Chapter Two
“You cannot say such things.” Lucy’s voice scarcely carried past his shoulder.
“I can. I am a duke. Society has trained me badly.” Godfrey kept his voice at its ordinary pitch, because a murmur now would be taken for a secret, and a secret was the one thing this room must not be handed to chew.
Beyond the door, the silent tally of consequences had already begun.
Lady Haverford stood near the card-room arch, bright and fixed, calculating how far a story would travel by morning and whether it would improve her invitations, and Ashwick had gone white about the mouth, watching his own clever plan turn in his hand and open a vein.
That last was very nearly worth the whole tedious evening.
Julian had staged the thing badly. The open door, the guests ranged behind him, the practised alarm in the voice.
He had rehearsed his triumph in a glass and never once considered that the room might be handed to somebody else.
He had meant to ruin the girl and had succeeded only in delivering her, a gift beyond price, to the one person at the ball with rank enough to make the ruin vanish.
And the girl was frightened. That was the part Godfrey had not planned for and did not care to examine. She stood very straight and very pale, holding her own hands as though they might otherwise misbehave, and the sight of it sat wrong in a way he had spent ten years arranging his life to avoid.
“Come,” he said, offering his arm. “We are quitting this doorway before anyone recovers enough to frame a question.”
She did not take the arm, but she walked, which served as well. The corridor beyond swallowed the light and most of the noise, and the moment the ballroom fell behind them she came back to life all at once.
“You have attached your name to mine without permission.” She was walking faster than he was and did not slow for him.
“And saved yours from being dragged through every drawing room in London by breakfast.”
“That does not make you noble.”
“No. Merely efficient.”
She stopped walking. “Why would you do such a thing? You do not know me.”
“I know Ashwick. On some evenings that proves sufficient.”
“That is no reason to enter into matrimony with a stranger.”
“It is a reason to stop a man I dislike from winning. The matrimony is only the most efficient weapon to hand, and you are the person it also happens to rescue.”
“You are very cold about it.”
“I am very honest about it. In time you will come to prefer the one to the other, though I grant the preference takes some acquiring.” He slowed his pace to hers, which cost him something, since his instinct in a crisis was to move quickly and let the world hurry after.
“You may be as angry with me as you like. I would only ask you to be angry quietly until we reach your family, because a duchess who shouts in a corridor makes a far better story than a duchess who was merely caught reading.”
“I am not your duchess.” She said it to the wall sconces and not to him.
“Not yet. You are at present the subject of a rumour that will settle the question for you unless someone with more standing than Ashwick settles it first.”
“And that someone is you.”
“Regrettably. I did look about for a better candidate. The corridor was empty.”
“Do you make a habit of proposing to women you discover in libraries?”
“You are the first. I dislike libraries at parties. They are the room people retreat to when they wish to be sincere, and sincerity at a party is almost always a trap. I ought to have known better than to sit in one.”
“And yet you sat.”
“And yet I sat. I begin to suspect the entire evening arranged itself around my single lapse of judgement.”
She almost smiled at that, and stopped herself, which he found he minded.
Girls in this position wept, in his limited and carefully guarded experience, and weeping he could have managed with the cool competence he brought to every unpleasant necessity.
Instead she argued, and turned each of his answers over in search of its weakness, and it interested him a good deal more than the situation warranted.
“Where are your people?” he asked.
“By the refreshment room. My father and my aunt.” She stopped, taking longer than necessary to push a stray pin back into the thick, auburn waves of her hair. “And my cousin, who is about to learn what a dare costs.”
***
They found Mr. Fairbourne near the refreshment room with Mrs. Selwyn at his elbow and Marianne hovering white-faced behind them both. One glance at Lucy’s countenance and the duke at her shoulder, and Fairbourne’s colour drained to match his daughter’s.
“Lucy.” Her father set down his glass with a hand that had stopped being steady. “Tell me you have not done a thing we cannot mend.”
Godfrey took the glass out of the older man’s hand and set it back on the table. “She has done nothing, Mr. Fairbourne. That is precisely the difficulty. Nothing whatever has been done, and by morning all London will be certain a great deal was.”
“It was my doing.” Marianne’s words tumbled out ahead of her courage. “I dared her. She would not, and I pressed her, and it is my fault entirely that she went anywhere near that library.”
“Then she is betrothed to a duke, which is a good deal further than most dares carry a girl.” Godfrey inclined his head towards Marianne with grave courtesy. “You have my thanks. I could not have arranged a more useful evening had I planned it, and I assure you I did not.”
“Useful,” Fairbourne said, and the word came out with no strength in it. “My daughter’s name is on the tongue of every busybody in this place, and you call it useful.”
“Her name was going into their mouths regardless, Mr. Fairbourne. My only alteration was the manner of it. A ruined Miss Fairbourne is a tragedy anyone may repeat at leisure. A betrothed Duchess of Wycliffe is a triumph they will resent too much to enjoy. I have merely changed the flavor of the gossip from pity to envy, and envy, whatever else may be said of it, does not follow a woman into her old age.”
Mrs. Selwyn had been studying him throughout, unhurried and thorough, as she might study a horse she had no intention of overpaying for. “You are the Duke of Wycliffe.”
“I am.”
“And you have publicly named my niece your intended wife.”
“In front of Lady Haverford, who could not keep a confidence if her soul were pledged against it.” He did not smile. “I chose the audience with some care.”
“Did you.” Her mouth did something that was not a smile. “And what does a man of your standing want with a girl of ours, Your Grace, beyond the pleasure of thwarting Mr. Ashwick? Forgive me. I am too old to take a horse without looking in its mouth.”
“You are wise not to. I want very little that need trouble you tonight, and I would rather discuss it somewhere your brother-in-law cannot say something honest in a public passage and double the size of the disaster.”
“Then you had better find us a door.”
A woman of sense was rare enough in his acquaintance that Godfrey was tempted to be grateful for one even in the middle of a catastrophe. He found a small card room lying empty between sets and shut it against the noise.
“Now,” he said. “I would speak with Mr. Fairbourne and Mrs. Selwyn about the arrangement circumstance has forced upon us.”
“You will speak with me.”
Her father turned to her, aghast. “Lucy, the gentleman is attempting to save you.”
Lucy had put her hands behind her back where nobody could watch them.
“Then the gentleman may save me to my face, and not in a corner while I stand in the passage counting the pattern in the carpet. It is my future. I will not have it settled as though I were a horse changing owners between two men who never once thought to ask the horse.”
Fairbourne put a hand out to the back of a chair and kept it there.
Mrs. Selwyn looked, if anything, faintly proud.
And Godfrey, who had entered this card room fully prepared to conduct the whole negotiation over the head of a trembling girl, found the plan dismantled and could not honestly say he minded it.
“She is right, Mr. Fairbourne. It is her future. She may as well hear the terms in her own hearing and correct me where I overreach, which I am reliably informed I do.”
“She is all I have,” Fairbourne said, and the bluster went out of him. “Her mother is ten years gone. I have made errors enough raising her alone, but I never once let her feel she was a thing to be traded.”
“Then you have raised her better than most fathers of my acquaintance, and I will try not to undo the work in a single matrimony.” Godfrey met the older man’s eyes. “It is not a promise. I do not make those. It is an intention, which in my case is a rarer article and a more reliable one.”
The door opened without a knock.
“Surely,” said Julian Ashwick, stepping in with an expression of wounded goodwill, “there has been some misunderstanding that a few reasonable people might yet untangle.”
Godfrey did not raise his voice. He never did. The quietest thing in a room commanded it. “There was a misunderstanding. You mistook my silence for permission.”
Julian’s hand went to the door he had come through and did not quite close it. “Wycliffe, I meant only to see Miss Fairbourne safely returned to her family.”
“You meant to see Miss Fairbourne ruined, with witnesses, at an hour and in a room of your own choosing. You have done a great deal of meaning tonight, and you will do no more of it in my hearing.” Godfrey crossed to the door and held it open with a courtesy more insulting than any slammed hinge.
“The corridor. You know the way. You were skulking in it not ten minutes past.”
Julian’s smile thinned, but he went. There was nothing else to be done with witnesses in the room. The door shut, and Lucy let out a breath she had plainly been holding since the last set.
“Now,” Godfrey said, turning back to her. “The terms.”