Chapter One
“If I were you, I would make him regret every word he has ever spoken.”
Lucy Fairbourne watched the dancers turn beneath the chandeliers and let the potted orange tree hide as much of her as a potted orange tree could reasonably be asked to hide.
“If you were me, you would last ten minutes before being banished from respectable society,” Lucy said wryly, and kept her eyes on the dancers, and did not once look where her cousin was looking.
“Then make them useful ten minutes.” Marianne snapped her fan shut. “He is not even ashamed. There he stands with Miss Leighton on his arm as though he never once sat in your father’s drawing room.”
Lucy smoothed a glove that had no crease in it. “I would rather not discuss Mr. Ashwick in a room full of feathers.”
“You would rather not discuss anything at all. That is the whole difficulty with you.”
“He courted me for three months, Marianne. I did not imagine that.”
Marianne’s hand closed over hers. “Of course you did not imagine it.”
Lucy drew her hand back and folded it with the other. “He told a card room full of gentlemen that I mistook ordinary courtesy for devotion. I have had the phrase repeated back to me by four separate people who each believed they were being kind.”
“And Miss Leighton believes every word of it, I suppose?”
“Miss Leighton believes he is charming, and rich enough to be forgiven anything. She has forty thousand pounds, and her father wants the barony that is coming to him. His uncle is Lord Ashwick, and Lord Ashwick is one and sixty and childless and disobliging enough to live forever, but he will not live forever, and Julian will be a baron before he is forty. That is what Lord Leighton is buying.” Marianne snapped her fan open again.
“She will not trouble herself over whether I imagined a courtship.”
“Forty thousand pounds buys a great deal of not troubling oneself.”
“It buys everything.” Lucy turned her fan over in her lap and did not open it. “You may stop looking at me as though I am about to shatter. I have been shattered for three weeks. I have grown accustomed to the arrangement of the pieces.”
“Then let us give the ballroom something else to repeat.” Marianne turned so sharply that a passing footman adjusted his tray. “Look discreetly towards the far doors, do you observe that gentleman of notable height with his dark hair and piercing grey eyes?” Lucy turned towards the doors.
“The gentleman in black attire, who has declined to dance with a single person all evening.”
“I see him. He looks as though someone brought him here against his will and he intends to make them regret it.”
“That is the Duke of Wycliffe. Godfrey Sotherton.” Marianne dropped her voice to the register reserved for scandal. “They say he ruined a baron over cards and did not trouble to look pleased about it. They say a woman once fainted merely from being introduced to him.”
“They say a great many foolish things at these affairs.” She looked at him again all the same, and then away, and then, briefly, back.
“I dare you to win his notice. One turn about the room on the arm of the most dangerous man in London, and Julian Ashwick will remember precisely what he threw away.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Lucy, it is but a small, innocent dare. I did not ask you to steal a kiss from him, though…”
Lucy snapped her own fan open at last and used it, though the room was not warm. “I have already been made a spectacle once this Season. I have no intention of volunteering for a second engagement.”
“You are not a spectacle. You are a girl who was deceived by a coward, and the difference matters even if no one in this room can be troubled to see it.”
“The difference does not matter to anyone but you. He said it in a card room, confidently, and I said nothing at all, and that is how such things are decided.”
“Then be clever back at him.”
“I have not the stomach for it tonight.” She touched the rim of a waxy leaf as if she had come only to admire the tree. “Perhaps tomorrow, when I am less inclined to weep in a potted plant.”
She meant it, and she kept to the plan right up until two gentlemen paused on the far side of the orange tree and one of them laughed in a voice she would have known anywhere.
“Miss Fairbourne is a sweet creature,” Julian said, “but some ladies mistake ordinary courtesy for devotion. One cannot be forever answering for another person’s imagination.”
The gentleman beside him murmured something Lucy did not catch. Julian laughed again, easy and unbothered. It had cost him nothing at all to say, and it would cost him nothing to say again.
“Lucy,” Marianne said, reaching for her hand. “Do not listen to him.”
“I need air.”
“Let me come with you.”
“No. I need one room in this house where nobody is deciding what I imagined.” She pressed her cousin’s fingers once and released them. “Stay. Enjoy the feathers.”
She would not run, for swiftness would betray her, and to betray her presence was the fatal error she dared not commit.
She walked instead, unhurried, looking at nobody, until she reached a door standing ajar on a room too dark to be part of the evening’s plans.
The library took her in and shut the evening out behind her.
One lamp burned low on a side table, and the fire had settled to a red and companionable glow.
She leaned her spine against the shelves and let her face do, finally, whatever it wished to do.
“You are either hiding from someone, Miss Fairbourne, or waiting to ambush him.”
She was not, it turned out, alone.
The Duke of Wycliffe sat in a wing chair angled towards the fire, a glass of brandy on the arm and a book across his knee that he had plainly not been reading.
She had a hand flat against the shelf behind her and took it away. “Your Grace. I did not see you.”
“Few people do, when I take the trouble not to be seen. It is one of my more useful accomplishments.”
“I was told you were dangerous. Nobody mentioned you were furniture.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth that shared a border with a smile. “Can a lady not simply wish to look at books?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That is what you were about to tell me. That you came here to admire the shelves.” He lifted his glass a careful inch. “It is a transparent falsehood, at best. Not at midnight. Not while breathing as though you have just escaped a duel.”
“I am not hiding.”
“No?”
“I am merely appraising the room, I assure you.”
He moved the book off his knee to the table without marking his place. “Then sit, and appraise. The chair opposite has an excellent view of the door, which I gather is the direction from which your trouble usually arrives.”
She sat, without quite knowing why, except that the alternative was a ballroom deciding what she had imagined, and this dark quiet man had decided nothing about her at all.
“You are trembling,” he said. “Not from cold. The fire is more than adequate to the room.”
“I am not accustomed to being alone with dukes in dark libraries.” Her hands went quiet in her lap, which took some doing.
“You are not trembling because of me. You had the look before you saw me. Someone beyond that door has spent the evening taking small bites out of you, and you have been very brave about pretending not to bleed.”
“That is a remarkably grim way to describe a ball.”
“I attend balls enough. I have never once found a truer description of one.”
She looked at the book lying open on his knee. “What were you reading?”
“Nothing. I find a book the most reliable way to be left alone in a crowd. One holds it open, looks displeased, and society obligingly does the rest.”
“You have made a philosophy of being disliked.”
“I have made a fortress of it. There is a difference, though few take the trouble to notice.”
“You know who I am,” she said.
“Everyone at this party knows who you are. That is rather the source of your difficulty.”
“You do not waste breath on idle flatteries, I see.”
He turned the brandy a half circle on the arm of the chair and did not drink it. “I am very tired. Being candid is what remains after a man has spent two hours listening to Ashwick be charming.”
“You know Mr. Ashwick?”
“I know men like Mr. Ashwick. He is not as original as he believes.” The duke studied her over the rim of his glass with an attention that felt less like flirtation than like arithmetic.
“He has made you look foolish because he is too cowardly to look dishonourable. It is the commonest trade in London. Barter another person’s dignity for your own comfort, and be sure to smile while you do it, so that anyone who objects appears unreasonable. ”
“You know nothing of it.” She had risen an inch out of the chair before she noticed she was doing it, and sat back down.
“I know cowards. They are tedious, but they are rarely inventive.” He tilted his head a degree. “Yours will use the same phrase for years, because it worked once and thinking of a second would be effort. Which phrase is it?”
“I do not see why I should tell you.”
“You should not. You will anyway, because you have been carrying it about all evening looking for somewhere to set it down, and I am, whatever else I am, extremely safe. I do not indulge in idle scandal. It would require me to converse with people I dislike.”
Lucy looked at the fire, weary past bearing of holding the thing alone. “He says I mistook ordinary courtesy for devotion.”
“Ah.”
“He does it gently, so that everyone believes he is sparing my feelings, when what he is doing is making certain I can never say a true word against him without sounding bitter, and imaginative, and greedy for a courtship I invented out of a few pleasant afternoons.”
“Yes. That is precisely what he is doing, and he is rather good at it. He would be less good at it if you would stop being ashamed and start being angry, but shame is warmer and easier to wear, so most people never make the exchange.”
“You speak as though you have made it yourself.”