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

Chapter 15

Before sunrise the next morning, Rosalind packed one trunk.

She did it quickly and without sentiment, because sentiment at dawn is a luxury that costs an hour and gains nothing. Two day dresses, one good one. Boots. Her mother’s brooch. The books she could not leave behind, which required sitting on the trunk lid to close. The letters from Aunt Verity, tied with string. Her writing case, with the promissory note and the folded sheet locked inside it.

She wrote two letters and left them on the writing desk.

The first was to Lady Marchwood, thanking her for an agreeable fortnight and apologizing for the abruptness of her departure, in terms so pleasant and so empty that no one could possibly object to them.

The second was to Marianne, and it was shorter.

I cannot stay and watch this be decided in front of me. Please do not think badly of me. I am going where I have always gone when the world becomes too much, and I will write when I am settled. — R.

For Edmund, she left nothing.

She sat with the pen for a long time and did not write, because anything she wrote would be one of two things. It would either ask him to follow, which she had no right to do, or tell him not to, which was not her decision to make. A letter that did neither was not a letter; it was decoration. She had spent her life being decorative on other people’s furniture, and she would not do it in the last thing she ever left him.

At half past five, the house was silent. She carried her own trunk down the back stairs because she had not asked a servant for help, and this way no one had to be told anything that would make them uncomfortable later.

At the bottom step of the portico, a figure was standing in a dressing gown with her arms folded, and Rosalind closed her eyes for a moment before she reached the gravel.

“Running away before breakfast,” Marianne said, “is unforgivably dramatic.”

“I prefer to call it leaving quietly.”

“Edmund will call it something worse.”

“Then don’t tell me.”

Marianne came down the steps and embraced her — hard, without any of the correctness of a drawing room, and for a moment Rosalind smelled lavender water and wood smoke and let herself be held.

“You are wrong about one thing,” Marianne said. “Only one. You think that leaving makes his choice easier.”

She released her.

“It merely makes the choice lonelier.”

Rosalind climbed into the hired carriage before her courage failed her, and pulled the door shut, and did not look back as it turned out of the drive, and by the time the village was behind her she had stopped shaking and started, instead, to plan.

Her aunt’s house at Marlbrook was forty miles south-west, a clean day’s journey along the turnpike. Aunt Verity was seventy, deaf in one ear, and possessed of an unsentimental kindness that Rosalind had relied on since childhood. She would take her in, ask three questions, and never speak of it again. From there Rosalind could write to Mr. Pettifer, engage a second solicitor of her own in Exeter, and begin the slow, ruinous business of proving that a dead man had not signed a piece of paper.

It would take a year. It would cost everything left. And she would lose him regardless, because a year of public litigation over a forged debt was exactly the sort of thing a duke could not put his name near.

But she would keep her father’s name clean, which was the only thing her father had left her, and which she discovered, at forty miles an hour along the turnpike, she was not willing to trade for anything.

The carriage stopped twice to change horses.

At the second stop, while the ostler worked, she sat in the yard with a cup of poor tea and watched the road and thought about the mechanics of it — because thinking about the mechanics was the only way to stop thinking about the folly, and the opened hand, and the way he had said Rosalind in a corridor and then never again.

Three hundred and nine pounds and four shillings, claimed within thirty days. A forged instrument prepared with skill. A warning note hand-delivered to her door in the middle of the night. Whispers arranged in advance. Every part of it required money, patience, and access to information about a tenant debt that only four or five people in England knew.

Mr. Rigby knew. Lord Prescott knew. Vivienne knew. Edmund knew.

And whoever had built it had also known, with absolute certainty, that the mere existence of the claim would be enough to make her leave.

Only one person in that house had ever looked at her and calculated what she would do if she were frightened.

She had felt him do it, in fact. On a landing, in the dark, with his hat in his hand.

Rosalind set down the cup and looked out along the road toward Marlbrook with a strange, cold, extraordinary steadiness, and for the first time since the envelope had appeared under her door, she was not afraid.

She was simply, quietly, paying attention.