Chapter Two
She did not stop until she had reached her room, shut the door, and set her back against it, as if the plain deal panel could keep out what had just walked into the house.
A duke. A London duke, with a quick crooked smile and a coat cut on Bond Street and the arrogant ease of a man who had never been made to wait for anything.
Ophelia James pressed her cold hands flat to the door, felt the grain of old oak rough beneath her palms, and made herself breathe slowly, the way her mother had taught her.
Slowly, my heart. Fear is only breath that has forgotten its manners.
She had been so careful. Three weeks of being no one.
Three weeks of Miss Olivia Jones, the dead baronet’s orphaned goddaughter, so quiet and grateful for her place that the eye slid over her and found nothing to catch on.
She had learned the trick long ago: make yourself small, unremarkable, easy to overlook.
The trick had worked perfectly at Plas Eira.
Even the sharp-eyed maid Bronwen, who brought her chocolate in the mornings and chattered of Welsh saints and local gossip, had said only once, sidelong, You’re no more a poor relation than I’m the Queen of Sheba, miss, but it’s none of my business and I’ll thank the good Lord for the company.
Now the one corner of the kingdom Ophelia had judged too remote for the Ton had produced a duke out of a blizzard.
She knew Adrian Sutton by name, of course.
Everyone knew the Duke of Calder, and Elise had spoken of her nephew often enough.
She had never set eyes on him before tonight, but his kind she recognised at a glance: an idle gentleman of the ton.
She had spent the whole of the Season before her flight being paraded through drawing rooms crowded with charming younger sons and indebted barons, the occasional viscount too bored to hide his calculations.
Every one had looked at her and seen, just behind her face, the long bright columns of her father’s ledgers.
The James fortune.
They smiled, charmed her father, and positioned themselves near enough to take whatever he might be persuaded to give them. And then Crispin Markham had taught her most thoroughly what such charm concealed.
Even here, even unspoken, his name felt like a cold finger on the back of her neck.
She pushed away from the door and crossed to the window, leaning into the deep alcove to peer through the tiny leaded panes, the cold of the glass reaching her skin before she had even touched it.
The snow had not slackened. It came down outside the glass, endless and indifferent, and she found she was glad of it.
Let it bury the lanes and seal the passes.
The snow trapped the duke, and a man who could not leave could carry no word of her to London.
Even if he somehow identified her, she would have time to make new plans and disappear before the news reached anyone who mattered.
Her panic subsided by degrees, and only then did she allow herself to consider that flight might not be necessary. Calder was dangerous only if he learned who she was, and he would not learn it. There was only Olivia Jones, who would be so dull that His Grace soon ceased to wonder about her.
An hour passed. Bronwen brought her supper on a tray, a bowl of hearty mutton stew and buttered bread, and Ophelia was careful not to meet the maid’s inquisitive expression.
The household must be in a ferment over the duke’s unexpected arrival, and Bronwen plainly wondered why Ophelia was hiding while everyone else hastened to attend him.
She tasted little of her supper, changed for bed, and listened as the servants carried water and bustled about in the hallways.
The house quieted by degrees. She had nearly steadied herself when a soft knock came and Lady Elise let herself in without waiting.
Ophelia shot to her feet, wringing her hands together so tightly her knuckles creaked.
“He has gone to bed, or is pretending to have done.” Elise sat on the edge of the narrow mattress with a sigh that seemed to come up from her boots.
“He drove through the pass, the great fool. He might have died, and then I should have had a dead duke to explain as well as a live runaway. One disaster at a time is all I ask.”
She looked up.
“Sit, child. You are standing there like a prisoner before the assizes.”
Ophelia sat in the room’s one hard chair and forced her hands to release their grip on each other. “I am sorry. I have brought this down on you. If I had not come…”
“If you had not come, you would be married to that creature by now.” The words were sharp, but her eyes were kind.
“We will have none of that. You came because your mother told you to come to me if you ever had need, and your mother was the dearest friend I ever had. I would not undo it for the world.”
Elise pressed her thin lips together, shaking her head slowly. “But I will not pretend to you, Ophelia. You are not a fool, and I will never insult you by treating you as one. My nephew is a problem.”
“He need not be.” Her voice came out level and quiet: the counting-house voice, the one she used when she found errors in her father’s books the clerks had missed.
People took her seriously when she used that voice, instead of the small soft one she used when she wanted to be ignored.
“He has no reason to look at me twice, and I shall give him none. In a few weeks the snow will go, and he will go with it. Until then, I shall employ the one accomplishment my father never knew he taught me. I shall be so dull as to be invisible.”
For a moment Elise looked at her with something close to grief, as though she saw the mother in the daughter’s face.
“You have a great many accomplishments, Ophelia.” She reached over and briefly covered Ophelia’s hand with her own dry, warm one. “I wish that were not among them.”
“It may protect me now.”
“It may.” Elise withdrew her hand. “Very well. You will be Miss Jones, he will be bored, and the snow will melt soon enough. But do not mistake Adrian for Markham. There is not a cruel bone in his whole idle body.”
“Then I have nothing to fear from him.”
“Cruel men are easier to guard against. They are generally obliging enough to show you where to stand.”
Ophelia studied her godmother’s face. “What are you warning me against?”
“I wish I knew.” Elise rose, smoothing her skirts. “Adrian means no harm. Neither did my brother. Men like them can cause a surprising amount of it all the same.”
It was no answer, but Ophelia could not doubt the concern behind it. She nodded. Elise gave a small smile that reassured neither of them.
“Now go to sleep,” Elise said. “We have a duke to bore to flinders in the morning.”
She bent and kissed Ophelia’s forehead, a thing she did rarely and which undid Ophelia more thoroughly than any warning could have. Then she went out, taking the worst of the chill in the room with her.
Ophelia did not sleep for a long time.
She lay in the dark and listened to the house settle: the old timbers ticking as the cold worked into them, the wind feeling its way along the corridors. Somewhere below, in a better room than hers, the duke was sleeping, or lying awake and wondering what his aunt had tried to hide from him.
Men like Calder did not need to be cruel.
They had only to become interested. Once they did, doors opened, servants answered questions, and other people’s secrets became theirs for the asking.
He had already looked at Ophelia with surprise.
Tomorrow surprise might become curiosity, and a duke’s curiosity was not a small thing to the person caught beneath it.
She thought of the way he had looked at her on the stairs. His had not been one of the calculating looks she knew. He had been caught unprepared, but curiosity had followed the surprise quickly enough.
Forgive me. I have arrived like an avalanche.
He had said it to put her at her ease. He had bowed to her, a duke to a woman dressed like a governess, as though it cost him nothing.
Perhaps it had cost him nothing. Kindness came easily to those who had always received it.
She turned onto her side, drew up her knees, and found beneath her pillow the hard, familiar shape of the book, its leather corners worn soft by years of handling. Her mother’s book. She did not need to open it to see the inscription on the flyleaf: For my dear Ophelia.
She kept it close every night. It was the one thing she knew she would never be able to sell, though the money might buy another week of safety. Some things were beyond price.
Cruel men are easier to guard against.
Ophelia thought she could guard against Adrian Sutton.
She had walked away on her wedding morning knowing Crispin Markham’s rage would follow her, crossed England and deep into Wales by slow and crooked stages, and arrived at a stranger’s door with only the hope that her mother had been right, that Elise would take her in without question.
She could survive a few weeks in the company of a charming man.
She fell asleep at last telling herself so, one hand resting on her mother’s book. Her final waking thought, treacherous and unbidden, was that Adrian had a kind face, and that it was a great pity that she must make sure never to look at it again.