CHAPTER TWO
"You cannot avoid this forever, Lucian."
The Dowager Duchess of Ashborn stood in the center of her son's study like a general surveying a battlefield.
She was a small woman, barely five feet tall, with silver hair swept into an immaculate coiffure and a spine that could have been forged from Sheffield steel.
At the age of three and sixty, Helena Ashborn had buried a husband, a son, and any softness she might once have possessed.
What remained was formidable.
Lucian did not look up from the letter he was pretending to read. "I am not avoiding anything, Mother. I am working."
"You are brooding. There is a difference." She moved to the window, her black silk skirts rustling with disapproval. "I have received correspondence from the Marquess of Thornwood this morning. He expects an answer regarding Cassandra."
The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
Lady Cassandra Mowbray. Daughter of the Marquess of Thornwood. Politically connected, impeccably bred, and possessed of the kind of pale, fragile beauty that reminded Lucian of porcelain dolls, lovely to look at, impossible to touch without breaking.
He had met her twice and both times she flinched attempting to conceal her repugnance of his disfigured countenance.
"The Marquess can expect whatever he wishes," Lucian said. "I have made no promises."
"You have made implications." The Dowager turned from the window, her grey eyes, so like his own, though infinitely colder, fixed on his face with surgical precision.
"Your father began negotiations for this match before his demise.
I have continued them in your stead, because you have shown no inclination to secure the succession yourself.
The Mowbrays control three parliamentary seats and have the ear of half the cabinet.
This alliance is not a preference, Lucian. It is a necessity."
"For whom?"
"For the duchy. For your legacy. For the family name that you seem determined to drag into obscurity.
" She crossed to his desk with measured steps, each one a punctuation mark.
"You are at the age of two and thirty. You have no heir.
You have no prospects of producing one, given your apparent determination to live as a hermit in this crumbling monument to your guilt. "
Lucian's hand tightened on the letter. The paper crumpled slightly beneath his fingers.
Guilt. She wielded that word like a blade, knowing exactly where to cut.
"I am aware of my responsibilities," he said quietly.
"Are you? You should conduct yourself with the composure befitting your station.” The Dowager reached into her reticule and withdrew an envelope, which she placed on his desk with deliberate care.
"This arrived with Thornwood's letter. It is a formal proposal of terms. You have one month to review them and sign the betrothal contract. The Marquess wishes to announce the betrothal at his winter ball."
Lucian stared at the envelope. The Mowbray seal, a stag rampant, rendered in deep red wax which gleamed in the morning light like a drop of blood.
One month.
Four weeks to sign away the rest of his life to a woman who could not look at him without trembling. Four weeks to accept that this was his fate, a cold matrimony, a colder bed, a lifetime of flinches and averted eyes.
He had known this was coming. Had known it for years, really, ever since the fire had taken his brother and his face and any hope he might have harbored of a normal existence.
The Ashborn line needed an heir. Lucian was the only one left to provide it.
Therefore, Lucian would wed not for love, not for companionship, but for duty.
It was, after all, the only thing he was good for.
"Very well," he heard himself say. His voice sounded distant, as though it belonged to someone else.
"I will review the terms."
The Dowager's expression did not change, but something in her posture relaxed almost imperceptibly.
"Splendid! I knew you would see reason." She turned toward the door, then paused.
"Oh, and Lucian? Do try to be civil to our guests at dinner this evening.
Professor Harcourt may be a tedious bore, but his daughter seemed...
observant. We do not need rumors spreading about the Duke of Ashborn's lack of hospitality. "
His daughter.
The image rose unbidden: honey-colored hair, brown eyes that refused to look away, a voice that carried challenge beneath its sweetness.
I disapprove of rudeness, Your Grace.
Lucian pushed the memory aside with more force than was strictly necessary. "The Harcourts are here for a fortnight at most. I doubt Miss Harcourt's observations will trouble us long."
"Indeed." The Dowager's gaze lingered on his face a moment longer than comfortable. "See that they don't."
She swept from the room, leaving behind the faint scent of rosewater and the heavy weight of expectation.
Lucian sat motionless for a long moment, staring at the envelope on his desk.
Then, very slowly, he reached for it.
The paper was thick, expensive, embossed with the Mowbray crest. Inside, he knew, would be lists of settlements and provisions, clauses about dowries and inheritances, carefully worded paragraphs about expectations and obligations. A contract. A transaction. A life reduced to legal terms.
He thought of Lady Cassandra's pale face, her trembling hands, the way she had pressed herself against the far wall of the drawing room during their last meeting, as though afraid he might lunge at her.
He thought of brown eyes that did not flinch.
Stop it.
Lucian shoved the envelope into a drawer and stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor. He needed air. He needed movement. He needed to stop thinking about a woman he had known for less than a day.
He strode to the window and stared out at the grounds of Blackthorn Hall.
The rain had cleared overnight, leaving the gardens sodden and grey, and the skeletal trees dripping with moisture.
In the distance, he could see the dark line of the woods and beyond them, invisible but ever-present in his memory, the ruins of the old stable.
The fire.
Thomas.
His fault, his fault, always his fault…
He turned away from the window before the memories could pull him under.
Work. He would work. Professor Harcourt would be in his study in…he checked his pocket watch, twenty minutes, ready to discuss Mercian boundary disputes and medieval land charters. It was exactly the kind of dry, intellectual exercise that Lucian needed to occupy his mind.
He would not think about the betrothal contract.
He would not think about Lady Cassandra's frightened eyes.
And he would absolutely, categorically, not think about Evangeline Harcourt.
At half past ten, Evangeline decided that she had been a very good girl for quite long enough.
She had breakfasted alone in her room, as instructed by Mrs. Graves.
She had written three letters, two to friends in London, one to her father's solicitor regarding a minor matter of accounts.
She had read forty pages of the novel she had brought with her, a rather scandalous Gothic tale involving a mysterious castle and a heroine with a pronounced tendency toward fainting.
And now she was bored.
The room, for all its grandeur, had begun to feel less like a sanctuary and more like a prison.
The walls pressed in. The silence thickened.
And outside her window, Blackthorn Hall waited, vast and mysterious and almost certainly filled with interesting things that she was probably not supposed to see.
Your daughter will, I am certain, find ways to occupy herself.
The Duke's words echoed in her memory, dripping with dismissal.
Evangeline smiled.
"Well," she murmured to herself, setting aside her novel. "If he insists."
She dressed carefully, choosing a day dress of soft amber wool that was both practical and becoming.
She pinned her hair into a simple arrangement that would survive exploration.
She checked her reflection in the mirror to ensure she was presentable, if not precisely elegant and then, with the determined air of a woman embarking on an expedition, she opened her door and stepped into the corridor.
Blackthorn Hall was even larger than she had realised.
The corridor outside her room led to another corridor, which led to a staircase, which led to a gallery, which led to yet another corridor, this one lined with suits of armor that watched her pass with empty metal eyes.
Evangeline navigated the maze with growing fascination, pausing occasionally to examine a painting or peer through a doorway.
The house was beautiful, in its way. Beautiful and sad, like a grand lady who had been abandoned by her admirers.
The furniture was fine but dusty. The carpets were rich but worn.
The chandeliers, magnificent crystal confections that must have blazed with light during the Hall's glory days, hung dark and neglected, their candles unlit.
He lives here alone, Evangeline thought, trailing her fingers along a marble balustrade. In all this space, all this silence.
It should have seemed pathetic. Instead, it seemed unbearably lonely.
She found the library quite by accident, a door left slightly ajar, a glimpse of floor-to-ceiling shelves through the gap. Evangeline pushed the door open and caught her breath.
The room was enormous. Two stories of books, reached by a rolling ladder and a wrought-iron gallery.
Windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, flooding the space with pale November light.
A fireplace large enough to stand in, and chairs arranged before it in an invitation to comfort that the rest of the house seemed to lack.
"Oh," Evangeline breathed. "Oh, you beautiful thing."