Chapter 12
Megan woke to light.
Not the thin gray light that crept through barred windows at the hunting lodge, apologetic and meagre as if it too had learned not to intrude.
This was winter morning light, pale gold and unhurried, falling across white linen and a counterpane of deep blue wool, and for one suspended moment Megan lay entirely still and could not remember where she was.
Then she did.
Saxton Castle. Oliver’s family seat.
She sat up slowly and looked around. The fire had burned low in the night, reduced to glowing coals that still threw enough warmth to keep the chill at bay. The chair where she’d fallen asleep sat empty by the hearth, her borrowed robe draped neatly across its arm.
She was in the bed.
Megan looked at the chair again, then at the bed, then at herself, still wrapped in the ivory robe, untouched, precisely as she had been when she’d curled into that chair and watched the fire and finally, finally let sleep take her.
She hadn’t walked to the bed. She was certain of that.
A vague impression surfaced through the fog of deep exhaustion.
Warmth. Strong arms. The particular steadiness of being carried by someone who knew how to carry a person without waking them, moving through darkness with the economy of a man long accustomed to silence and care.
She had a dim sense of settling against cool linen, of a blanket drawn up, of a hand that had hovered near her hair and then withdrawn without touching.
He’d carried her to bed.
He’d carried her to bed, and he’d left her there. Untouched. Undemanding. As if it had simply needed doing and so he’d done it and that was the whole of the matter.
Megan pressed her fingers to her mouth and felt, to her absolute bewilderment, a smile breaking through.
She was still smiling when the knock came.
“Come in,” she managed.
The maid was young, perhaps sixteen, with a no-nonsense manner that sat oddly on her slight frame and a curtsy so practiced it was clearly a point of personal pride.
She carried an ewer of hot water and had a gown draped carefully over one arm of deep russet wool, simple and well-made, that suggested it belonged to a woman of quality without announcing it.
“Good morning, my lady. Mrs. Fenwick thought this might serve better than the robe for breakfast. It belonged to Lady Eliza before she married and went to Bath.” The girl set the ewer on the washstand and laid the dress across the foot of the bed with practiced efficiency.
“I’m Annie. I’m to help you dress and show you to the dining room when you’re ready. ” Annie saw to the fire as she spoke.
Megan looked at the dress. Then at Annie. Then at the ewer of steaming hot water.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it more than the girl could possibly know.
Annie helped her dress without fuss and without questions, which Megan suspected was a carefully managed virtue.
The gown fit tolerably well through the shoulders, a little loose in the waist, and the russet brought a color to her face that the last week of cold and exhaustion had stripped away.
When Annie had finished Megan’s hair and stepped back to assess her work, the girl nodded once with the satisfied air of a craftsman inspecting a finished joint.
“The dining room’s two floors down, miss. I’ll take you.”
Saxton Castle revealed itself in corridor after corridor as they descended.
Portraits and polished floors and the smell of beeswax and old wood, all speaking of generations of careful maintenance.
The kind of house that expected certain things of the people who moved through it and trusted they already knew what those things were.
Megan straightened her spine and followed Annie down the stairs.
She heard the Duke before she saw him.
Not words, just the particular quality of silence that surrounds a person accustomed to commanding rooms, an expectant quiet that preceded his presence the way a change in weather precedes the storm itself. Annie opened the dining room door and curtsied, and Megan walked in.
The room was long and high-ceilinged, with windows overlooking a sweep of frost-silvered grounds.
A fire burned at the far end. The table could have seated twenty.
The Duke of Saxton sat at its head, alone, a cup of coffee at his right hand and a newspaper he was not reading folded beside his plate.
He looked up.
She had expected coldness. She had not expected assessment quite so open and thorough, the sharp gray eyes moving over her with the frank appraisal of a man who saw no reason to pretend he was not taking her measure.
Megan crossed the room and curtsied, because whatever else was uncertain, basic courtesy cost her nothing.
“Your Grace.”
“Sit down.” He gestured to the chair at his left, close enough for conversation, which she noted was not the choice of a man who intended to ignore her. “Coffee or tea?”
“Tea, please.”
A footman materialized and poured. Megan took the cup and waited, because she had learned long ago that the person who spoke first in a room like this one had already conceded something.
The Duke let the silence run for a moment before he spoke. “Oliver tells me you’ve been Penharrow’s prisoner since you were a child.”
“Yes.”
“He also tells me you intend to testify against him.”
“If it would help, yes.”
“Would help.” The Duke set down his coffee.
“And have you given any thought to what that actually means? To stand in front of a magistrate—or worse, face a trial—and speak publicly about what you suffered at Penharrow’s hands?
Do you understand what society would make of it? What would they make of you?”
Megan looked at him steadily. “I understand very well what society makes of women who’ve been through what I have, Your Grace. I’ve had considerable time to think about it.”
“Then you’ll understand that your testimony, however truthful, would be of limited use against a man of Penharrow’s standing.
His solicitors would dismantle it. His connections would ensure it never reached the right ears, and your history would become public knowledge.
” His tone was not unkind, which was, somehow, worse than if it had been.
He laid out facts. He had the air of a man who believed he was being helpful.
“You would be destroyed by the very process intended to deliver justice.”
“Quite possibly,” Megan said. “I find I’m not as afraid of being destroyed as I once was.”
Something shifted in the Duke’s expression, too brief to name.
“You are not a fool,” he said, which seemed to surprise him slightly.
“No.”
He picked up his coffee again. “My nephew has a tendency toward what I will generously call conviction. He forms it quickly and holds it absolutely. It is not always wisdom.” He paused. “He has formed a very particular conviction where you are concerned.”
Megan said nothing.
“Oliver is heir to this dukedom,” the Duke continued, his voice measured.
“He has responsibilities that extend considerably beyond his personal grievances, however legitimate. What he does from here—how visibly he moves against Penharrow, how publicly he aligns himself with your cause—will have consequences for this family for years to come. Penharrow has allies in Parliament. He has the ear of men who could make Oliver’s position very difficult.
” He looked at her directly. “I am not asking you to abandon your testimony. I am asking you to consider whether your presence here, as Oliver’s particular project, serves his interests or endangers them. ”
Megan set her teacup down carefully.
“Your Grace,” she said, “I would ask you one thing before I answer that.”
A slight inclination of his head.
“Did you know? Not about me specifically. I don’t imagine you did.
But about men like Penharrow. The things they do.
The women who disappear into houses like his and are never spoken of.
” She held his gaze without blinking. “Did men of your standing know, and look the other way because it was convenient?”
The silence that followed was not comfortable.
“That is not a question I am prepared to answer to a stranger at my breakfast table,” the Duke said finally.
“No,” Megan agreed quietly. “But it’s the right question.
” She straightened in her chair. “I understand what I am, Your Grace. I understand what I represent to a room full of gentlemen. I am inconvenient. I am a problem polite society prefers to manage quietly, from a distance, with a small sum of money and a strong suggestion that I remove myself somewhere I won’t cause difficulty.
” She folded her hands in her lap. “I have been managed in precisely that way for fourteen years. I don’t intend to permit it again. ”
The Duke’s eyebrows rose a fraction.
“Your nephew did not create my situation,” Megan continued.
“He chose to do something about it when most men would not. That choice is his, made with open eyes, and it is not mine to unmake for him because it is costly. If he decides the cost is too high—if he tells me himself that he wishes me gone—then I will go.” She met the Duke’s eyes.
“But I will not be managed out of this house by a conversation at the breakfast table, however elegantly conducted.”
Another silence.
The Duke of Saxton looked at her for a long moment with an expression she could not entirely read. Something moved through it. Not warmth exactly, but something adjacent to respect, arrived at reluctantly and not without some irritation.
“Oliver said you were stronger than you looked,” he said at last.
“He was right.” She picked up her teacup again. “He usually is.”
The Duke made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He lifted his newspaper with the air of a man who had said what he came to say and found the conversation had not gone as anticipated. “Help yourself to the sideboard. You look as though you haven’t eaten properly in a week.”
“A week and a half,” Megan said. “But who’s counting.”