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

Chapter 13

Ashcombe moved before the waltz had finished.

He crossed the floor in the peculiar gliding haste of a man performing an entrance, and he arrived beside them in the small cleared room at the edge of the dance with all the ceremony of a season at last arriving. “Eleanor—one moment of your time, I beg. I have been a fool—a complete and damned fool—and I have come to make amends. I have the ring, Eleanor. I have carried it forty miles to give it back to you in public, to show the county that the story they are telling is wrong, that I was wrong—”

Whatever he had been about to say stopped, because Marcus had turned, and was looking at him with the particular quiet of a man who does not need to raise his voice.

“Mr. Ashcombe.”

“Your Grace.” Ashcombe’s smile did not waver, but something behind it did. “Forgive the intrusion. A private matter of some years’ standing—”

“There is no matter between you and Miss Linden standing,” Marcus said, “private or otherwise.”

“I—your Grace, I think you do not understand the history—”

“I understand it perfectly. I understand that you were engaged to Miss Linden, and that when her father’s fortune failed you asked for your ring back within the month. I understand that you informed her, with enormous regret, that your feelings could not survive contact with her family’s changed circumstances.” He paused. The ballroom had gone so quiet that the candles seemed to be holding their breath. “What I do not understand, Mr. Ashcombe, is why you imagine that this history, so well known to yourself, could possibly do anything but recommend her to me.”

Ashcombe stood very still.

“Miss Linden found out what you are worth in the same month she lost her father’s fortune,” Marcus said. “That is the most expensive education a young woman can purchase, and she paid for it, and she has carried it as a gift to every subsequent acquaintance. She told me of you, sir, freely and plainly, in the middle of this very waltz, without a single operatic accompaniment. A man who has once been cut so cleanly knows the bitter currency of generosity.” He smiled, and the smile did not reach the edges of his voice. “You will excuse us. The music has restarted, and I believe the young lady intends to dance with me.”

The velvet box in Ashcombe’s hand trembled once, and closed.

The entire room had understood, by then, with the unerring instinct of a county watching its own mythology being rewritten, that the winter courtship was no courtship at all—it was an election, and the returns were in, and the duke had declared for the girl in blue among the county’s assembled fathers, mothers, and daughters, in a manner that could not be walked back without the walking back of his name.

For the first time since the arrival of the carriage, Eleanor looked at Frederick Ashcombe with something close to pity.

“I did tell you not to call again,” she said.

Ashcombe said nothing. He stood a moment, ornament in hand, processing the arithmetic of the room, and then he made his bow—to the duke, not to her—and walked, with the careful unhurried precision of a man evacuating a burning building while carrying the fire, toward the doors.

He did not look back.

The assembly saw the duke hand Miss Linden a glass of ratafia with his own hand, and saw her drink it, and saw them both, a little later, laughing at something in the corner that no one else could hear. And the chorus of whispers rearranged itself, as it always does, around the newest and most useful truth: the duke of Marnfeld was in love.

At the far end of the room, Lady Amara Colthurst had not moved from her seat for over an hour. She had watched the entire performance with the fixed attention of a naturalist studying a specimen, and now she rose—unhurried herself—and crossed the room in a gown the color of the sea at dusk, and came to stand before Eleanor Linden with her hands folded, and her face assembled, and the county holding its breath behind her.

“Miss Linden,” she said.

“Lady Amara.”

“You will think me ill-bred if I do not say something, so I shall say it, and you may do with it what you like.” A pause; a small, precise adjustment of her cuffs. “I planted the story that your silence was a performance. At Marnfeld, in the autumn. I told myself it was strategy—your strategy—and that I was simply exposing it. I have had all winter to become aware that it was nothing of the kind: it was envy, and it wore the clothes of suspicion.”

Eleanor said nothing.

“I do not ask your forgiveness,” Amara went on. “I ask only that you understand what I did, and why, so that you may know the full measure of the account you might have against me.” She smiled—a thin, rueful, wholly unarmored smile. “You beat me, Miss Linden, at a game I believed I was the only one playing. That is a more honest defeat than most. I thought I should at least admit it to your face, before the county begins to whisper that I have been gracious, which I have not been, and should not like to take credit for.”

Eleanor considered her for a long moment.

“You were right,” she said, “at Marnfeld, about one thing.”

Lady Amara’s careful composure flickered.

“The quietest performance is still a performance,” Eleanor said. “Only—as it happens—not mine.” She held out her hand. “I do not intend to make an enemy of you, Lady Amara. I have made too few friends this winter to waste one on a grudge.”

Amara looked at the offered hand for a moment, and then, with the smallest of hesitations, took it.

The violins had started again; the candles had burned down another hour; and at the door, waiting with his coat over his arm and his carriage ordered for the return to Brackley, the Duke of Marnfeld stood watching the two women shake hands, and felt—in a room he had entered an hour ago holding the county’s opinion like a live coal—the first full, undefended warmth of a winter ending.