Chapter Two The Duke Who Came Demanding #6
Sebastian watched her against his will.
He had assumed, upon entering Lantern House, that she was an obstruction.
A sharp-tongued keeper of another woman’s secrets.
A dependant inflated by the trust of her employer.
He had been wrong in one respect at least. Whatever Miss Vale’s station, she was not inflated by anything.
She was the thread by which half the house seemed invisibly stitched together.
That did not make her less dangerous.
It made her more so.
By late afternoon, his men had arrived and been arranged, after a negotiation that would not have disgraced a treaty, at points Miss Vane permitted.
The broken window had been boarded. Tom had found no intruder, only scuffed mortar on the rear wall and a footprint in the damp earth too blurred to be useful.
The threatening note lay beside the first, both now copied and locked away.
Sebastian should have left then. He had a houseful of records to gather, servants to question, old correspondence to revisit and an anonymous enemy to consider.
Instead, he found himself once more in Lady Theodosia’s study as the light thinned and the first lamps were lit.
Miss Vane had been called away to Miss Harlowe, who had finally begun to speak of her guardian.
Mrs Finch had gone below to terrorise the kitchen into producing tea strong enough for crisis.
For the first time since his arrival, Sebastian and Miss Vale were alone.
Not properly alone, perhaps. The door stood partly open. The house moved around them. Propriety hovered close enough to claim it had been considered. But no one stood between them now.
Miss Vale was at the desk, retying the Evangeline packet with its dark green ribbon. She had not removed the rosemary. Her fingers were careful with it.
Sebastian stood by the mantel, his gloves in one hand.
“You do not trust me,” he said.
She did not look up. “No.”
The honesty was almost restful.
“Because I am a duke?”
“Partly.”
“Because I am a man?”
“Substantially.”
He gave a short, humourless breath. “And because I am Evangeline’s brother.”
At that, she did look up.
“Yes,” she said.
The answer should have enraged him again. It did not. Perhaps fatigue had dulled the edge. Perhaps the letter had.
“I did try to see her.”
“I believe you.”
He had not expected that.
Miss Vale lowered her gaze to the ribbon. “That is not the same as believing you tried enough.”
The edge returned.
“You are merciless.”
“No. I am precise.”
“Precision can be cruel.”
“So can vagueness. It is how most families preserve themselves.”
He crossed the room before he had decided to move, stopping on the opposite side of the desk. “If you are using my sister’s memory for some wider scheme, Miss Vale, if Lantern House intends to make Evangeline into a weapon against my name or my family, I will destroy this house.”
The words were too harsh. He knew it as soon as he had said them. Yet part of him meant them, or thought he did: the part still armed against humiliation, against old scandal, against the terror that Evangeline’s truth might condemn not merely Ashmont or Mordaunt or his father, but himself.
Miss Vale tied the ribbon into a neat bow. Then she placed the packet flat on the desk between them and looked at him.
“Men have been threatening to destroy women’s houses for centuries, Your Grace. They are rarely as original as they think.”
He stared at her.
There was no fear in her face. Not because she was foolish enough to believe him powerless. Quite the opposite. She understood power very well. That was what made her refusal to bow beneath it so astonishing.
“Good evening, Miss Vale,” he said.
“Good evening, Your Grace.”
He left before he could say anything else.
The hall was quieter now. Lantern House had absorbed the threat, boarded the glass, set its watches, fed its frightened residents and returned, not to peace, but to function.
Sebastian accepted his hat from Tom, gave brief instructions to the Halgrave footman stationed discreetly beyond the square, and stepped out into the damp evening with Evangeline’s letter burning behind his eyes.
His carriage waited beneath the bare trees. He did not enter it immediately.
Instead, he looked back at Lantern House.
In the dusk, with lamplight beginning to glow behind the curtains, it looked as it had when he arrived: respectable, narrow, slightly unfashionable, unlikely to trouble anyone of consequence.
Yet now he saw the deception of that plainness.
It was not dull. It was guarded. It had learned to hide in the open.
Like Miss Vale, perhaps.
The thought followed him into the carriage and remained with him through the short drive to Halgrave House, though he did his utmost to replace it with more useful matters: anonymous letters, Mordaunt’s records, Ashmont’s debts, Evangeline’s hand on old paper, the wrong name on a copied settlement, the impossible date.
By the time the carriage turned into Grosvenor Square, he had resolved to begin with the family strongroom and every box sealed after his father’s death.
He had also resolved not to think again of Miss Marianne Vale’s eyes when she told him his sister had not been broken.
He failed before reaching his own front door.
Back at Lantern House, Marianne remained in Lady Theodosia’s study until the sound of the Duke’s carriage faded entirely.
Only then did she allow herself to sit.
The day had left a tremor in her hands that she disliked exceedingly.
She placed both palms flat upon the desk and waited until stillness returned by force of will.
Outside, footsteps crossed the hall: Mrs Finch checking bolts, Tom speaking quietly to one of the Halgrave men, Helena’s low voice from the blue parlour, Beatrice protesting that she was perfectly capable of keeping a poker by her bed.
Ordinary sounds. Necessary sounds. A house continuing.
Marianne drew the Evangeline packet toward her again.
She should have locked it away at once. Helena had instructed that all papers be secured before dinner.
Yet something in the ledger scrap had troubled her all day, a small unease beneath the larger alarms. She untied the ribbon once more, gently moved the rosemary aside, and took out the torn piece of ledger paper.
The lamplight was different from morning light. Warmer, lower, angled across the page rather than falling cleanly upon it. What had appeared at dawn as a blot in the margin now revealed edges too deliberate for accident.
Marianne lifted the lamp closer.
The mark beside the initials was not merely a dark shape.
It was a rook.
Not drawn. Stamped.
A small black rook, crowned, with one wing slightly raised.
Her breath caught.
She had seen that shape today.
Not on the threatening letter. Not in Lady Theodosia’s notes. Not among the old papers.
She saw again the Duke of Halgrave standing in the study, removing his gloves finger by finger. She saw the strong, controlled hand that had held Evangeline’s letter. She saw, on the smallest finger of his right hand, the heavy signet ring he wore not as ornament but as inheritance.
A black rook, crowned, with one wing slightly raised.
The same.
Marianne sat back slowly.
The room seemed colder than before, though the fire had not burned low.
On the desk, Evangeline’s letter lay beside the ledger scrap, one woman’s plea beside one small mark of power.
Marianne looked from one to the other and felt the fragile beginnings of the day’s reluctant certainty shift beneath her.
Sebastian Rookwood had come demanding truth, or property, or perhaps absolution.
But the mark of his house sat beside the stolen sums.
And now Marianne had to ask herself the question Lady Theodosia had left her no choice but to ask.
Was the Duke of Halgrave investigating the crime that had destroyed his sister?
Or had he inherited more of it than grief?