Chapter Twelve #2
He got her to the back of the house. A quiet drawing room behind the dining room, carpeted, clean, untouched by the chaos in the front rooms. A housekeeper, the only entirely sober person in the building, materialized with tea and a blanket and the particular expression of a woman who was accustomed to finding unexpected guests in quiet rooms and who had opinions about it that she was too professional to share.
Ash seated Imogen in a chair by the fire and stood at her shoulder while her maid was standing one step behind.
He stood there for two hours.
Two hours in which he did not drink, did not laugh, did not flirt, did not sit down and did not allow a single member of the wagers set within ten feet of her chair.
Two hours in which the Duke of Ravenhurst, the most chased duke in London, the man who had spent eight seasons accepting everything the ton’s most beautiful women had offered him, stood beside a wallflower’s chair in a quiet drawing room at the back of a debauched house and refused everything.
She watched him refuse. The first refusal came ten minutes in, a woman in emerald silk, beautiful, her neckline cut to her navel, who sauntered to the doorway and leaned against the frame and asked Ash, in a voice like warm honey, whether he intended to spend the entire evening playing nursemaid or join her.
Ash said no, thank you, without looking at her, and the woman’s face changed, briefly and sharply, and she left.
The second refusal came twenty minutes later.
A card game, proposed by a man Imogen did not recognize, stakes to be determined, the game to last until dawn.
Ash shook his head, but the man persisted.
Ash turned his head and looked at him, and whatever was in Ash’s face when he looked was sufficient, because the man retreated without further argument and did not return.
The third refusal was Lord Rourke, who appeared in the doorway with his cravat undone and his face flushed and said something to Ash in a low voice that Imogen could not hear. Ash’s response was two words, quiet and flat, and Rourke looked at Imogen and then at Ash and retreated.
The fourth refusal was a glass of brandy, offered by a footman, declined without a word.
The fifth was a woman in dampened muslin who put her hand on Ash’s arm and was removed so quickly and so firmly that the woman stumbled backwards half a step and left the room without looking back.
The sixth was Lord Aldous, who had found his way to the back of the house and who stood swaying in the doorway asking whether Ravenhurst was feeling well, because Ravenhurst did not normally spend Friday evenings in quiet drawing rooms with wallflowers.
The word wallflowers landed on the room and sat there, but Ash’s face did something that made Aldous’s swaying stop very abruptly, and leaving without a word.
She watched the refusals accumulate, each one adding to the others, each one telling her something she had not known before about the man standing at her shoulder. She had known he desired her.
But desire was not this. Desire was private, physical, contained between two people in dark rooms and dim corridors.
This was public. This was a man standing in an open doorway and telling the entire world, by the simple act of not moving, that the woman in the chair behind him was worth more than everything else in the building combined.
This was not desire. This was choice. And the choice was more devastating than any kiss had been, because a kiss could be taken back but a choice could not, and the Duke of Ravenhurst had made his choice and was not going to move.
When the gathering began to slide toward the kind of disorder that could not be unseen, the noise from the front rooms growing louder and more ragged, a crash of glass, someone’s sharp high laugh that sounded less like amusement and more like something breaking, Ash escorted her out by the back stairs and the kitchen door.
The kitchen was empty, the staff having retreated to their quarters, and the door opened onto a side path that led around the building to the stable yard.
The night air hit her face, cold and clean after the perfumed heat of the house, and she breathed it in and let it wash the evening out of her lungs.
He refused to get her own carriage back to take them. “Your coachman will talk. Every servant in London talks, and your coachman will have opinions about why Miss Goodall left at ten o’clock by the kitchen door, and his opinions will be in the servants’ hall by morning.”
He put her in his own carriage. Two of his footmen, one inside and one on the box, men whose discretion he trusted because they were his men and their silence was guaranteed.
He held the carriage door open when she climbed in, but he did not follow.
Because following would have meant riding alone in a carriage with an unmarried woman at ten o’clock at night, and he was protecting her reputation, every inch of it, even the inches she would have been willing to sacrifice.
He folded her cloak around her before he closed the door, adjusted the collar and pressed something in her hand. It was a card, folded once, his handwriting on the inside. She closed her fingers around it without looking at it.
“I am sorry,” he said. His voice was very quiet.
The door closed, and the carriage rocked forward. Imogen sat in the Duke of Ravenhurst’s carriage with his footman sitting opposite her and her maid next to her, and she opened the note.
I am sorry. I will explain. Trust me one day longer.
His handwriting was angular and slightly uneven, the hand of a man who had been taught penmanship as a boy and had spent the subsequent twenty years not practicing it.
The ink was fresh, but she had no idea when he had written it.
He could not have because he was beside her the whole time.
The only thing she could think of was that she remembered that he stepped to the back of the room for no more than a minute .
.Mayhap that was what he was doing then.
She folded the note and pressed her hand flat against the carriage window.
She thought about what she had just seen.
Not the courtesans or the card-room or the disorder or the woman calling his name.
Those were scenery, ugly scenery, the backdrop against which the real thing had happened, and the real thing was six refusals in two hours and a man who had not sat down and a note written in angular handwriting that said trust me one day longer.
The real thing was the color leaving his face when he saw her in the doorway, the horror in it, the genuine unperformable horror of a man who had walked into a room expecting one evening and had found another.
He had not been afraid for himself. He had been afraid for her.
Afraid of what the room would do to her reputation, afraid of what the gossips would carry away and reproduce in drawing rooms across London by morning.
His fear had been entirely for her, and the selflessness of it had broken something inside her that she had not known was still intact.
It was some last barrier, some final reservation, the last thin wall of Bethany’s warnings and her own careful self-preservation and the four seasons of invisibility that had taught her to expect nothing from men.
She arrived home. Sarah had been sleeping again and woke when the carriage stopped but asked no questions, because Sarah was sensible and because sensible servants did not ask questions whose answers might require them to have opinions.
Imogen let herself in through the kitchen door, quietly, because Aunt Margery’s cough was audible from the upstairs bedroom and waking her would require explanations she was not prepared to give.
She went upstairs, sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, still in her blue silk, still in her mother’s pearl earrings.
She held the note in both hands and read it again, though she had already memorized it.
Trust me one day longer.
She was going to trust him. She had decided, sometime between the doorway and the carriage, between his hand on her cloak and his footman riding inside, that trust was no longer a question.
She thought about what trust meant. Trust was not the absence of doubt.
Trust was the decision to act despite the doubt, to walk forward knowing the ground might not hold, to choose the person who had given you every reason to believe and some reasons not to and to decide, with full knowledge of both, that the reasons to believe outweighed the reasons to doubt.
She was in love with him. She could say it now, sitting in the dark on the edge of her bed with the note in her hands and the evening settling around her like silt after a storm.
She was in love with the Duke of Ravenhurst, and the love was not sensible, safe or anything Bethany would approve of, but it was the truest thing she had ever carried.
She undressed and went to bed but did not sleep.
She held the note against her collarbone, listened to the quiet house and thought about the sound of his voice when he had said I am sorry.
It was real, and she was going to trust it, and that was a decision that was either going to save her or break her.