but it went through the little screened space like a blade through silk, and Samuel’s head snapped up, and Rosaline turned with him, her skirts catching against the low yew branches.
Magnus stood in the gap in the yews. Rosaline had not heard him come.
He was not looking at her. He was looking at her brother, and there was nothing polished about his face now, nothing of the careful manners she had spent weeks drilling into him.
What was underneath had risen to the surface, and it was terrible and very calm.
“Your Grace.” Samuel composed himself with effort, and his voice took on the smooth condescension he kept for men he considered beneath him. “This is a private conversation. You will oblige me by removing yourself from it.”
“I heard the entirety of yer private conversation.” Magnus approached them, unhurried. “That’s nae how a man speaks to a woman in his care, Darton. That’s nae how a man speaks to anyone.”
“That woman is my sister, and my charge, and none of your business.” Samuel jutted his chin.
“I am aware that in whatever bog you were reared, such distinctions are lost. But here, a gentleman does not insert himself between a peer and his family. Go back to the party. Go back to Scotland, for all I care. You are out of your depth, Your Grace, and you are making a spectacle.”