Chapter Three
“A duke has offered matrimony. Girls in your position are handed a trunk and a coach ticket, not a coronet.”
“I was not reaching for a coronet. I was trying to get out of a room.” Lucy set her chocolate down untouched and looked at her aunt across a breakfast table none of them had the appetite to use.
The house had not slept. She had heard it through the walls all night, the low industry of servants who knew a scandal before their mistress had finished deciding how to feel about it, and the particular silence of a home that has stopped pretending everything is ordinary.
She had risen at seven to a note from the modiste withdrawing an unpaid account and a countenance in the glass she did not much wish to keep company with.
“You need not look at me as though I have wronged you,” Mrs. Selwyn went on, buttering her toast without hurry.
“I am on your side. I am so far on your side that I am prepared to be vulgar about it. A duke, Lucy. Not a curate with prospects. A duke, who has settled the whole disaster before it had time to spoil.”
“He has not settled anything. He has made an announcement.” She had not touched the toast either. “I spent the night learning the difference.”
Marianne slipped into the room, quiet and guilty, having plainly been listening at the door until her nerve gave out. She had wept, plainly, and recently, and she stopped by the sideboard with one hand on the back of a chair she did not take.
“I am sorry.” Marianne’s hands were red from wringing, and she put them behind her. “I have said it forty times and it does not improve. I dared you. I pushed and pushed, and I thought I was being clever, and I was only being a child with a grievance that was not even mine to hold.”
“You did not open the door, Marianne. You did not stand in it with an audience arranged behind you. You dared me to speak to a man. Mr. Ashwick did the rest, and he did it on purpose, and I will not let you carry his cruelty for him. There is quite enough of it to go round without you volunteering.”
“Then you are not angry with me?”
“I am furious with you. I am furious with everyone in this house, including the one presently drinking cold chocolate.” Lucy pushed the cup an inch away. “Sit down before you fall down. Guilt is exhausting to watch on an empty stomach.”
Marianne sat, and Mrs. Selwyn laid down the toast she had been defending.
“You are angriest with yourself,” the older woman said. “I can see it plainly from here. You think you ought to have outwitted a man who has made a whole career of ambushing girls in doorways.”
“I think I ought to have stayed home.” Lucy set the cup down in its saucer harder than the china deserved. “I ought to have worn grey and let the Season close without me, and then none of us would be sitting over cold chocolate wondering what a duke wants with the leavings.”
“A duke wants what all of them want. To carry off a thing another man reached for. You need not love the roof to be glad of it in the rain.”
“That is exactly what frightens me. I have already been one man’s convenience this Season. I do not know how to be a second man’s and keep any part of myself that is still my own.”
“Then you will bargain for that part, and see it written into the paper, and hold him to every word.” Mrs. Selwyn set her knife down with a small deliberate click.
“He announced it in front of Lady Haverford. He cannot unannounce it now without playing the fool before all London, and men of his stamp would sooner wed than look foolish. Use it while it is warm.”
“I shall want the pin money paid to me and not to Papa,” Lucy said.
It came out smaller than she had meant it to, and her hands were unsteady in her lap, and her father looked up from the post with an expression of such simple astonishment that she nearly took it back.
Twenty-three years in that house had taught her that a wanting said out loud was a wanting held against you afterwards.
Nobody said anything against it. Her aunt inclined her head half an inch, and her father said, “Well. Yes. That would be proper,” and returned to the letters, and the ceiling did not come down.
Lucy sat very still and discovered that the thing she had been most afraid of all her life took about four seconds and cost nothing whatever.
Her father came in then, grey about the eyes, holding the morning’s post as though it might bite. He had said very little since the carriage home, and what he had said had been apologies, which were worse than reproaches because there was nothing in them she could argue with.
“He has sent word,” Fairbourne said. “The duke. He will call at eleven, as arranged. He writes that he will bring his solicitor’s outline of settlements, which the man appears to have had drawn since Friday, before ever the two of you were in a room together, and that you are to read every line before you commit to a word, and that if any part displeases you it is to be struck out and not endured.
” He set the letter down. “It is more consideration than I expected of him. I confess I do not know what to make of a man who is generous on paper and terrifying in a doorway.”
“Neither do I, Papa. That is rather the difficulty I mean to spend the next hour resolving.”
***
He arrived at eleven exactly, which she had somehow known he would.
He was perfectly dressed and perfectly composed, far too composed for a person who had upended a stranger’s life at midnight and slept well after, and the sight of him standing in her father’s modest drawing room made the room look suddenly like a coat that no longer fit.
Lucy rose as the footman showed him in. “Your Grace.”
“Miss Fairbourne.” He put his hat and gloves into the footman’s hands without looking at either. “You have not slept, which I take as evidence of sound judgement. A woman who could sleep peacefully through this would frighten me.”
“I mean to speak with you alone.” She stayed exactly where she was standing. “The door will stay open, and my aunt will sit within sight of it, and you will not object to either arrangement.”
“I object to neither. I would think less of you for omitting them.” He crossed to the chair she indicated and waited for her to sit first, which she had not expected, and settled himself with the outline of settlements across his knee, unregarded.
“Ask me your questions. You have plainly been sharpening them since dawn, and it would be a waste of good steel to let them go unused.”
She had a list, written at half past six with a pencil that wanted cutting, and she found now that she did not need the paper for it.
“Do you have debts?”
“No.”
“Mistresses?”
“None I intend to bring to breakfast.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only answer appropriate before luncheon. Ask me again at a more scandalous hour and I will give you a duller one, and it will be the truth, and you will be sorry you spent a good question on it.”
She very nearly laughed, and disliked herself for how near it came, and pressed on before the wish could soften her. “Have you a temper?”
“A considerable one. I keep it filed and rarely take it out, because it frightens people I have no wish to frighten and delights people I have every wish to disappoint. You will see it perhaps twice a year. I will endeavour to give notice.”
She held his gaze steady for this one. “Have you killed a man?”
“Not with my hands. I have ruined two with a quill and both deserved it, and I lost no sleep over either, which you may weigh however you like when you decide whether to trust me. I would rather you had the worst of me at eleven in the morning than discovered it at some worse hour later.”
“Have you a family that will despise me?”
“I have a sister who will adore you within the hour and exhaust you within two, and an aunt who decides her opinion of a person in a single glance and never afterward revises it, so I would counsel you to meet her having slept. Beyond those two, no one whose contempt need cost you a moment. My parents are both deceased. I do not miss them enough to pretend otherwise for your comfort.”
She turned the pencil once between her fingers before she asked it. “Have you ever wished to wed?”
“Once. It did not answer. I have not wished it since, and I did not wish it this week, which you may take as the plainest compliment I have paid a living soul in a decade, since I am doing the thing anyway.”
“Why would you wed me?” She had not meant to arrive at the question so quickly, but it had been sitting under all the others like a stone under running water.
“You could have any settled, dowered, unspoiled girl in London by Thursday next. Why choose the ruined one with an empty account and a modiste who has already withdrawn her credit?”
“Society has decided we are to wed.” He did not blink. “I am merely agreeing with it faster than it can gather breath to insist.”
“That is the answer you give the room. I want the one you would not.”
He was quiet a moment. Something moved behind the composure, brief, and shuttered again before she could put a name to it.
“Because I know what it is to be made into a mockery someone too small to admit his own cruelty,” he said.
“It is a particular kind of injury. It does not bleed, so no one thinks to bind it, and it heals crooked if it heals at all. I have watched Ashwick do to you in three weeks a thing that was done to me once, and I have no stomach for watching it finish.”
The drawing room, which had felt like a borrowed coat, settled around her differently. She looked at the cold, careful man in her father’s chair and saw, for one unguarded instant, the shape of the wound under the armour.
“That sounds almost like sympathy,” she said.
“Do not spread that rumour.” He squared the settlement outline on his knee, which was already square. “It would ruin me. I have spent years persuading London that I have no soft places, and I would take it very ill to be exposed by a woman I have known for one evening and a morning.”