Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 11

Frederick Ashcombe had not changed.

This was, Eleanor thought, watching him approach across the muddy lane on a December afternoon, the most disappointing thing about him—that a man could fail to change and yet be changed by time’s simple passing into a stranger. He had the same copper hair, the same easy confidence, the same particular way of smiling that suggested he was about to offer you a favor. He was dressed with the careful unpracticality of a man who expected to be judged by his coat, and he doffed it now, and made his bow, and the bow contained everything of him that had ever been at bankers’ tables: smooth, measured, and calculating the value of the room.

“Eleanor.” He straightened. “You are looking wonderfully well.”

“I am called Miss Linden, Mr. Ashcombe. I believe we have established that.”

“Yes—of course. Old habits.” He fell into step beside her with the ease of a man who had never once been refused anything that money could purchase. “I was passing through—an errand of my father’s, some wool business out of the north—and I heard the most extraordinary piece of intelligence at the inn at Bath. You have caught the attention of a duke, Eleanor. The Duke of Marnfeld, no less. They say he cancelled an entire house party to pursue you.”

“They say many things.”

“Are they true?”

She stopped walking and turned to face him. The December light was thin and white; it made his confidence look like brass. In the two years since he had asked for his ring back—carefully, politely, with enormous regret—she had rehearsed this conversation in a hundred unlikely rooms, and now that it stood before her in the lane, she found she did not feel the anger she had expected. She felt, instead, the flat weariness of a person confirming the contents of a box she had already opened.

“The duke and I are acquainted,” she said. “The duke and I are, in fact, choosing to be honest with one another, which is a language you do not speak. I do not think the details are any of your business.”

“Ah—but that is precisely the thing, Eleanor. See, I am the only man in this county who knows you as you truly are.” He had stepped closer; the smile had not moved. “I know the family circumstances. I know what would happen to your father’s name if the true extent of his debts were made a matter of common knowledge. I have been at pains, these two years, to keep that knowledge quiet, Eleanor—at some cost to myself, I might add—because I believed you would find your feet again, and I wished to be the one standing beside you when you did.”

He paused, allowing the burden of his generosity to descend upon her.

“My father’s firm is doing handsomely now,” he said. “Very handsomely. And I find that I am in a position to be—generous—to the family of a woman I once hoped to marry. One word from you, and the matter of the canal shares, the whole unfortunate entanglement, could be made to disappear. All I would ask is that you consider whether a duke’s attention is worth as much as a gentleman’s certainty.”

Eleanor stood in the lane and looked at him.

She thought of the asking, and the certainties, and the careful arithmetic of men who weigh women against money. She thought of the ring, returned in its velvet box with enormous regret. And she thought of a man who had ridden thirty miles through rain to stand in her garden and ask not whether she would have him, but whether she might one day choose him, and who had spent the winter learning the names of her village and the books she had read.

“Mr. Ashcombe,” she said, “you are offering me certainty the way one offers a trap to a bird, and you have timed it poorly: I have become acquainted with the difference between being chosen for one’s position and being chosen for oneself. That education has been expensive, and I intend to use it. Please do not call on me again.”

The confidence in his face flickered—a banked fire finding wind—before settling into something harder.

“You are making a mistake, Eleanor.”

“I am aware. I have made it before; it is familiar country; I am choosing it freely this time, which makes all the difference.”

“People will say—”

“People will say what they always say. Good afternoon, Mr. Ashcombe.”

He stood in the lane a long moment, his carriage waiting at the inn, and watched her walk back to the small white house without looking back, and some part of him that had banked on her smallness folded quietly into the December fog.

She did not tell Marcus of the encounter.

It was not secrecy, exactly. It was more that the winter had grown soft with them, and she had begun—against her own careful program—to want his company uncomplicated by the debts of her past. She wanted the ordinary texture of the courtship: the walks, the arguments about novels, his appalled delight when she described the end of a book before he had begun it. Twice she had caught Marcus looking at her with an expression of such open, unarmored attention that she had felt the ground tilt under her, and both times he had looked away first, as though respecting a boundary she had not yet drawn. She was, she realized with alarm, beginning to trust him, and she treated the development with all the suspicion it deserved.

In January, there arrived at the village a house party of another sort: the annual assembly at Brampton, seven miles off, where the county’s second-best families gathered to dance, to match, and to broadcast intelligence. Eleanor’s mother had been angling toward it since October. “A duke, Eleanor, at the Brampton assembly—the entire county will see you together, and that, my darling, is worth a fortune in itself.” And so she had written to him—a small, formal, ridiculous note, asking whether he might wish to attend the Brampton assembly, and he had written back within the day, saying that he would, and that he had “never once in his life been invited to a dance by a woman he was courting,” and that he considered it “the most ordinary and extraordinary honor of his thirty-six years.”

They went in his carriage. She wore the pale blue dress.

And at the assembly, among the candles and the violins and the careful rearranging of the county’s attention, Frederick Ashcombe was waiting, with his father’s firm behind him and a smile like a drawn blade, and behind him, in a gown the color of the sea at dusk, stood Lady Amara Colthurst, who had come up from Cornwall expressly to see what the winter had made of the quiet girl who had won the duke.