Chapter Five A Bargain in the Rain
By the time the Duke of Halgrave’s carriage turned away from Grosvenor Square, London had surrendered itself entirely to rain.
It did not fall gently. There was nothing poetic in it, nothing of silver veils or delicate melancholy.
It came hard against the carriage roof, struck the glass in slanting sheets, and turned the streets into black ribbons where lamps trembled and horses tossed their heads against the wet.
Water ran along the gutters in hurried streams, carrying straw, mud, scraps of paper, and all the small refuse of a city too busy to notice what it shed.
Umbrellas lurched in the wind like broken mushrooms. Footmen bent their heads.
Coachmen cursed. The world outside the carriage had blurred into motion and shine, while within it Marianne Vale sat very straight, hands folded, cloak damp at the hem, and felt the weight of Sebastian Rookwood’s silence pressing from the opposite seat.
He had not permitted her to return in the Lantern House carriage.
That was how he had phrased it at first.
Permitted.
The word had fallen in Halgrave House’s cold entrance hall while a footman held her cloak and the gossip sheet lay folded in Sebastian’s hand like something diseased.
Quiet women are easiest to bury. His face had been hard with anger then, and behind the anger something she had no wish to name because it would make him more difficult to oppose.
He had said, in that tone men used when they believed urgency excused command, that she would return in his carriage with two outriders and a Halgrave footman behind.
He would escort her himself. The Lantern House carriage could follow empty or wait; he did not care which.
Marianne had looked at him and said no.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. There were servants present, and she had no desire to turn her own safety into a performance for the hall. But the word had been clear enough that the nearest footman, trained though he was to stone, had discovered sudden fascination with a brass umbrella stand.
Sebastian had said, “Miss Vale, this is not a matter for debate.”
And Marianne had replied, “How unfortunate for you that I am in the habit of debating matters which concern me.”
In the end, they had left in his carriage, but not because he had permitted it, ordered it, arranged it, or assumed it.
They had left in his carriage because he had stood beneath the portraits of his ancestors, visibly mastering an irritation that wished to be command, and said, with effort enough that no one in the hall could miss the cost of it, “Miss Vale, will you allow me to escort you back to Lantern House? The threat was addressed to you in my house, and I would consider it a personal obligation to see you safely returned.”
It had not been apology.
It had not been surrender.
But it had been a question.
So now they sat across from each other while the rain battered the windows, and Tom rode outside in misery because he had declared no downpour in London would drive him from the place Miss Vane had assigned him, and Marianne had the irritating knowledge that Sebastian had been right in one respect.
The threat had changed something. A message pushed beneath a door was one sort of danger.
A message addressed to her by name and delivered into the Duke of Halgrave’s own house was another.
It meant she had stepped out from behind Lady Theodosia’s papers and become visible to whoever wished those papers buried.
Visibility, she reflected, was proving every bit as inconvenient as she had always suspected.
Sebastian spoke at last.
“You should not have touched the sheet.”
Marianne turned from the rain-streaked glass. “It was addressed to me.”
“It may have been poisoned.”
“It was a gossip sheet, Your Grace, not a goblet in a Gothic novel.”
“I am not amused.”
“I had noticed.”
His jaw tightened. Rain glanced across the window, casting wavering lines of water-shadow over his face.
In the grey light, the severity of him seemed sharpened: the strong nose, the unsmiling mouth, the line between his brows that had become more familiar to her than any sensible woman would have allowed in so short a time.
He had not removed his gloves. She wondered if that was because he disliked being unarmed, even in so small a way.
“You are careless with yourself,” he said.
Marianne’s eyebrows rose. “That is an astonishing accusation from a man who stormed into Lantern House two days ago threatening to demolish every protection it possessed.”
“I did not storm.”
“No. You entered like weather and expected the furniture to admire you.”
For one dangerous moment, she thought he might laugh. It passed quickly.
“You have an answer for everything.”
“No. Only for people who mistake control for sense.”
His gaze fixed on hers. “Control kept you from being crushed beneath a carriage yesterday.”
“No. Your arm did that.”
The words slipped out before prudence could catch them.
The carriage seemed suddenly smaller.
Sebastian’s expression altered, not much, but enough.
Marianne felt again, with humiliating clarity, the hard shock of his hand closing around her arm in Chancery Lane, the strength with which he had pulled her back, the brief, impossible second when she had been held against him and his heart had beaten beneath her cheek.
She had done very well not thinking of it.
Or rather, she had done very well thinking of it only when utterly alone and therefore unable to embarrass herself before witnesses.
His voice lowered. “And if I had not been there?”
“Then perhaps Tom would have pulled me back.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or perhaps I would have stepped aside in time.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or perhaps I would not,” she said, because false bravery was as tedious as male command, “and then we should have had a different problem. But the fact that danger exists does not grant you ownership of my judgement.”
“I have not claimed ownership of anything.”
She gave him a look.
His mouth tightened. “Today.”
“That is progress.”
“Miss Vale.”
“Your Grace.”
The carriage jolted, and for a moment both were forced to catch the straps beside them. Tom’s boots sounded above, shifting on the wet footboard. Outside, a cart wheel splashed through a puddle with such force that water struck the side of the carriage like thrown gravel.
Sebastian released the strap. “I will not allow another woman connected to Evangeline to be harmed.”
There it was. Not arrogance only. Not command only. Grief speaking through the language it had been taught.
Marianne’s answer, when it came, was quieter.
“I am not Evangeline.”
His eyes held hers.
“No,” he said. “You are not.”
“Then do not manage me as atonement for what was done to her.”
The words landed more heavily than she had intended, though she had meant every one of them.
She saw the blow pass through him. Not visibly enough for strangers, perhaps, but she knew by now that Sebastian Rookwood did not need to flinch in order to be wounded.
His stillness deepened. His gloved hand closed once upon the head of his cane.
“That is not what I am doing,” he said.
“Is it not?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing?”
He looked out into the rain as if the answer might be written upon the glass and spared him the indignity of discovering it inside himself.
“I am attempting,” he said at last, “not to repeat a failure.”
“Failures are often repeated by men who think only of preventing the same result, not the same mistake.”
He turned back. “And what mistake am I making?”
“You are making my safety a matter of your conscience rather than my agency.”
The words seemed to puzzle and irritate him in equal measure. “Agency does not stop a stone through a window.”
“No. Nor does conscience stop a forged signature. Yet both matter.”
He was silent.
Marianne softened, though not enough to surrender the point.
“You wish to prevent harm. That is not dishonourable. But you must understand this, Your Grace. Women are often protected in the same motion by which they are silenced. We are told to stay indoors for our safety, to surrender letters for our safety, to accept guardians for our safety, to marry for our safety, to cease troubling powerful men for our safety. Protection becomes another room with the key turned outside.”
“I am not your jailer.”
“No. Do not become one by accident.”
For a long time there was only the rain.
When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its edge. “You believe I made Evangeline’s safety a room with a locked door.”
Marianne looked at his face in the dim carriage light and felt, not for the first time, that honesty was a cruel form of mercy.
“I believe you were taught to think the locked door was kindness,” she said.
He closed his eyes briefly.
The gesture was so human, so unlike the controlled Duke who had first entered Lady Theodosia’s study, that Marianne looked away.
They did not speak again until the carriage turned into the square before Lantern House.
The house stood through the rain with lamplight burning behind every lower curtain.
It did not look dull now. In the wet dusk, with the front steps shining black and the brass knocker catching the carriage lamps, it looked alert.
Not frightened. Alert. The Halgrave guards stationed discreetly along the square were more visible than they wished to be, collars turned up against the rain.
Tom jumped down before the carriage had entirely settled and hurried to open the door, wet to the skin and indignant with weather.
The front door of Lantern House opened before Sebastian’s foot touched the step.
Mrs Finch stood there.
It was not usual for a housekeeper to open the door to a duke. Mrs Finch did not appear troubled by this breach of hierarchy. She held a lamp in one hand and a face like judgement in the other.
“Miss Vale,” she said, as if Sebastian were no more than the damp inconvenience that had delivered her. “You are soaked.”
“I am barely damp.”