Chapter 2
Two
Your Grace,
Do you ever wonder whether duty has quietly replaced the life you might have chosen for yourself?
V.
Henry, Duke of Blackmere, scowled and read that again.
Then he set it down on the desk beside his estate correspondence — the quarterly reports from his solicitor, the letter from his land steward about the south tenant farms, the invitation to a Parliamentary committee dinner he had already decided to decline — and looked at it as though it might, if studied with sufficient patience, explain itself.
It did not.
He picked it up and read it a third time, which produced no additional information but confirmed his initial impression that whoever had written it had done so with remarkable self-assurance.
There was no preamble. No apology for the intrusion.
No careful establishment of acquaintance or credential, no suggestion that the writer was at all uncertain about putting such a question to a duke they had apparently never met.
Just the question, and a single letter.
V.
Henry turned the envelope over. Plain paper, no crest, no seal beyond a small drop of unidentifiable wax.
The handwriting was neat — controlled, but with a slight flourish at the end of certain letters that suggested the writer had been pleased with a particular phrase.
The messenger, according to Simmons, had arrived before six, refused to give any name, and departed before anyone thought to detain him.
He set the letter down again and picked up the quarterly report.
He read the same paragraph three times without retaining a single word of it.
The question itself was not, he told himself, a particularly sophisticated one.
Do you ever wonder whether duty has quietly replaced the life you might have chosen for yourself?
It was the sort of thing one found in the more earnest variety of philosophical pamphlet, the kind that circulated among people who had a great deal of leisure and not enough occupation for it.
The question assumed, rather presumptuously, that duty and choice were necessarily in opposition — that a man who governed his life by responsibility did so at the cost of something he actually wanted.
Henry had never experienced any particular difficulty with the distinction.
He had inherited the dukedom at three-and-twenty, when his father died of a fever that took him in under a fortnight.
He had married at six-and-twenty, sensibly and without drama, a woman of good family and steadier temperament than most, and their years together had been marked by mutual respect and the absence of complication.
When she died, shortly after Arabella's birth, he had grieved in the quiet, private way he did everything, and then he had turned his attention to his daughter and his responsibilities and had not looked back.
He had made his choices deliberately. Every one of them.
He placed the quarterly report precisely at the center of his desk and stood.
"Simmons."
His secretary appeared from the adjoining room with the promptness of long practice. "Your Grace?"
"The riding party this morning. What time did I say we would leave?"
"Half past nine, Your Grace. Lady Arabella has been ready since eight."
Henry glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was quarter past nine. "Have the horses brought round."
Arabella was, in fact, waiting in the entrance hall with her riding gloves already on and the expression of a person who had been exercising considerable patience and wished it to be acknowledged.
"You said half past nine," she said, falling into step beside him as he came downstairs.
"It is half past nine."
"It is twenty-eight minutes past." She looked up at him with dark eyes that were entirely too perceptive for a twelve-year-old. "I have been ready for an hour and a half."
"Then you are admirably well-prepared."
"Emily said there will be at least twenty people." Arabella pulled on her second glove with a sharp tug. "She said Lady Forsythe's nephew is coming, and the Alderton girls, and possibly—" She stopped. "Papa, are you listening?"
Henry, who had been thinking about the letter, looked down at her. "Lady Forsythe's nephew."
Arabella gave him the look she reserved for moments when she suspected she was being managed. It was, he had often thought, an unnervingly accurate look for someone her age.
"I am listening," he said.
"You have that expression."
"I have no expression."
"You have the one that means you're thinking about something else entirely and hoping I won't notice." She fell into step beside him as they went out to the horses. "Is it the estate accounts again?"
"It is nothing. Are you ready?"
Arabella was ready. She was always ready. It was one of the qualities he admired most in her and found, on certain mornings, somewhat exhausting.
The gathering was already well underway when they arrived — horses and riders spread across the lawn of the Hargrove house, the kind of pleasant late-spring morning that brought out half the ton for any event with an outdoor component.
Henry handed his horse to a groom and stood for a moment at the edge of it all, noting the faces he recognized, the groupings that had formed, the particular social geometry of a gathering like this one.
He had come because he had promised Arabella. He intended to speak to three people he needed to speak to, allow Arabella her time with her friend, and leave at a reasonable hour. This was a perfectly satisfactory plan.
Arabella spotted Emily Bennet within approximately thirty seconds of their arrival and was gone before Henry had finished assessing the field.
He watched her cross the lawn and fall into animated conversation with a slight, fair-haired girl about her own age, and something in him settled, the way it always did when Arabella was happy. Whatever else a morning might contain, that particular sight was always enough.
He turned back to the gathering.
He had managed perhaps ten minutes of tolerable conversation with Sir Edmund Hargrove about the proposed drainage improvements to the lower fields when Hargrove's attention moved past his shoulder and brightened in the way of a host spotting a guest he had been hoping to introduce.
"Ah — Miss Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, come and let me make you known to the Duke of Blackmere."
Henry turned.
There were two women. The elder — Mrs. Bennet, presumably — was already extending her hand with the practiced warmth of a woman accustomed to making herself agreeable at gatherings, and Henry bowed with the automatic courtesy of long habit.
Then he looked at the younger one.
She was watching him with an expression of composed attention — not the careful blankness some ladies produced when trying to appear unimpressed, but something more straightforward than that.
She simply looked at him directly, in the way of a person who found nothing particularly remarkable about the situation, and when he met her gaze she did not look away.
It was, Henry realized, the first time in a considerable while that a woman had looked at him as though his title were entirely beside the point.
"Miss Bennet." He bowed.
"Your Grace." She curtsied with perfect correctness, and then looked at him again with those clear, considering eyes, and said nothing else, which he found, for reasons he did not immediately analyze, rather more interesting than the things most people said.
The conversation began as these conversations always did — the weather, the gathering, Hargrove's pleasant grounds.
Mrs. Bennet contributed warmly and at length to all three subjects.
Henry replied with the polished sufficiency of a man who had been making this kind of conversation since his early twenties.
Miss Bennet said relatively little, but when she did speak her observations were precise and occasionally dry, and she had a way of looking at the gathering around them as she spoke that suggested she was finding it mildly but genuinely interesting, rather than performing interest for social reasons.
He was trying to determine something about her. He was not yet certain what.
"It is a fine morning for it," Mrs. Bennet was saying, with satisfaction. "I always think Richmond air particularly agreeable."
"Society does seem to arrange itself more comfortably when the weather permits," Miss Bennet said, and there was something in the phrasing — the faintest edge beneath the pleasantness of it — that made Henry glance at her.
"You find society less comfortable when it cannot go outdoors?"
"I find," she said, "that society is generally most comfortable when it can be arranged according to established expectations. Outdoors, indoors, the setting matters less than the pattern."
"And you find the pattern disagreeable?"
She looked at him with a slight alteration of expression that was not quite a smile. "I find the pattern rather inevitable. There is a difference."
Mrs. Bennet laughed and said something about her daughter's opinions, which she clearly found both exasperating and a point of pride, and Miss Bennet bore this with the patient composure of someone accustomed to the particular phenomenon of being discussed while present.
Henry was about to turn the conversation to something safer — the Hargrove horses, perhaps, which were visibly fine animals — when Miss Bennet said, in the same pleasant, offhand tone she had used for everything else: "Society has a remarkable ability to persuade people that the life expected of them is the one they would have chosen regardless. "
Henry went very still.
He did not show it. He had spent enough years managing his expression in rooms full of people who were watching him that stillness came to him as naturally as breathing.
But something had shifted with a sharp, internal click that he suspected showed nowhere on his face and hoped very much remained that way.
The question in the letter. Do you ever wonder whether duty has quietly replaced the life you might have chosen for yourself?
The phrasing was not identical. But the thought beneath it was the same — the same architecture, the same quiet assumption that the life a person was living was not necessarily the life they had elected.
He looked at Miss Bennet.
She was watching the gathering again, perfectly composed, apparently unaware that she had said anything of particular significance.
"You speak as if society's expectations are something to be resisted, Miss Bennet."
She turned to look at him, and something in her expression sharpened slightly — not alarm, not guilt, just attention. The look of someone who had been asked an interesting question.
"Only when those expectations demand a life one never wished for in the first place."
"Most people would argue that duty exists for a reason."
"And most people," she said, "never stop to ask whether the duty was truly theirs to begin with."
She said it without heat, without the self-conscious emphasis of a person making a point they were proud of.
She said it the way one states a thing one has thought through thoroughly and arrived at some time ago, which was, Henry found, considerably more unsettling than if she had said it with passion.
He studied her.
She did not flinch under the study. She held his gaze with that same calm directness she had produced from the first moment of their introduction, and he found himself with the peculiar sensation of being assessed in return — not with hostility, but with a frank and careful intelligence that did not appear to find his attention flattering or his scrutiny intimidating.
He briefly thought about the letter, about the confidence of a single question and a single initial, and the complete absence of apology.
He looked at Miss Victoria Bennet, standing beside her mother in the morning sunshine, meeting his gaze as though she met dukes every Tuesday and found them generally unremarkable, and he thought: it was you.
He had no proof. He had nothing but a feeling that was entirely unlike anything he permitted himself to act on, and a coincidence of phrasing that could be exactly that — coincidence.
It would be absurd to say so. It would be, in fact, precisely the sort of impulsive conclusion he prided himself on never drawing.
He was still almost certain.
Before he could determine how to proceed, Lord Alderton appeared at his elbow with a question about the Parliamentary dinner, and simultaneously the Hargrove daughters descended on Mrs. Bennet with social enthusiasm, and the particular configuration of their small group dissolved as these things always did, rearranged by the current of the gathering into something entirely different.
By the time Henry had dealt with Alderton, Miss Bennet was twenty feet away, walking with her mother toward the refreshment table, her back straight and her pace unhurried.
She did not look back.
Henry collected Arabella an hour later, made his farewells to Hargrove, and rode back toward London in the clear afternoon light with his daughter chattering happily beside him about everything Emily had told her, and he listened and responded in all the right places and thought, with a focus he could not quite suppress, about a pair of steady brown eyes and the words: whether the duty was truly theirs to begin with.
It was a coincidence. It was almost certainly a coincidence.