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

Chapter 8

Eleanor left Marnfeld Hall before dawn the following morning.

She had always been an early riser—one of the many small truths the duke had never learned, because he had never asked—and so it was not remarkable that she was dressed and waiting at the side door when the carriage came, or that she left before the house had begun to stir. She had not slept. She had spent the night composing, and discarding, and finally writing, in her small careful hand, a single sheet that she addressed to His Grace the Duke of Marnfeld, and she had left it on the table in her room, weighted with the book she had been reading in his library, because it seemed to her that the book belonged to the house.

The note said:

Your Grace—

I have been told that the chairs are beautiful and that I should have sat still and let them pinch me. I have decided instead that there is no furniture valuable enough to bruise a person on. I hope you find someone beside whom you can rest, and that you do not hold it against her when she does not ask first what you are worth.

—E. Linden

The servants who had been kind to her wept a little, which surprised her; Mrs. Quill, the housekeeper, pressed a small bundle of her best lavender into her hands and said, fiercely, “Men are fools, child, and dukes are fools with better tailors. You come back to us.” Eleanor had thanked her, and had not promised anything, because she had made a career of not promising what she could not keep.

The guests came down to breakfast at nine, and found that the pale-blue ghost of their gathering had gone home to Brackley, and that the morning had become ordinary again, and the conversation settled into its old routines with a relief that tasted like liberation.

Marcus discovered she was gone when he returned from his ride at ten and found the note on his pillow, where his valet—a practical man with no tolerance for melodrama—had placed it by his tooth-glass.

He read it once.

He read it again.

He sat on the edge of his bed in his riding clothes, smelling of horse and rain, and read it a third time, and did not realize he was holding his breath until his chest ached with it.

I hope you find someone beside whom you can rest.

He thought of all the things he could have said, arranged them by their weight of cowardice, and found them all wanting. He could have told her that he had been too long surrounded by people who wanted things, and had grown afraid of the wanting itself. He could have told her that the accusation had come not from distrust of her but from the deepest habit of his life—the habit of not believing. He could have told her that watching her refuse her mother’s bargain through a half-open door had been the most painful, impressive thing he had ever witnessed.

He could have said any of it.

He had not said any of it, and she was gone, and the house was suddenly enormous and empty in a way that the stone itself seemed to notice.

He did not go after her.

For three days, he told himself that the reason was wisdom. He had given her no reason to return, and any pursuit now would be not a question but a claim, and she had asked for fewer claims, not more. On the fourth day he admitted the truth: he was afraid. He was afraid that he would arrive at her door and find that she did not want him, and that the discovery would end the only thing in his life that had ever felt like an answer rather than a question.

So he stayed, and he was punished for it by staying, and the punishment was the first honest thing he had felt in weeks.

The remaining guests departed two days later. The Dowager Duchess—who had watched her carefully assembled table scatter like startled doves, and had heard, through the reliable instrument of her lady’s maid, an account of the night her son buried himself in the morning room with all correspondence refused—found him there at last, at noon, sitting in the window seat with a letter he was not reading.

The Dowager Helena Ashford entered the room like a ship coming into harbor: fully dressed, fully briefed, entirely unstoppable.

“I have the itinerary for the week,” she said, holding up two sheets of paper. “Dinner at Lady Pemberton’s. A private box at the opera. The Amara girl’s family have contrived an invitation to Tewkesbury—”

“I am cancelling everything.”

Helena’s hands lowered. “Marcus.”

“I am cancelling it all. The dinners, the outings, the entire apparatus. It was a mistake to have begun it.”

“Lady Amara’s family will be offended, and I do not mean politely.”

“They will manage. Their offense will survive contact with my absence.”

“And the others—”

“They were invited under circumstances I should never have permitted.” He stood, and his mother, for the first time in her life, took a step back from her son’s height. “I asked eight women to submit themselves to a hospitality that was actually a judgment. Seven of them did it with grace and courage, and one of them did it without performing. And I repaid the only honest one in the room by treating her honesty as a tactic.”

“Marcus.” Helena’s voice had changed—had become, unexpectedly, the voice she had used when he was small and had fallen from a tree: softer, and lower, and unarmored herself. “You were not well used by Lady Vane. That was not your crime. You are not required to spend your life atoning for it.”

“Mother, I know.” He turned to the window. “But I am not atoning by trusting no one. I am atoning by being unworthy of trust.” He was quiet for a moment. “I think,” he said, “that I invited eight women here to prove they were suitable, without once asking whether I was becoming a man any of them should choose. And it took a woman who asked me if I was tired to make me see it.”

Helena stood in the middle of the room, the itinerary crumpling slowly in her hands.

“That,” she said at last, “does not sound like you.”

“No,” said Marcus. “I think that is the point.”

A faint, calculating smile touched the Dowager’s mouth—the smile of a woman who had miscalculated badly and was already composing the letter of apology and the more important letter of correction.

“Then what,” she asked, “do you intend to do?”

Marcus looked at her. He had not known, until that moment, what the answer was. But it came to him whole, fully formed, the way a decision arrives when it has actually been made.

“I intend,” he said, “to become the man she asked me to be. And then I intend to write to her—and if she answers me, I intend to spend whatever years remain learning to be silent beside her.” He picked up the letter he had not been reading and tapped it against his palm. “I have waited long enough, Mother. I have waited six days, and I have stopped waiting. Tonight I write to Eleanor Linden, and she will either receive a duke’s apology or a stranger’s letter, and I think I shall lose her either way unless I am willing to risk being refused.”

Helena watched her son walk out of the room, and stood alone among the ruined itinerary, and allowed herself—in the privacy of an empty morning room, where no one could see—one small, astonished smile.