Chapter Four
“He is a Hambridge, Imogen. They breed three things in that family. Beautiful sons, broken hearts, and rakes. Your duke has the first, will hand you the second, and is the third on legs.”
Bethany Mercer had let herself in through the connecting garden door before Aunt Margery had cleared the tea things, which meant she had been listening.
She had heard every word, which meant Imogen was going to have to discuss the Duke of Ravenhurst’s morning call with a woman who had opinions about dukes as reliably as other women had opinions about weather.
“He is not my duke, Bethany.”
“He brought you violets. He stayed twenty-three minutes. Your aunt counted.” Bethany settled herself into the chair Ash had occupied not ten minutes earlier, her dark hair pinned in its usual severe arrangement, her face carrying the particular expression it wore when she was being protective and did not wish to be thanked for it.
“A man who brings violets to a woman he has danced with once is either courting or hunting, and I have yet to see a Hambridge do the former.”
“You have never met a Hambridge.”
“I have read about them. The papers are very thorough. His grandfather kept a woman in Kensington for eleven years and left her nothing. His father was better, by all accounts, but his father married for love, and love in that family appears to be an aberration rather than a trait.” Bethany picked up the cold teacup at her elbow, looked into it, and set it down.
“I am not telling you what to do, Imogen. I am telling you what he is.”
Imogen sat very still for a moment, her hands in her lap, and she wanted to argue.
She wanted to say that the man who had sat in this chair and laughed at her jests about potted palms and drunk her middling tea without complaint was not the man Bethany was describing.
She wanted to say that his eyes had been real, that the laugh and the twenty-three minutes had been real.
She said none of it. Bethany was her oldest and sharpest friend, and she had been right about men before. Imogen was not yet certain enough of her own judgment to stake it against six seasons of Bethany’s observation.
“I will be careful,” she said.
“Careful…” Bethany repeated the word as if testing it for structural integrity and finding it insufficient.
“Careful is what a woman says before she does something reckless, Imogen. Careful is not a strategy. It is a prayer.” She paused.
Her fingers, Imogen noticed, were wrapped tightly around the arm of the chair, and the tension in them did not match the evenness of her voice.
“I am not trying to be cruel. I am trying to be your friend while you still want one.”
“I will always want you as my friend, Bethany.”
“You say that now. Women who fall in love with men their friends have warned them about tend to revise their guest lists eventually. I have seen it happen three times in six seasons and I should rather not be the fourth.”
The words sat between them. Imogen wanted to say that she was not falling in love, that a single country dance, a morning call and a pair of hothouse violets did not constitute falling.
The warmth on her knuckle was a physical fact and not an emotion, but the distinction felt thinner than it should have, and Bethany’s dark eyes were watching her with a steadiness that left very little room for self-deception.
Bethany looked at her for a long moment. Then rose, kissed Imogen’s cheek, and let herself out through the garden door without another word. The latch clicked and the morning room was quiet again. The violets on the mantelpiece looked, in the sudden stillness, as if they were holding their breath.
***
Three days passed. Three days in which Imogen neither saw nor heard from the Duke of Ravenhurst, and, most irritating of all, she could not stop thinking about him.
She had given him no permission to take up residence in her thoughts.
Yet, he had done so all the same without lease or any other arrangement, installing himself in the corners of her mind as comfortably as he had once installed himself in the gilt chair at the Marchmont: uninvited and entirely at ease.
She thought about the laugh. The real one, the one that had escaped before he could shape it.
She thought about the twenty-three minutes, the middling tea and the simple undeniable fact that he had drunk her tea without complaint and had looked at her drawing room without pity.
He had sat in a chair with a turned carpet beneath it and had not once, not for a single second, made her feel as if her poverty were something she needed to apologize for.
That was the thing she could not stop returning to.
Not his face, his title or the particular manner in which he moved through a room, as if rooms existed primarily for his convenience, but the absence of condescension, and how rare that absence was.
How it had made the worn little drawing room feel, briefly, like a place where she was allowed to be exactly who she was.
She had been invisible for four seasons and had come to expect invisibility, but the Duke of Ravenhurst had looked at her, and the looking had not felt like being evaluated, appraised or assessed for potential.
It had felt like being seen. The difference between those things, between being looked at and being seen, was a difference she had not known existed until he sat in her morning room and showed it to her.
Now she could not pretend she did not know it, and that was the problem.
Bethany would have told her this if she had known, but she probably did know, and that was probably why she had not smiled.
***
She thought about him while reading, while sewing the panel into the waist of her ivory gown, which needed letting out because the gown had been made three years ago and her body had quietly continued to change shape without consulting her wardrobe.
She thought about him while walking with Cassie in the park, and while listening to Aunt Margery’s commentary on the price of candles.
Most of all she thought about him while lying in bed and wondering whether a duke who laughed without permission was the same thing as a duke who could be trusted.
She did not write to him. She did not inquire after him. She read her Crébillon, kept her own counsel, and waited, because waiting was what Imogen Goodall did. She had been doing it for four seasons; she was very good at it, but she hated it.
***
The Montford musicale was three evenings later, and the Italian soprano in the music room was either magnificent or punishing, depending on whether one had come for the music or for the conversation happening underneath it.
Imogen had come for neither. She had come because Aunt Margery had received the card and had said, gently and persistently, that it would be good for Imogen to be seen.
Being seen, in Aunt Margery’s vocabulary, meant standing near a wall in one’s second-best evening gown and hoping someone would notice, and Imogen had spent four seasons being seen in precisely this manner and had yet to find any evidence that the seeing was reciprocal.
She was standing near the wall now. The soprano was reaching for something ambitious in the upper register, and the audience was arranged in the Montford music room in neat rows of gilt chairs, fans moving, gloved hands folded, faces politely attentive or politely asleep depending on their relationship to the hostess.
Aunt Margery was four chairs in, already listing toward her neighbor’s shoulder.
Cassie was seated beside Miss Drayton, whispering behind her programme.
Imogen was not seated. She had given up her chair to a stout matron who had arrived late and breathless and who had looked at Imogen’s chair as if her corset were winning a war against her ribs and the chair were the only available surrender.
Imogen had yielded without complaint and retreated to the corridor side of the room, where the door stood half-open, the air was cooler, and the soprano’s highest notes were slightly less likely to cause permanent damage.
“You are not enjoying the music, Miss Goodall.”
She did not jump. She refused to jump. The Duke of Ravenhurst had appeared beside her without warning, as if materialising from dim corridors were a skill they taught at whatever school produced men like him.
He was standing close enough that the sleeve of his coat was an inch from her bare arm, and the inch was doing more work than any inch of air had any right to do.
“I am enjoying the music very much, Your Grace. I am enjoying it from a safe distance.”
“Is that your habit? Enjoying things from a safe distance?”
The question landed differently than he had probably meant it to, and they both heard it land, but neither of them corrected it.
His eyes found hers in the low light of the corridor side, and she saw something move in them, a flicker of awareness that the conversation had shifted underneath him without his permission.
“May I find you a glass of ratafia?” he asked. “The Montford cellars are said to be better than their soprano.”
“That is not a high bar, Your Grace.”
“Nevertheless.”
She should have said no. Bethany’s voice was sitting in the back of her mind, clear and precise, telling her about Hambridges, beautiful sons and broken hearts. The voice was right, and sensible, but it was no match at all for the inch of air between his sleeve and her arm and the hum it carried.
She let him steer her into the corridor.