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

Chapter 13

Lady Marchwood was unusually cheerful at breakfast.

“Another letter from London,” she announced, unfolding it with a flourish, because news delivered once is merely information and news delivered twice is a performance. “His grace returns tomorrow.”

Vivienne Prescott lowered her eyes with practiced modesty. “My father writes that their discussions have been very productive.”

Rosalind’s spoon touched the rim of her cup with a faint click.

“Productive is such a hopeful word,” Vivienne went on pleasantly, addressing the table at large. “I believe there may soon be reason for celebration.”

Marianne, two seats away, heard the click. Rosalind knew it, because Marianne’s head came up half an inch and stayed there.

“How fortunate,” Rosalind said.

Vivienne’s smile was flawless. “I hope you mean that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“No reason at all.”

Lady Marchwood was already reading the second page of the letter. The table resumed its conversations. Rosalind finished her toast in the correct order, and excused herself in the correct manner, and left the room at the correct speed.

Halfway down the corridor, a hand closed around her elbow.

“You,” Marianne said, “and I, are going to the morning room.”

“Do you always abduct people before eleven?”

“Only when they have been disappearing for a week and pretending it is a hobby.”

Marianne shut the door behind them and leaned against it, arms folded, in a dressing gown still, because she had left the table before her maid could arrive, and Marianne Vane never left a table early for anything less than an emergency.

“Something happened,” she said. “You have been walking the long way around the house since the day Edmund left, and yesterday you did not eat, and this morning you clicked your spoon against your cup like a woman dropping a coin into a well. Tell me.”

Rosalind took the note from her pocket and handed it over.

Marianne read the promissory note, and then the sentence beneath it, and then the date. Her face hardened in a way Rosalind had not seen before — Edmund’s stillness, worn by his sister, with none of his patience attached.

“Who sent this?”

“There was no signature.”

“Who sent this?”

“No one known to me.”

“Does Edmund know?”

“No.”

“Then we tell him tomorrow.” Marianne folded the paper and held it out. “The moment he comes back.”

Rosalind took it back and put it in her pocket. “We do not.”

Marianne stared at her. “Why?”

“Because if the debt is genuine, I bring scandal and financial obligation to a man already choosing between his own life and forty-three families. And if it is false — if someone has gone to the trouble of forging my dead father’s signature to frighten me away — then that person is willing to manufacture scandal to keep me from him. Which is precisely why he should not be told.”

“That,” Marianne said, “is the most convoluted piece of self-punishment I have ever heard, and I once listened to a bishop explain the Trinity.”

“He is already choosing.”

“You do not know what he is choosing.”

“Vivienne apparently does.”

Marianne’s mouth tightened. “Vivienne Prescott knows what she wants people to believe. Believing a person like that is like trusting a weathervane to tell you the direction of the wind in a closed room.”

Rosalind looked toward the window. In the park below, gardeners were burning the previous week’s cuttings, and the smoke went straight up in the still air.

“Marianne. If I tell him now, while he is in London negotiating the future of forty-three households, he will drop everything and come back and take this over, because that is what he does, and this time it will cost other people their roofs.” She turned around. “You told me that he has spent his whole life believing duty means accepting whatever costs him most. I will not be a bill he pays at the expense of his tenants.”

Marianne looked at her for a long moment.

“Then what will you do?”

“I do not know yet.”

“You do know. You simply do not want to say it to me.”

Rosalind said nothing, and Marianne let out a breath through her nose and walked to the door, and put her hand on the handle, and then turned back.

“For what it is worth — and I do not expect it to be worth anything — Alexander has never once in thirty-nine years looked at a woman the way he looked at you on that terrace.” She opened the door. “He is a man who has been arranging the world his whole life so that no one could ever hand him anything he had not already priced. You were the first thing in his life he could not price.”

She went out, and the door clicked shut, and Rosalind stood alone in the morning room with her hands at her sides.

An hour later, when the household had settled into its usual middle-of-the-morning torpor, a footman came looking for her.

“Miss Ellery? There is a gentleman in the hall, asking for you.” He hesitated, holding out a card. “I told him her ladyship was not receiving, but he says it is a matter of business. He is a solicitor, miss. His name is Mr. Pettifer.”

Rosalind looked at the card in the footman’s hand for a very long moment.

Then she took it, and smoothed her skirts, and walked downstairs with a completely steady step, and did not permit herself to think about whether the man waiting at the bottom of the stairs had been paid by somebody to be there today, of all days, six hours before the Duke of Harnwood came home.