Chapter 28
“Ye’re certain ye remember the way, Duchess? Only I’d hate for ye to get lost in a hedge and fall into the arms of some strange Scot.” Magnus handed her down from the carriage, and the fox mask dangling from his fingers caught the September light. “I’m told it happens.”
“I am told the strange Scots are the greater hazard.” Rosaline took the mask from him and could not for the life of her stop smiling. She had been unable to stop for weeks. “One wanders into a maze a perfectly sensible woman and wanders out betrothed to a man in a kilt. A cautionary tale.”
“A love story, surely.”
“The jury is still deliberating.” But she let him tuck her hand into the crook of his arm, and the warmth that ran up her own at the simple contact was answer enough.
“Confess it,” he murmured as they crossed the lawn. “Ye came back to this maze hopin’ to be led astray again.”
“I came back because my husband insisted, and because I mean to win it this year, and because you look absurdly handsome in a fox mask and I am shallow enough to enjoy it.”
“Ah, the truth at last.” He looked entirely too pleased with himself. “Shallow suits ye, Duchess. I’ll have ye wicked yet.”
The Reynard’s Chase looked exactly as it had over a year ago, with the great hedge maze rising green and ancient behind the house, the lawns strung with the same masked and glittering crowd.
It was not, in truth, quite the same event at all. A year ago, Reynard’s Chase had been a close-kept secret, an invitation whispered to a chosen few, every guest sworn to their masks and their anonymity, half the pleasure of it the not-knowing.
Its success had ruined that.
Word had spread the way word does, and what had been a hidden game was now the most coveted card of the Season, and the host had bowed to the change with good grace, throwing the doors wider and letting the masks become ornament rather than armor.
That suited the ton, which had never in its life truly wished to be anonymous, only to be seen being exclusive.
Only Rosaline was entirely changed.
Last fall, she had crept along these edges as a wallflower, slipped into the maze to hide, and come out something else.
This year, she walked in on a duke’s arm in a gown the color of claret, with her chin up and her face bare of any mask, and watched the whole bright crowd turn to look and did not shrink from a single stare.
“Rosaline.” Beatrice reached her first, and there was something suspiciously bright in her sharp eyes as she took in her sister from head to foot. “You look well. You look appallingly well, in point of fact. It is quite disgusting, and I could not be happier about it.”
Behind her, Samuel inclined his head the barest fraction of courtesy allowed. “Your Grace.” The word cost him. Rosaline was above him now, past his reach, and it lived in every stiff line of him. “I trust Greythorne is treating you as you deserve.”
“He is treating me a great deal better than I was ever taught to expect,” Rosaline said pleasantly, and had the rare joy of watching the shot land clean and her brother find nothing to say to it.
“Blackholm. And the elusive Duchess.” Magnus’s voice warmed, and Rosaline turned to find the Duke and Duchess of Blackholm approaching, the Duchess already smiling at her as though they were old friends.
“Greythorne, you great fraud, you told no one you were getting married.” Evander Brightshaw clasped Magnus’s hand. “I had to learn it from a scandal sheet, like a servant.”
“I told ye, ye were three sheets to the wind at the time and remember nothin’.”
“That is slander, and probably true.” Evander turned to Rosaline and bowed. “Duchess. Ignore every word my friend has told you about me. Whatever it was, it is worse than that.”
“Do not let him frighten you.” The Duchess took both of Rosaline’s hands with a frankness that undid a knot of nerves Rosaline had not known she was holding.
“I am Mary. I spent my first months as a duchess quite certain I would be discovered as a fraud at any moment and sent home in disgrace. I promise you that feeling passes, and that, in the meantime, there is at least one other woman in every room who has felt exactly the same and would like, enormously, to be your friend. Come and call on me. I mean it.”
“I… yes.” Rosaline found herself smiling helplessly. “I should like that very much.”
It was only as the Blackholms drifted on that the crowd near them shifted and parted, and a silver-haired gentleman stepped smoothly into the space they left. Rosaline felt her husband go still as stone beneath her hand.
“Your Grace. And Lady Rosaline—forgive me, Your Grace, now.” The Earl’s smile deepened. “We spoke once before. I had no notion then that you would prove to be the woman who has worked such a transformation in him.” The Earl of Oldbrook bowed over Rosaline’s hand.
His manner was flawless, warm, grandfatherly. But his eyes, when they lifted to hers, were the coldest thing she had ever looked into. He did not once stop smiling.
“Your Grace, I confess the whole ton is in your debt. You have civilized the most interesting man in London.”
“You are too kind, My Lord.” Rosaline held his pale gaze and smiled her sweetest wallflower smile, the one that had hidden a clever mind for three full Seasons.
She felt Magnus’s arm twitch under her fingers and understood in that instant with a cold certainty that this was the man. She did not know how she knew. She simply knew, the way she knew a false clue in a maze.
“Though I hardly think him in need of civilizing. I find I rather prefer him wild.”
“Ha. Do you?” Something flickered in the old man’s eyes, assessing her anew, and she let him find nothing but a besotted wife. “How charming. We shall see you both at my little dinner, I hope. Do bring that clever tongue, Your Grace. I find I like it.”
With that, he bowed and walked off.
Rosaline let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
“That,” she murmured, “is a dreadful man.”
“Aye.” Magnus was looking at her with something new in his eyes. “And ye recognized it in under a minute. I married well.”
Then the horn sounded, high and bright across the lawn, and the master of the hunt called the chase, and there was no more time for dreadful men.
“Right.” Magnus tied her fox mask on for her, his fingers quick at the back of her hair, his mouth close to her ear.
“Last year, I let ye lead me astray through this beast of a hedge for the sheer pleasure of yer company. This year, we win the wretched thing. Ye read it. I’ll run it. Point me, and I’ll go.”
The rules had not changed. A golden fox waited at the maze’s black heart, and the first couple to reach it and carry it out claimed it.
Last year, she and Abigail had blundered into three dead ends and given up laughing.
This year, she stood at the mouth of the maze, closed her eyes for one breath, and let the shape of the thing unfold behind them the way shapes always did for her—the pattern, the logic, the single true path hidden under a hundred false ones.
“Left. Then the second right, not the first. The first doubles back.” She was already moving, and he was already with her, his hand on the small of her back steering her at a most unladylike run. “Trust me. Left again here.”
A branch tore at her sleeve. Behind them, a woman shrieked at a wrong turn. Magnus vaulted over a low hedge she would have gone round, then caught her by the waist and swung her bodily over it without once breaking stride, and she came down against his chest breathless and outraged.
“Did you just throw me over a hedge?”
“I conveyed ye over a hedge. Efficiently.”
“Efficiently.” She shoved her mask straight, laughing despite herself. “You may convey me anywhere you please, Your Grace, so long as you convey me to the right when I say right. You went left at the elder. I did tell you.”
“I’d trust ye through the gates of hell, lass, ye ken that, but must ye be right about it so smugly—”
“There. The gap in the yews. Go.”
They burst through the yews into the green heart of the maze, half a step ahead of a shrieking pair of Fenwicks, to find the little golden fox gleaming on its plinth.
Magnus swept it up and Rosaline clean off her feet in the same motion, spinning her once in the dappled light while she laughed and clutched his shoulders and told him breathlessly to put her down before someone saw.
“Let them see.”
He did not put her down. He held her up against him in the private green heart of the hedge, both of them masked and breathless, and his voice dropped to something that curled low in her belly.
“D’ye recall the last time I had ye alone in a hedge, Duchess?
Ye were a great deal more scandalized then.
And a great deal less mine.” His mouth brushed the corner of hers, maddening, unhurried.
“I’ve a mind to remind ye how that first afternoon went.
Slowly. The moment we’re home, and I’ve got ye out of this very fine gown. ”
“Magnus.” It came out unsteady. “We are in a public hedge maze. With a trophy.”
“Aye. And two Fenwicks gapin’ at us through the yews this very moment.
” He set her down at last, unrepentant, and pressed the little golden fox into her hands.
He tucked a loosened curl back beneath her mask with a tenderness entirely at odds with the wickedness in his eyes.
“Won fair, Duchess. Yer brains, me legs. We make a fearsome pair.”
And Rosaline, standing masked and laughing in the green heart of the maze where in the past she had hidden from the whole world, understood that she was hiding from nothing anymore.
She had crept into this hedge once and come out changed past knowing. She had walked into it this year a duchess, a wife, and a partner in the winning, and she thought she had never in her life been so glad to be so thoroughly seen.
They walked out to applause hand in hand, and Rosaline held the small gold fox and thought at once of Abigail, who had blundered every dead end of this maze at her side a year ago and lost with such good grace, and who deserved a golden fox far more than a mantel at Greythorne ever would.
“I am giving this away, you understand,” she told him, turning it in the light. “To Abigail. She earned it a year before I did.”
“Course ye are.” Magnus looked down at her, and whatever was on his face then was a great deal larger and more dangerous than the moment could hold. He did not say it, and neither did she. “Give the whole world away if it pleases ye. Ye’re a duchess now. Ye can afford to be generous.”
He lifted her hand and kissed the knuckle above her wedding band in front of everyone, scandalous, Scottish, and entirely hers.
“Only save yer evenings for me.”