Chapter Two
“The roof is leaking again.”
Rosalind delivered this news with the cheerful resignation of someone who had grown accustomed to domestic catastrophe.
She stood in the doorway of the kitchen, a bucket in one hand and a look of mild inquiry on her face, as though she were asking Helena’s opinion on the weather rather than announcing the latest in a series of structural failures.
Helena set down her quill, she had been writing yet another letter to yet another registry office, this one in Plymouth, and pressed her fingers to her temples.
“Which room?”
“The small bedroom. The one with the blue curtains. I’ve put a pot under it, but the pot is rather small and the leak is rather enthusiastic.”
“Of course it is.” Helena stood, brushing ink-stained fingers against her apron.
She had flour on her sleeves from the morning’s failed attempt at bread, Rosalind had burned the first batch, by some inexplicable misfortune, and Helena had succeeded only in producing a confection far better suited to serving as a door-stop than a loaf of bread. “Is Mama awake?”
“She had a difficult night. I gave her the medicine an hour ago. She’s resting now.”
A difficult night. The words landed with the familiar weight of things that could not be fixed with letters or determination.
Their mother’s illness was a slow, quiet thief, stealing her strength in increments so small they were almost invisible until you looked back and realised how much had been taken.
“I’ll check the leak,” Helena said. “You watch the…”
Suddenly the sound of wheels on gravel came from outside. The unmistakable rhythm of horses, not the plodding farm horses that occasionally passed the vicarage, but something finer. Matched. Precise.
Helena moved to the window.
A carriage had stopped in front of their gate.
Not just any carriage, a London carriage, polished to a gleam that seemed almost offensive against the muddy Somerset lane.
The crest on the door was too distant to distinguish clearly, but it was undeniably present, painted in gold leaf that caught the weak morning light.
“Helena?” Rosalind had come to stand beside her. “Who on earth can it possibly be?”
The carriage door opened. A man stepped out.
Tall. Dark-haired. Impeccably dressed in a way that made their modest garden look even more modest by comparison.
He looked at the vicarage with an expression that suggested he was not entirely certain he had arrived at the correct address, then squared his shoulders with the air of a man preparing to face something unpleasant.
Helena’s stomach dropped.
The uncomfortable aristocrat from the assembly. The one who laughed.
“Oh my,” Rosalind breathed. “Helena, is that, do you know who that is?”
“No.” Helena was already in the act of untying her apron when she checked herself, reflecting on the utter futility of the gesture.
She had flour on her dress and ink on her fingers and a leak in her ceiling and a Duke, because he was certainly a Duke, nothing less than a Duke would travel in a carriage like that, was walking up her garden path. “Yes. Possibly. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
The knock came before Helena could formulate a response. Three precise raps against the door, neither timid nor demanding. The knock of a man who expected to be answered but was not entirely certain he wished to be.
“I shall answer it,” Rosalind said, already moving.
“No.” Helena caught her arm. “I’ll go. You stay here. And don’t, just stay here.”
She walked to the door. She did not check her reflection in the glass because there was no point, she already knew what she looked like, and no amount of last-minute adjustment would transform her into someone who belonged in the same sentence as the man on the other side.
She opened the door.
The Duke of Westmere, for that was who he must be; she had heard the name whispered at the assembly, connected to the uncomfortable stranger and his fine clothes, stood on her doorstep looking entirely out of place.
Up close, she could see details she had missed across the crowded assembly room: the slight shadows beneath his dark, gold-flecked eyes and the careful neutrality of his expression, the way his hands hung at his sides as though he was not quite certain what to do with them.
He was holding a card. He extended it toward her with the precision of a man following a script he had memorised but not entirely understood.
“Miss Whitmore.” His voice was deeper than she had expected. Quieter. “I hope I am not intruding.”
The Duke of Westmere is standing on my doorstep, Helena thought, with the distant clarity that sometimes descended during moments of particular absurdity. I have flour on my person. Fate is evidently taking immense pleasure in the day’s strange happenings.
She took the card. His name was printed in elegant script: Edmund Ridley, Duke of Westmere. Below it, an address in London that probably cost more than everything Helena had ever owned combined.
“Your Grace.” She was pleased to note that her voice was steady. “I believe you already have. Intruded, that is.”
A shadow of something unexpressed betrayed itself upon his features, surprise, perhaps, or the echo of the laugh she had startled out of him a week ago. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are standing in my garden. The intrusion has already occurred. The only question now is whether you intend to continue it indoors, where I can at least offer you a chair that isn’t covered in mud.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Something that might become one, if given sufficient encouragement.
“That is very kind of you.”
“It isn’t kind at all. It’s practical. If you collapse from standing too long in the Somerset damp, I shall have to explain to someone why there is a Duke on my lawn, and I haven’t the energy for that conversation.”
She stepped back, holding the door open. He hesitated for just a moment, long enough for her to notice, not long enough to be rude, and then crossed the threshold into the vicarage.
The sitting room was small. Helena had never thought of it as particularly small before; it had always seemed adequate for their needs, cosy even on cold evenings when the fire was lit and her father’s voice had filled the space with warmth.
Now, with the Duke of Westmere standing in the middle of it, the room seemed to have grown smaller. He appeared far too tall for the ceiling, too imposing for the furniture, and altogether too grand for the modest proportions of her quiet existence.
“Please,” she said, gesturing to the settee. “Sit. I’ll have my sister bring tea.”
She found Rosalind in the hallway, eyes wide, practically vibrating with questions she had been forbidden to ask.
“Tea,” Helena said. “The good cups. Don’t say anything.”
“But.”
“Anything, Rosalind.”
Her sister retreated to the kitchen with visible reluctance. Helena took a breath, pressed her hands flat against her flour-dusted skirt, and returned to the sitting room.
The Duke had not sat. He was standing by the window, looking out at the garden, or perhaps at the carriage waiting beyond it, his escape route should this encounter prove too strange to bear.
When Helena entered, he turned, and she caught something unguarded in his expression before he smoothed it away.
Nervousness, she realised with a start. He is nervous.
This, more than anything, made her curious.
“Your Grace.” She sat in the chair nearest the fire, the one with the worn armrest that she had always meant to repair and never found time for. “I confess myself at a loss. I was not aware we had been introduced.”
“We were not. Not formally.” He finally moved to the settee, lowering himself onto it with the careful precision of a man who expected the furniture to give way beneath him. “I saw you at the assembly a few days ago. You were quite memorable.”
“Memorable.” Helena let the word sit between them. “That is one way to describe it. I believe I insulted Mrs Dawkins and departed without observing the proper social niceties. Hardly the behaviour of a woman one seeks out for further acquaintance.”
“You told her that young men were exhausting to maintain and rarely worth the investment.”
“I did.”
“It was the most honest thing anyone had said all evening.”
Helena studied him. He met her gaze steadily, not with the practiced ease of a man accustomed to charming his way through conversations, yet tempered by something far more unvarnished, and infinitely more authentic.
“You have me at a disadvantage, Your Grace,” she said. “You clearly know something of my circumstances, or you would not be here. I know nothing of yours beyond the fact that you own an extremely expensive carriage and appear to have no fondness for country assemblies.”
“The assemblies are tedious,” he agreed. “The carriage is inherited.” He paused. “I made inquiries about your circumstances. After the assembly. I hope you will not think me indiscreet.”
“You are sitting in my parlour without invitation, asking about my personal affairs. The opportunity for non-intrusion, Your Grace, has long since passed.” That almost-smile appeared again.
It formed a singular transformation upon his features, softening that guarded composure and revealing, if only for a fleeting instant, the man beneath the noble title.
“Your father was the Reverend Thomas Whitmore,” he said.
“He held this living for twenty-three years. He passed away three years ago. Your mother is unwell. Your younger sister is of eligible age but has not had a Season. The living has been granted to a new vicar who will take possession of this house in…”
“Six weeks.” Helena’s voice was flat. “You have been thorough.”
“I find it better to be thorough than to proceed in ignorance.”
“And what, precisely, are you proceeding toward?”
Rosalind chose that moment to appear with the tea tray. Helena watched the Duke’s gaze track her sister’s entrance, noted the quality of the cups and, the modest spread of biscuits.