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

Chapter 7

The rumors did not arrive as accusations at first. They arrived as weather.

The next morning, conversations stopped when Eleanor entered the breakfast room. Not rudely—there was no rudeness in it—but with a particular kind of smoothness, the sea closing over a stone. Lady Gwendolyn’s eyes followed her with the bright attention of a magpie. The heiress from the north, who had never once addressed her, found a reason to lean across the table and mention the cold beauty of the gardens, and to ask—lightly, as if the question cost nothing—whether Miss Linden had enjoyed her walk last evening.

“I did,” Eleanor said. “The sea air is restorative.”

“Indeed. The sea air.” Lady Gwendolyn’s smile was a china cup, carefully carried. “You seem to have excellent weather for walking. And such excellent company.”

By luncheon, Lady Amara had reduced the entire matter to a single sentence, delivered softly enough that no one could accuse her of cruelty and loudly enough that the duke, standing by the window with his letters, heard it perfectly:

“Perhaps the quietest performance is still a performance.”

Marcus disliked the remark immediately. He disliked it the way one dislikes a stone in one’s shoe, not for its size but for its persistence.

He disliked more that a part of him remembered it.

He had spent most of his adult life surrounded by people who wanted something from him. Some wanted money. Some wanted influence. Some wanted simply to say, at dinner parties in London, that the Duke of Marnfeld knew their names. He had grown expert at recognizing ambition when ambition presented itself openly. Miss Linden’s interest in him had never been open. That was the very thing he had admired.

Now, against his better judgment, he began to wonder whether that had been deliberate too.

The idea irritated him profoundly—partly because he knew how unfair it was, and partly because he could not entirely make it go away.

He stopped seeking her out.

It was not a decision, exactly. It was more like a reflex, a tightening of the hand. The next morning he found himself at breakfast arranging his coffee cup, and realized he had been wondering whether she would come, and hated the discovery so much that he did not look up when she entered the room.

He allowed Lady Amara to claim the seat beside him at dinner without objection, and she filled it with stories and opinions like a woman furnishing an empty house.

And when, from farther down the table, Miss Linden made some dry remark about the quality of the pie, he smiled, and did not answer, and went back to his plate.

She did not ask him what was wrong.

That silence, inexplicably, felt worse than any accusation she could have made. He would have preferred her fury; fury at least attended him. He spent the evening in a state of speechlessness, watching her across the table, noticing that she noticed him watching, and watching her decide not to notice that.

The misunderstanding might have grown, might have taken root entirely, were it not for one afternoon in the middle of the third week, when Marcus came down the corridor toward the morning room and heard voices through the half-open door.

He had not intended to eavesdrop. It was the kind of sentence one tells oneself afterwards, after the hook has already set.

“Do not be a fool, Eleanor.” That was Mrs. Linden—a sharp, lovely, anxious woman who had spent the entire gathering arranging her daughter’s future in small, visible adjustments. “You will never get another chance like this one. A duke, Eleanor. A duke. Your father’s situation—you know what he faces when we return. One word from you—invitation, opportunity, any show of warmth at all—”

“There has been a misunderstanding between us,” Eleanor said. Her voice was careful. Marcus, frozen on the other side of the door, felt his throat close. “He has been—I do not know precisely what has happened, Mama. He has withdrawn.”

“Then this is the moment it has been leading to! You have been too clever by half, Eleanor, too particular, always measuring your honesty against his. Men such as this duke are not handled by honesty, they are handled by opportunity—by a woman’s willingness to take her chance when it presents itself. And you are letting it sail past you.”

A pause. When Eleanor spoke again, her voice had gone low and level in the way that Marcus had come to recognize—the way water goes still before a storm.

“Then maybe,” Eleanor said, “I don’t want the chance.”

“Eleanor—”

“Listen to me, Mama. If the only reason I could ever be a duchess is the size of his fortune and the width of my opportunity, then I do not want to be a duchess. I want to be chosen—by anyone, by the postman, I do not care—for myself. And if you love me, you will stop trying to sell me to the highest household.”

“We cannot afford your father’s debts.”

“Then we will afford them together, in the ordinary way that families afford their shame. I am done performing, Mama. I would rather be poor in a cold house than rich in a dishonest one.”

Marcus stood outside the door with his hand on the frame, hearing the two of them through the grain of the wood, and felt the floor shift under him.

Opportunity, his mother’s voice had said, in the drawing room, of the gathering. Invitation. The chance.

It had never occurred to him that a woman might refuse a chance. It had never occurred to him that the refusal might be the finest, most honest thing he had ever overheard, or that he had been turning his back on it all week because a cruel woman’s whisper had found fertile ground in his fear.

He should have walked in. He should have knocked, and asked, and begged their pardon.

Instead—because he had spent a lifetime learning to trust the armor and not the man inside it—he turned, and walked away, and said nothing.

That evening at dinner he spoke to Miss Linden not a word. And when she finally cornered him by the drawing-room windows, standing near the glass with a book he had not seen her open, he felt the whole of her quiet attention land on him like a hand.

“Have I offended you, Your Grace?”

“No.”

“That answer would be more convincing if you had looked at me at dinner.”

He set down the book. “I did look at you.”

“Then perhaps the problem is not that you looked away. Perhaps it is that you looked, and decided not to speak.” Her voice stayed even, but something had come into it—a note of distance that unsettled him more than her anger would have. “Something has changed, Your Grace. I am not stupid, and I am not a child, and I will not be handled. So I ask you plainly, as one honest person to another: what have I done?”

He heard the detonation of truth coming toward him and could not step aside in time.

“It is not anything you have done,” he said. “It is only—I have spent years being careful with people’s motives, Miss Linden. And I have begun to wonder whether I have been careful enough.”

“About what, precisely?”

“About you,” he admitted. “Whether the honesty is the whole of it, or the most polished part of a performance.” He heard himself say it, and felt the room grow colder. “I overheard you and your mother this afternoon. I have been asking myself how much of what you do—the walking out, the asking me if I am tired, the refusing to compete—how much of it is genuine, and how much of it is simply the most flattering mask in a house of masks.”

Eleanor went very still. The color drained from her face slowly, the way tide goes out.

“I see,” she said. And when she spoke again, her voice had gone quiet and level, and that calmness was the most frightening thing he had ever heard. “I spent two years being judged by a man who weighed my worth in credit and found it wanting. I came here, Your Grace, having decided that I would rather die unwed than live performing. And you, in three weeks, have managed to make me wonder why I ever thought a sincere heart would be visible to anyone.”

“Eleanor—”

“Miss Linden,” she corrected him, gently, and the gentleness was the end of the world. “I asked only that you not decide what I meant without asking me. It was a small request, I thought. I did not expect you to honor it, but I did not expect you to mourn it either.”

She walked past him to the door, and paused with her hand on the frame, and spoke without turning around.

“I think I should go home, Your Grace.”

It was not a threat, and it was not a plea. It was a decision, made in the same level tone with which she had said peace, and he knew, with the certainty of a man who has watched the tide change, that she was gone.

“Eleanor—” And then, forgetting every rule of the house, forgetting twenty years of armor: “Eleanor. Stay. We can—”

But the door had already closed, and the room was dark, and all that was left of her was the faint, expensive smell of her perfume, and the knowledge that he had spent three weeks earning the only honest thing ever offered him at Marnfeld Hall, and had lost it by asking the wrong question of the wrong person.