Every Woman Avoided the Chair Beside the Feared Duke — Until the Quiet Spinster Sat Down

Chapter 10

Over the next week, their easy companionship vanished beneath courtesy.

It was done so smoothly that no one in the house remarked on it, which was the point. Edmund spent his mornings shut in the study with estate ledgers and solicitors, and his afternoons riding the boundary with a steward, and his evenings performing the duties of a guest with the mechanical correctness of a clock. He was pleasant to everyone. He was pleasant, especially, to Vivienne Prescott, who had stopped calling Rosalind a curiosity and begun treating her with a warm, inclusive kindness that was considerably harder to withstand.

Rosalind occupied herself with Marianne, with books, and with walks taken at hours when she knew the estate office would be occupied.

She was good at it. She had thirty-two years of practice in being absent from rooms without leaving them.

But she felt him everywhere.

In the empty chair opposite her at breakfast. In footsteps passing the library door and not stopping. In the absence of the dry, half-spoken observations she had begun, over four short days, to expect beside her like a habit she had not agreed to develop.

On the fifth evening, she went into the library looking for a novel and found the house quiet in that particular way houses go quiet when important conversations are happening behind a closed door.

The study door was ajar, and lamplight spilled out of it in a long yellow slice.

“Prescott will cover the northern mortgage entirely,” said a voice she recognized as Mr. Rigby, one of Edmund’s trustees — an older man with the flat certainty of someone who had been right about money so often that he had confused it with being right about everything. “The settlement would protect the farms and prevent forced sales. There is no other instrument available to you at present, your grace. I have looked.”

“And the price,” Edmund said, “is Vivienne.”

“The price is marriage. Men in your position rarely have the privilege of pretending the two are separate.”

Rosalind should have moved away. She was standing beside the shelves with a novel already in her hand, and every particle of good manners she possessed told her to walk to the far door and let the house keep its business. Instead she stood frozen in the dark, listening, because she had spent her whole life being someone to whom nothing important had to be explained — and for once, she wanted to know.

“Miss Prescott is suitable,” Rigby continued. “Young. Accomplished.”

“Wealthy,” Edmund said. “You forgot willing.”

“Surely that recommends her.”

“Does it?”

A chair scraped. Rigby’s voice flattened into its final argument, the one men used when they had run out of respectable ones. “And if you refuse, then by spring you may be forced to sell acreage that supports dozens of tenant households. I need not tell you what happens to those families, your grace. Their grandfathers planted those fields.”

Silence followed.

Rosalind pressed her fingers against the spine of the book nearest her, and thought about forty-three families: children, winter roofs, fields planted by generations who would never know her name, would never know she had stood in a library with a novel in her hand while their lives were being weighed in a room forty feet away.

“I will give you my answer in London,” Edmund said finally.

“Then you will meet Lord Prescott.”

“I will meet him.”

“And the lady?”

“Do not,” Edmund said, “call her the lady, as though she were a parcel.”

Rosalind slipped away before the door opened, and made it to the corridor, and stood in the dark with her heart going like a bird in a box.

She had asked him to do this.

She had stood on a stone bridge four days ago and told him to choose forty-three families over her own happiness, and he had told her that she was seeing his title instead of him, and she had walked away rather than admit that he was right. And now here it was, being arranged in his study, at his own table, by men who talked about it exactly the way she had told him to think about it.

At the top of the stairs, the corridor was dark except for one lamp by the landing.

Someone was standing beside it.

Rosalind stopped walking, and her skin prickled along the arms.

“Miss Ellery.” Mr. Crane stepped out of the shadow of the staircase with his hat in his hand. “You look disturbed. I hope nothing has distressed you.”

“Mr. Crane.” She kept her voice flat. “I understood you had gone north.”

“I returned. Business in the county.” He smiled, and it was perfectly pleasant, and his voice was low and unhurried, and something about him was so at ease in this house he was not staying in that her mouth went dry. “I heard his grace has been very occupied this week. Fortunate, for the tenants. Forty-three households is a great many chimneys to keep burning.”

Rosalind’s hand tightened on the novel.

“How did you know it was forty-three?”

Crane’s smile did not change. It simply stayed exactly where it was, warm and easy and fixed, and Rosalind understood that she had made a mistake by saying it out loud, and that he now knew she had made it, and that he was going to enjoy knowing.

“Everyone knows, Miss Ellery,” he said. “It is the great question of the season. Whether the Duke of Harnwood will marry money or marry nothing.” He put on his hat and adjusted the brim with two fingers. “I wish him the better of the two, naturally. Though I wonder sometimes whether gentlemen in his position are ever permitted the better of anything.”

He bowed and went down the stairs, and his boots made no particular hurry on each step.

Rosalind stood in the corridor a long time after he was gone.

Then she went to her room and did not sleep, and in the morning she told no one.