The Convenient Bride and the Beast (Wounds and Scandals #3)

Chapter One

“You will, of course, find your own arrangements.”

Lady Foskett said it over the butter, the knife moving in long even strokes, her eyes never once lifting from the toast.

“Of course, Aunt.” Cecilia’s voice came out perfectly level, which gave her a small private satisfaction she had no intention of showing.

“The house closes at the end of next week. I shall be at my sister’s in Wiltshire by Friday. Mrs Potts has had her notice, and Thomas comes with me.” She paused to drink. “The agency is seeing to the rest. I trust you have some connection you might apply to.”

“I have a few lines I mean to follow up on.”

It was not, in any strict sense, true. The governess post in Hertfordshire, her last real prospect, had dissolved three weeks ago in a short apologetic letter about a younger candidate, and she had folded it into the grate and gone back to the accounts.

“Have you, indeed? You might have mentioned them rather earlier, you know. But then you were never very forthcoming about your intentions.”

“I had not supposed my intentions to be of much interest to the household.”

“They have never had cause to be. You have been comfortable enough these eight years, I think. Fed, housed, and kept in respectable company. There are a great many women in your situation who would have given a good deal for as much.”

“I am aware of it, Aunt. You have been good enough to remind me with some regularity.”

“And yet you say it as though it were a grievance.”

“I say it as though it were the weather. One remarks upon it, but one does not expect it to alter.”

“They are of interest now, in any event, when they have grown inconvenient.” Lady Foskett dabbed at her mouth. “I do hope you have not been counting on remaining past Friday. The lease will scarcely keep itself open for the sake of one person’s want of foresight.”

“I had not imagined it would.”

“You might write to the agency yourself, if it eases you. A companion of your years and your particular usefulness is not so very difficult to place, provided one is not overnice about the terms.”

“You are all consideration, Aunt.”

“I am practical, Cecilia, which is a good deal more useful than consideration and rather more to be relied upon.”

“You will want a character for me, I suppose.”

“I shall write you something suitable.” Lady Foskett considered the prospect as though it were a novel and faintly tiresome one.

“Steady, capable, discreet. Nothing that commits me to an opinion, you understand, but enough to open a door. It is a great deal more than the Wrens of Devonshire have offered you, who, I observe, have still not troubled to write.”

“They have not.”

“No. Blood is a good deal less reliable than people are fond of pretending. The world runs upon usefulness, Cecilia, and very little besides, and you have at least had the wit to make yourself useful.” She rose, settling her wrapper about her shoulders.

“One cannot always have what one hopes for. You of all people ought to know that by now.”

“I had hoped, at the least,” Cecilia said, and the evenness of it cost her something she kept off her face, “that my own arrangements might not be wanted quite so promptly.”

Lady Foskett paused at the threshold, and it was the particular pause that always preceded the remark she had been saving for last.

“Who else would have you, Cecilia, at your age and with your prospects?” Pleasant, almost kind, which was somehow the worst of it. “You ought to be grateful I kept you about me as long as I have.”

The door drew shut behind her, soft and well-oiled, her tread already on the stairs to oversee the trunks.

Cecilia allowed herself one minute by the clock and not a second more.

There was no connection to apply to and never had been, only the registry office, a letter that could go out today, and the open question of where she was to sleep and what she was to eat until something came of it.

She got as far as the fourth sentence at the writing desk, the one obliged to explain her availability, before the footman appeared with the silver tray.

“A card, miss.”

She took it up. Lord Everett Vane. The name struck no chord, though the Lord suggested a viscount, and the Vanes were respectable enough.

“At this hour?” She turned the card once in her fingers. “Is the gentleman still waiting?”

“In the drawing room, miss. I did not quite like to turn him away.”

“You did very right. I shall come down directly.”

He stood at the window when she came in, a man of perhaps thirty, fair-haired and broad through the shoulders, examining Lady Foskett’s porcelain shepherdesses with an expression that managed both genuine interest and faint alarm.

A dimple showed when he glanced up, and he smiled as though he had never once in his life been unwelcome anywhere.

“Miss Wren. Forgive the intrusion. I had hoped you might spare me half an hour.”

“As it happens, Lord Vane, I have a good deal more than half an hour at my disposal.” She took the chair that had always been her aunt’s, for no reason beyond a sense that this was a morning for choosing where she sat. “You may even have the whole of it, should you prove interesting.”

Something recalibrated in his face as he understood that her freedom this morning was not the pleasantry she had dressed it as.

“You will think me forward,” he said, taking the chair opposite, “but I would rather not waste your morning, nor my own, on the usual pleasantries.”

“Then we already agree. I have had a surfeit of pleasantries before noon and very little to show for any of them.”

“I had hoped we might be of one mind on that,” he said, and clasped his hands.

“You have brought no papers,” she went on before he could begin. “No portfolio, no letter of introduction, no list of a family’s requirements. Whatever you have come to propose, it is not a governess you are seeking, or you would have come equipped to engage one.”

“I was warned you would notice as much within the quarter-hour. I see the warning has done me no good whatever.”

“Few warnings do. People are forever being told what I am likely to observe, and forever astonished when I observe it. And who, may I ask, gave you so accurate a warning?”

“That is rather further along than I am permitted to be just yet.” The dimple again. “Might I put a question to you instead? Would you call yourself a practical woman, Miss Wren, by disposition?”

“I would call myself a woman who has never been able to afford to be anything else, which I expect comes to much the same thing for your purposes.”

“It comes to a great deal for my purposes.” He leaned in. “I am relieved, in truth. I had begun to fear I was sent to find someone ornamental.”

“Then you were sent to the wrong houses entirely, until this one. I have never in my life been ornamental, nor had the leisure to learn the trick of it.”

“Discretion, then. Is that a quality you possess, Miss Wren, or only one you would claim if a gentleman were tactless enough to ask?”

“A woman who has spent eight years in other people’s drawing rooms learns to hold her tongue, or she does not last eight years. I have swallowed a great many things I might have said. I have found, on the whole, that the unsaid keeps rather better than the said, and costs a good deal less to keep.”

“That is very nearly the most useful answer anyone has given me in a fortnight.”

“Then your fortnight has been poorly spent, my lord, or poorly populated.”

“And if a position were to take you a good distance out of London,” he said, “to a household in the country, where the society is thin and the evenings are long, would that weigh with you?”

“It would weigh in its favour. London has shown me a great deal of itself these eight years, very little of it kindly, and I should not grieve to see the back of it.”

“You have no attachment to keep you, then? No one who would object to your going or expect to be consulted upon it?”

“You ask that as a man who already knows the answer and would merely like to hear me say it plainly. There is no one. My father has been some years dead, his people in Devonshire have made their feelings tolerably clear, and my aunt, as you may have observed, will be glad to have the matter settled before her trunks are loaded.”

“I am sorry for it,” he said, and to her mild surprise he sounded as though he meant the thing.

“You need not be. A woman who expects nothing is very seldom disappointed, and I have made rather a long study of expecting nothing.” She tilted her head a fraction.

“But you have not come the length of London to condole with me over my relations, Lord Vane. You have come to satisfy yourself of something. Have you done it?”

“Very nearly, Miss Wren.”

“Then put the last of your questions to me, whatever it is, and we shall both be spared the suspense.”

“And were you to be offered a situation,” he said, “unconventional in certain respects, but answering to something of genuine and lasting value, would you consider…”

“Lord Vane.” She said it pleasantly, in the voice she kept for her aunt’s roundabout strategies and for solicitors explaining a disagreeable thing at the greatest possible length.

He stopped at once. From overhead came the muffled commotion of trunks hauled down from storage, and she let it sit between them for a moment, in no hurry at all to fill it.

“You are either very poor at paying social calls, or remarkably good at something else altogether, and I confess I should like very much to know which it is.”

He looked at her for a moment. Then he laughed, sudden and quite without guard, nothing at all like the practised warmth he had carried in through the door.

“The second,” he said. “Entirely the second, Miss Wren, and I begin to think I have been sent to precisely the right house.”

He leaned forward, and for the first time since he had entered the room, he looked as though he were about to say something that mattered.

“In that case,” said Cecilia, “I suggest you say what you came to say.”