Chapter Two #2
“You wish to enter into matrimony with me to correct an inconvenience.” She did not sit. “I have been an inconvenience to one gentleman already this Season. I have lost my taste for the office.”
“Then let me be plain, and you may decide whether plainness improves the offer.” He clasped his hands behind his back.
“I will give you my name, my house, my protection, and as much freedom as society permits a duchess. I will not demand affection. I will not demand gratitude. And I will not pretend, to you or to anyone, that this began romantically.”
“You speak of freedom. Whose measure governs it, yours or mine?”
“Yours, within the walls. Mine, at the front door, where the world is watching. It is not a tidy division of the estate, but it is an honest one, and I have found honest arrangements outlast tidy ones.”
She did not sit, though he had left her the chair. “And you will not interfere with me?”
“I will not manage you. I reserve the right to disagree with you loudly, and I intend to exercise it often.”
“How generous.” Something bright and bitter moved behind her eyes. “You offer me a prison with excellent furniture.”
“No, Miss Fairbourne. I offer you a fortress.” He held her gaze so she would not mistake the difference for a flourish. “The door will remain unlocked from your side.”
The bitterness in her face wavered, but she did not answer at once and she did not accept.
“You have thought hard about an arrangement you devised twenty minutes ago in a strange library,” she said.
“I devise everything quickly. It is my slow decisions that ruin me, and I have made very few of those, which is why I am rich and disliked in roughly equal measure.”
“And if I say no?” she asked.
“Then you go home tonight a ruined woman and I go home a bachelor, and only one of those is a hardship. I will not pretend the risk falls on us equally. It never does, and I would rather not open the matrimony by lying to you about arithmetic.”
“You might have softened that.”
“I might have. I have watched softer men be untruthful to their wives and spend the matrimony servicing the debt. I do not intend to wed in arrears.”
“You are a very unusual suitor, Your Grace.”
“I am not a suitor at all. I am a solution wearing evening dress, which is worse, and I have the poor taste to say so aloud instead of letting you discover it at the altar.”
“And devotion?” Lucy asked. “You have ruled out affection, and gratitude, and romance. You have left the largest word off your list entirely.”
“I have left it off because I do not deal in it, and I decline to explain a policy I have kept far longer than you have been out. You need not fear I will demand what I do not myself possess. It is nearly the only cruelty I have never had the equipment for.”
“That is either the saddest thing you have said tonight or the most convenient.”
“With me you will find those are frequently the same sentence.”
Her father cleared his throat. “There is the matter of settlements, Your Grace. I would rather raise it before the vows than after.”
“There is, and I would think less of you for omitting it. My solicitor will draw the papers so generously that your aunt’s suspicion of me becomes the least reasonable thing in any room she enters. She may read every line before her niece signs a word of it.”
Mrs. Selwyn folded her gloved hands in her lap. “I shall. I read slowly, and I read everything twice.”
“I would expect nothing else of a woman who prices horses at balls.”
“Will she be happy?” Marianne asked from the corner, so quietly that the room almost missed it.
Godfrey considered the girl a moment before he answered.
“That is not a thing I can promise you, or purchase, or set my hand to on paper. I can promise she will be safe, and respected, and never again made small in a room by a man too cowardly to be honest. Happiness she will have to build for herself. I undertake only not to stand in the light while she does it.”
“That is not the answer I hoped for.” Marianne did not come out of her corner to say it.
“No. It is the true one, and you will find, Miss Selwyn, that I traffic in almost nothing else tonight. It is why the room has grown so uncomfortable.”
Their voices ran on over settlements and the speed of a licence, and Godfrey let them, watching the girl weigh a locked drawer she had just been told held its key on the inside.
“I will give you my answer tomorrow.” Lucy folded her hands together to still them. “You will call at eleven. You will bring nothing but your own arguments, and you will let me keep the last of them for myself.”
“Eleven.” He collected his hat from the card table and turned it once in his hands. “I am a punctual creditor. I collect on time and I call on time, and you will find the two are the same habit.”
He made his farewells with more grace than the hour deserved and let himself into the corridor, where Julian Ashwick waited beside a marble bust with his arms folded. He had lost the room. He meant to win the passage.
“You believe you have rescued a wronged innocent,” Julian said, low and pleasant.
“Consider the other possibility, Wycliffe. Consider that a clever girl saw a duke alone in a library and understood precisely how to be discovered in it. A dare, was it? How convenient, that the dare should end in a coronet.”
Godfrey stopped where he stood in the passage, and did not pretend otherwise.
He had come out of the card room braced for the ordinary spite of a beaten man, the kind one let slide off and forgot by the carriage step.
This was a colder thing. Julian was smiling, and the smile had a plan behind it, and a plan meant the man would keep at this long after the ballroom had moved on to fresher meat.
Vanity tired itself out inside a Season.
At forty years of age, a life passed in drawing rooms had taught him that much.
This one would go on hurting the girl for exactly as long as hurting her stayed useful to him, and the useful cruelties were the only ones that ever did lasting damage.
“You have said your piece,” Godfrey answered.
“Now hear mine, since we are trading confidences over a deceased man’s marble head.
I have known men who mistook a woman’s misfortune for a woman’s scheme.
Without exception they had done the scheming themselves and could not picture anyone declining to.
You have told me everything about yourself tonight, Ashwick, and almost nothing about her. ”
“Careful, Wycliffe.”
“I am always careful. It is why I am still standing where cleverer men have fallen.” He drew on one glove with unhurried precision.
“You wanted a scandal you could aim. You have handed me a wife and yourself an enemy, and I collect from my enemies at leisure and in full. Give my regards to Miss Leighton. She will wish to know what manner of gentleman she has agreed to purchase.”
He walked out into the cold without looking back, and the last useful falsehood of the evening settled quietly into place behind him.
He had said the words to save the girl, and that much had been true.
What he had not said to Ashwick, nor to Lucy, nor to the aunt with her horse-buyer’s eyes, was the smaller and more dangerous truth.
From the first moment in that library she had looked at him as though he were a man and not a title.
Ten years he had gone without being looked at so, and a single evening was not enough to forget the sensation, however inconvenient he found it before luncheon.