Chapter Three
“You might have told me,” Cecilia said, “that this was to be an interview.”
Lord Vane had the grace to look mildly abashed, though only mildly. He was not, she was beginning to gather, a man much given to self-reproach.
“Would it have altered your answer?”
“It would have altered my preparation, which a woman in my position has learned to value rather highly.”
“You seem tolerably well prepared as you are,” he said, choosing the words with some care.
She studied him across the carriage; his hat was balanced on his knee, his face was pleasant and open, but beneath it, he was watching her very closely, taking in a good deal more than he gave back. Eight years of composing Lady Foskett’s letters had taught her to look from the inside.
“You came to my aunt’s house knowing it was closing,” she said.
“Which means you knew a good deal of my situation before the door was ever opened to you. This arrangement, whatever it proves to be, has been thought out with some care because I was not being assessed this morning so much as confirmed.”
He looked at her for a moment, then smiled, and the smile had none of the polish of his earlier ones. “He said practical. He ought to have said formidable.”
“You say it as though there were a particular gentleman behind all this,” she observed, “and as though you have been steering me toward him since the moment you sat down in my aunt’s drawing room.”
“It is the gentleman you are going to meet,” he turned the hat once on his knee, “who does not, I will tell you plainly, make a favourable first impression, and would be the first man to tell you so himself. I would far rather you had the truth of it from me in the carriage than be left to assemble it for yourself in his drawing room.”
“Then tell me what I am walking into. I prepare a great deal better with facts than without them.”
“A duke.”
“A duke?” She let it settle. “You will forgive me for observing that dukes do not, as a rule, send to Mayfair for penniless companions.”
“This one does, for reasons that will make their own sense to you within the hour. He has lately become guardian to three small girls, his brother’s daughters, both their parents dead within a twelvemonth.
They are at present kept by their other grandmother, Mrs Norwood, who holds the guardianship and a portion of what little the children were left, and who means to keep her grip on both. ”
“And he means to take them from her?”
“He means to give them a home, which the law will let him do only if he can show it to be a settled and respectable one. A bachelor of his reputation, alone in a great house in the country, will not answer the case. The court will want a wife, a household, the whole ordinary furniture of a family.”
“So, he requires a wife and requires her soon.”
“With enough urgency that I have driven the breadth of London at nine in the morning to interview a woman I had never met, and find myself, an hour later, hoping a good deal harder than is professional in me that she will say yes.”
The carriage had stopped, and she stepped down onto the pavement of a quiet, well-kept street and gave herself a moment to settle the weight of the thing before she permitted herself to feel any part of it.
A duke who wanted a wife on paper, and a woman who wanted a roof, an income and a door of her own to close behind her.
They would discover, in the next half hour, whether two such needs could be persuaded to fit together.
She had stood in less promising rooms, though she could not at that moment have named one for him.
***
Vane’s drawing room was everything her aunt’s had never been: comfortable and a little disordered, with books left where they had last been set down, and two chairs drawn companionably up to the fire.
A room lived in, rather than a room performed in, and she liked it rather more than she had meant to.
The man at the window did not turn at once.
He stood with his right side to the room and his left to the street, a placing too exact to be an accident.
His shoulders held very still and braced, as though he were waiting for a reaction and determined not to show that he expected one.
He was tall and broad, and he filled the room without appearing to mean to, too much of him for the space he had been given.
Then he turned, and she saw the scar, old and long healed, running the left of his jaw and down beneath a cravat knotted higher than fashion asked of any man. His eyes were grey, level, set in the careful blankness of someone with long practice at waiting. He was watching her for the flinch.
She gave him none, having nothing in particular to flinch at. The man was not monstrous. He was braced against a hurt, and she had read that much off him in the first second with a sureness that startled her a little.
Something moved in his face and was put away again, there and gone, suppressed almost before it had surfaced, as though it had caught him off his guard.
“Miss Wren.” His voice was low and even. “Gideon Crane. Sit, if you like.”
Not please sit down, nor may I offer you a chair, only sit if you like, which was either the bluntest invitation she had ever been paid or the most honest one, and she could not on the instant decide which she preferred.
She sat. He stood a moment longer, then appeared to judge the standing theatrical and took the chair across from her, while Vane folded himself into the seat by the fire, present and careful not to intrude.
“I will be direct,” Gideon said.
“I should be grateful for it. I have had a morning of people being otherwise.”
“I have filed a petition for the guardianship of my brother’s three daughters.
Mrs Norwood has entered a counter to it, and the court has made it tolerably plain that it will not hand three girls over to a man rattling alone about a house in the country on the strength of his name.
” He set it out plainly and in order, without one persuasive word or the least attempt to dress the thing finer than the facts would bear.
“It wants a settled establishment, a wife, in plain language. The marriage would be legal, and it would not be,” he paused a moment over the word, “conventional. I would ask nothing of you that the arrangement does not name.”
“Which is the management of your household, the care of the children, and the appearance of a working marriage, sufficient to satisfy a court.”
“That is the whole of it, and I will not pretend it is a small thing to ask of a stranger before noon.”
“And Mrs Norwood’s petition? How serious a thing is it, in your honest estimate?”
Something sharpened in him. “More serious than I was first advised. She is methodical, her solicitors are thorough, and she holds the standing of the existing guardianship already in her hand, which I cannot simply wave aside. She will not give up the children, nor the income that comes attached to them, without a long fight.”
“Then this is not a matter of showing a tidy house to a magistrate and going home satisfied. This is a contest, and very likely a long one.”
“It is, and likely a long one.” He held her eyes without retreat. “I want you to understand that much before you decide anything at all.”
“Then tell me about the children.”
Something happened to his face, less a softening than a shift in some inner arrangement that altered its set without quite changing it.
“Rosalind is twelve and careful. She has been the eldest long enough that it has become a way of being rather than an accident of birth, and she is sharp, and wary, and she will not make a moment of this easy.” He said it without complaint, as a man describes ground he means to cross, whatever the crossing costs him.
“Tabitha is eight, and gentle, and has been frightened long enough that it has settled into her body more than her mind. She startles at sounds. She will want steadiness before she wants warmth, though I think she will take the warmth in the end, once she has decided it means to stay.”
He paused.
“And Louisa is four.”
The careful blankness dropped a fraction, briefly, without his leave.
“She is afraid of nothing, as far as I know, except for her grandmother. She talks without once drawing breath, she holds decided opinions on the subject of horses, and she arranges her toys in order of battle and will defend the arrangement to the last.” Something warm and faintly helpless sat beneath the words.
He stopped, appeared to hear how much of himself he had let into the room, and the blankness drew back together with impressive speed.
She had seen it all the same, and entered it quietly in the account she had already begun to keep on him.
The man loved them already, before they were even his to keep, and it frightened him.
She could see that much plainly enough. A man did not guard his own face so carefully over children he was indifferent to.
“Then my answer is yes, Your Grace,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment. “You have not asked about the settlement.”
“I will, though it would not alter the answer, and it seemed only fair you should know that before we spend twenty minutes upon the particulars.”
Then he put out his hand, and she took it, and his grip closed warm and careful about hers, firm without any of the force that lesser men mistook for firmness.
His thumb came to rest a moment at the inside of her wrist, no more than the natural set of a large hand about a smaller one, but she was aware of the warmth of it in a way that had very little to do with any agreement and a good deal to do with how long it had been since a single soul had touched her with care of any kind, even the plain official care of a bargain struck.
Neither of them let go at quite the moment they ought to have.
She marked it, but kept the marking to herself.
The settlement was made, the marriage set for the Friday of the following week, and going toward the carriage afterwards, Vane considered her with what she was learning to read as his thinking face.
“You did not flinch.”
“I had no occasion to. He is not a man who wants that kind of behaviour.”
He looked at her with something pleased in his face, and something more guarded than pleased beneath that.
“No, he is not,” he said quietly. “The wedding will be on Friday, at the house, and very quiet. A carriage will come for you on Thursday. There will be papers enough to paper a wall, and a settlement a good deal more generous than you will feel you ought to take, but my advice is that you take it without argument, for he has thought about it a great deal longer than you have and he cannot abide being thanked.”
“You appear to know him very well.”
“Fifteen years since Oxford.” The lightness went out of him by a degree.
“He will not court you, Miss Wren. It is not in the bargain, and I do not think there is much left in him to attempt. Only do not mistake the silence for indifference. He feels a great deal more than he allows the world to see of him, and the world has given him every reason to allow it very little.”
“You are fond of him.”
“I am nearly the last person left who is, and I hope that three little girls will accompany my feelings for him.”