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

Chapter 11

She found Marianne in the conservatory the next day, trimming dead leaves from a rose tree that had no business being indoors.

“May I ask you something dishonest and difficult?”

“You may ask me anything,” Marianne said. “The dishonest part will take care of itself.”

Rosalind turned her face toward the glass panes. “If someone could prevent a great deal of suffering by surrendering something they wanted very much — would you call that sacrifice, or common sense?”

Marianne’s scissors stopped.

“I would ask,” she said, “whether the suffering truly required that surrender.”

“Suppose it did.”

“Then I would ask why you are making my brother’s decision for him.”

Rosalind looked sharply down. Marianne had not taken her eyes off the rose tree.

“I did not mention your brother.”

“You didn’t need to.” Marianne set down the scissors. “You have been walking the long way around the house for a week trying to convince yourself of something, and everyone can see it but the two people it concerns, which is always how these things work.” She brushed soil from her fingers. “Alexander has spent his entire life being told that duty means accepting whatever costs him most. He is very good at believing it. It is the one lie he has never once questioned.”

“People depend on him.”

“Yes. That does not mean they require him to be miserable.”

Rosalind swallowed. “Vivienne could give him everything his estate needs.”

“Everything his estate needs,” Marianne said softly. “Is that everything he needs?”

Rosalind could not answer, and Marianne did not press her, and they stood together among the roses while the rain of the previous week dried on the glass.

That afternoon, Edmund departed for London.

The carriage came round to the portico at three. The guests assembled to see him off with the pleased gravity of people who enjoy watching departures. Lady Marchwood made the arrangements about the luggage. Vivienne Prescott stood near the step with her hands folded, radiant in expectation, and did not say a word, which was itself a kind of statement. Mr. Rigby waited in the second carriage with a case of documents, looking like a man escorting a treaty.

Rosalind stood with the other guests beneath the portico, at the back, in the way she had always stood: present, appropriate, and not quite included.

At the carriage door, Edmund paused.

He turned around and looked along the portico, past the baronet and the two ladies from Wessex and Lady Marchwood’s nephew, and his gaze found her immediately, the way it always did now, as though she were the only object in the landscape with edges.

“Miss Ellery.”

The formality hurt more than it should have.

“Your grace.”

He seemed about to say something. She watched him decide against it — watched the sentence form and be discarded — and then he bowed, once, and climbed into the carriage, and a footman folded the steps and closed the door.

The wheels turned on the gravel. The horses leaned into the trace. Vivienne Prescott lifted one hand in a graceful farewell, and Lady Marchwood said something about the weather being likely to hold, and the carriage went down the drive and turned out of sight between the dark hedges.

Rosalind stood there for a moment longer than the others, which was careless, and then went inside with everyone else and drank tea in the drawing room and discussed nothing at all.

Three days passed without word.

On the third evening, Lady Marchwood received a letter from London and read it aloud at dinner, because letters from London were the currency of a country house and she was not a woman to hoard wealth. Lord Prescott and the Duke of Harnwood had met twice. The discussions had been cordial. Nothing had been settled, but everything had been discussed, which in London was nearly the same thing.

By the time the fish was cleared, everyone in the house had a theory. By the time the pudding arrived, three of them had been shared out loud. By morning, the theories had hardened into a fact with no source, which is the most durable kind of fact there is: the Duke of Harnwood was going to marry Vivienne Prescott.

Rosalind listened to it all and corrected nothing.

At breakfast she drank her tea — milk, no sugar — and answered when spoken to, and did not assume any invitation included her until her name was said aloud, and observed every rule she had spent ten years learning.

That night, when she climbed the stairs to her room with her candle, something white moved under the edge of her door.

She stopped. She looked down the corridor, in both directions. The house was quiet. Somewhere below, a clock struck one.

Then she knelt on the cold boards, picked up the envelope, and opened it.

There was no seal, no signature, and no address.