Chapter 3
Three
The letter arrived before Victoria had finished her first cup of tea.
Thomas brought it on the small silver tray, the same way he had brought the previous one, and set it beside her plate with the careful neutrality of a footman who had learned not to comment on the correspondence habits of the household.
Victoria looked at it.
Same paper. Same plain wax. Same absence of any identifying mark whatsoever.
"When did this arrive?" she asked.
"This morning, miss. Early, same as before."
She picked it up, turned it over once, and set it down again. She picked up her teacup. She put the teacup down. She opened the letter.
I suspected you might understand my thoughts better than most. Yesterday confirmed it.
H.
She read it twice, which she was becoming irritatingly accustomed to doing, and then she sat very still for a moment with the letter in her hands and thought about the riding party and the Duke of Blackmere and the particular way he had looked at her when she said that duty was not always truly one's own to begin with.
She had not been speaking to him, specifically.
She had been making an observation — the sort of observation she made regularly, in various company, because it was what she believed and she had never seen a compelling reason to pretend otherwise.
She had not been thinking about mysterious letters or anonymous initials or anything except the ordinary mild interest of a conversation that had become unexpectedly sharp.
Except.
Except that he had gone still, in a way that had nothing to do with the social stillness of a polite gathering. It had been the stillness of a person who has heard something they were not expecting, and she had noticed it and filed it away and told herself it was nothing.
I suspected you might understand my thoughts better than most.
She folded the letter along its crease and looked at it for another moment.
The Duke of Blackmere. It was not — she was not going to leap to conclusions.
The initial was H. Henry began with H. So did a considerable number of other names, and she had no reason whatsoever to assume that a duke had been sending her anonymous philosophical correspondence rather than, say, any one of a dozen other people she could not immediately identify.
She put the letter in her pocket, which she recognized was not the behavior of a person who had dismissed something, and reached for the toast rack.
Emily appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, saw Victoria's expression, and sat down without saying anything immediately, which was unusual enough that Victoria looked up.
"What?" Victoria said.
"Nothing." Emily poured her tea. "You have the letter expression again."
"I do not have a letter expression."
"You do, and it is becoming quite distinctive." Emily wrapped both hands around her teacup. "Was it the same person?"
Victoria considered denying this, concluded it was not worth the effort, and said, "I don't know who it is."
"But you have a theory."
"I have nothing of the sort."
Emily looked at her over the rim of her cup with the patient, intelligent look she had been producing with increasing frequency since the age of about fourteen, and which Victoria found more disconcerting each time. "Is it someone we've met?"
"Emily."
"Because you had a very particular expression yesterday when you were speaking to the Duke of Black—"
"I had no expression."
"You had the expression you get when someone has surprised you and you don't want them to know it."
Victoria put down her toast. "I am going to find you a great many more improving books to read if you have this much time to study my face."
Emily smiled into her tea.
The morning call to Blackmere House had been Mrs. Bennet's idea, or rather it had been Mrs. Bennet's enthusiastic adoption of Emily's suggestion that she would very much like to see Lady Arabella Ravenscroft again, combined with Mrs. Bennet's own view that any reason to visit a ducal residence was a reason worth acting on without delay.
Victoria had received the announcement with perfect composure, agreed that it was a very natural thing to do, and spent the rest of the morning being perfectly composed about it in a way that required considerably more effort than she would have preferred.
It was not that she was reluctant to go.
She was not reluctant. She had no reason to be reluctant.
She had met the Duke of Blackmere once, at a riding party, and spoken to him for perhaps ten minutes, and the fact that she had thought about that conversation more than it deserved was entirely irrelevant to the question of whether she wished to visit his house.
She did not particularly wish to visit his house.
She was going anyway, because Emily wished to see her friend and because refusing would require an explanation, and the only explanation she had was one she was not prepared to give.
Blackmere House was in Grosvenor Square, large and well-maintained and exactly the sort of address one expected of a duke who took his responsibilities seriously.
The entrance hall was handsomely appointed without being ostentatious, and the drawing room to which they were shown had the comfortable, slightly worn quality of a room that was actually used rather than merely preserved for visitors.
Arabella Ravenscroft appeared within two minutes of their arrival, greeted Emily with the unceremonious warmth of someone who has dispensed with formality in favor of genuine pleasure, and the two girls disappeared toward the garden with the efficiency of people who had already decided what they were going to do and required no further discussion about it.
Mrs. Bennet settled happily into conversation with Miss Graves, who had apparently governed both Arabella and Victoria at different points in their respective childhoods and had opinions about both of them that she was prepared to share at considerable length.
Victoria sat for a suitable interval, contributed to the conversation as required, and eventually excused herself on the grounds of needing to find the powder room, which was entirely true and also happened to require her to walk through a section of the house she had not yet seen.
The corridor was quiet. Doors on either side, most of them closed. She was moving at a perfectly ordinary pace toward where a housemaid had indicated the powder room might be found when she became aware that one of the doors ahead of her was not quite closed.
She would have walked past it without a second thought, except that she could see, through the two-inch gap between door and frame, the corner of a very large desk, and at the desk, a man who was unmistakably Henry Ravenscroft.
Victoria stopped.
This was, she recognized immediately, the precise opposite of what she should do.
She should continue walking, find the powder room, return to the drawing room, and not think about it further.
She was standing still in a corridor outside a man's study like someone in the more implausible variety of novel, and she had exactly the amount of time it took to form this thought before the Duke looked up from his papers.
He saw her immediately.
For a moment neither of them moved.
Then he rose from his chair, and said, "Miss Bennet," and opened the door with the measured courtesy of a man who found nothing unusual about discovering a lady standing in his corridor, which she strongly suspected was not true.
"Your Grace." She kept her voice entirely level. "I beg your pardon. I was looking for—"
"The powder room is two doors further along." He stepped back, leaving the doorway clear without quite closing the door entirely behind him, which meant the conversation was neither an invitation nor a dismissal. "Were you shown upstairs when you arrived?"
"Miss Graves directed me."
"Miss Graves has a long-standing belief that the powder room is where it was when she first came to this house, which was before I made several alterations to this corridor." He paused. "It has been moved."
"I see." Victoria looked at him. He looked back at her. "Thank you."
She should, at this point, have continued down the corridor. The powder room was two doors along. The information had been provided. There was no further reason to remain.
"I did not expect to see you here," he said.
"Emily wished to call on Lady Arabella."
"Of course." A brief pause. "It is rather remarkable, is it not, how one keeps encountering the same people in unexpected places."
Victoria looked at him with more attention. "London is not so very large," she said carefully.
"No. And yet there is something particularly interesting about the coincidence of finding, in one's own corridor, someone one spoke to only yesterday."
"I would not have thought a man of your position found coincidence particularly remarkable."
"I find it interesting," he said, "when the coincidence seems to carry a theme."
There was a quality to the way he said it — measured, deliberate, watching her with those steady dark eyes — that made something in her chest tighten in a way she did not entirely care for.
"A theme," she said.
"I have been thinking," he said, with the air of a man choosing his words with great care, "that there are people who make a habit of presuming to understand others very quickly. Based on very limited acquaintance."
Victoria clasped her hands in front of her. "That is a rather broad observation, Your Grace."
"It is a specific one, Miss Bennet. I have simply framed it broadly."
"Then perhaps I might frame my response in kind," she said. "There are people who seem entirely certain that their manner of living requires no examination, and find it faintly irritating when someone suggests otherwise."
Something crossed his expression — not quite irritation, not quite amusement, something that occupied the narrow and complicated space between them. "Bold opinions," he said, "offered without invitation, are sometimes less about the recipient than about the person offering them."