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

Chapter 18

Charlotte — no: Vivienne Prescott stepped down from the polished carriage alone, in a dove-gray travelling dress and a bonnet that had clearly been chosen that morning to make her look like a woman doing something charitable.

“Miss Ellery.”

Rosalind’s fingers closed around the handle of her writing case. “Miss Prescott. You are a long way from Marchwood.”

“So are you.”

Behind them, Aunt Verity’s door opened and shut, and a small figure in a black shawl stood at the top of the step regarding the two of them with the flat curiosity of a woman who had buried a husband, three brothers, and every illusion she had ever held about gentility, and was therefore not impressed by crests.

“Rosalind,” said Aunt Verity. “There is a lady in my drive.”

“I see her, Aunt.”

“Does she want tea?”

“I believe she wants me.”

“Then she can want you in the garden. The kitchen floor is wet.” The door closed.

Vivienne’s mouth twitched, very slightly, and Rosalind noticed it and did not know what to do with the fact that she almost liked her for it.

They walked a few paces along the low stone wall, out of the driver’s hearing. The morning was bright and cold and smelled of woodsmoke and wet leaves.

“May we speak privately?” Vivienne said.

“That depends on what remains to be said.”

Vivienne looked at the cottage, at the hillside, at anything but Rosalind’s face. Her composure had a crack running through it, and Rosalind, who had spent thirty-two years reading the faces of women who never bothered to hide anything from her, could see the seam clearly now.

“My father purchased your debt,” Vivienne said.

The words landed the way a stone lands in a still pool. Rosalind kept her face entirely still.

“Why?”

“Because I asked him to find out whether there was anything in your family’s affairs that might persuade you to be sensible.”

“Sensible.”

“Harnwood needs my fortune. Everyone in three counties knows it, including my father, including your duke, including you.” Vivienne’s eyes came up, and there was defiance in them, and underneath the defiance something much younger than twenty-four. “He needed only to see it written down. That was all I intended. My father did the rest.”

“Then why threaten me?” Rosalind asked quietly. “If the debt is real, he need not threaten anyone. If it is false, the threat is the crime. Either way, the letter under my door was not an act of business. It was aimed at me. Why?”

Vivienne looked away.

“Because he does not want me,” she said.

There it was.

Not triumph. Not the beautiful, composed cruelty of a woman who had won. Humiliation — standing in a gravel drive forty miles from home with her gloves in her hands, saying the sentence she had never said aloud to anyone: he does not want me.

“He met my father in London,” she went on, and her voice had gone thin. “He refused the settlement. He refused it courteously, and he refused it completely, and then he came home.” She looked back at Rosalind. “Before he knew anything about your father’s note. Before he knew what we had done. He simply would not have me.”

Rosalind’s breath stopped in her chest, and the morning went very still, and everything she had done in the last eleven days rearranged itself in her mind with a horrible, silent click, like a key turning in a lock she had built herself and never once examined.

She had left to spare him a choice he had already made.

“The letter,” she said. “You wrote it.”

“My father authorized the purchase. The warning was mine, the hand was mine, and the whispers were mine as well.” Vivienne’s chin lifted, in the exact gesture Rosalind had seen a hundred times in drawing rooms: the movement of a woman who has decided that if she is to be shamed, she will at least be shamed standing up. “People repeat what interests them. You gave them something interesting.”

“I gave them nothing. I sat in a chair.”

“Yes.” Vivienne’s face twisted. “You sat in a chair. Do you imagine I enjoyed watching a man like Edmund Vane ignore every suitable woman in three counties because a penniless woman nobody had ever noticed happened to put herself in the one seat in the room that everyone else was afraid of?”

Rosalind felt the insult arrive — penniless, nobody, happened — and discovered, with genuine surprise, that it no longer had any weight at all.

“No,” she said quietly. “I imagine you hated it.”

Vivienne’s eyes flashed.

“And I imagine,” Rosalind went on, “that you spent six weeks at Marchwood being gracious to me because it was easier than being honest, and that you will spend a great deal longer than that being gracious in drawing rooms where nobody expects anything else from you. I know how the rules work, Miss Prescott. I have been following them since before you came out.”

The two women looked at each other along the top of the low stone wall, and for a moment the grounds smelled only of leaves.

“Will you tell him?” Vivienne asked.

“Which part?”

“That the note is worthless. That the claim is built on a forged date. That my father —” She stopped. “That the debt can be broken in a week by any solicitor with the parish registers.”

Rosalind was silent.

“Because if you do,” Vivienne said, “he will not destroy us. He is not that kind of man, whatever the county says. But he will never again open a door to my family, and my father’s business is already —” She stopped again, and did not finish the sentence, and looked away across the hills.

“Miss Prescott,” Rosalind said, “your father purchased my dead father’s name and dressed it in a lie. You delivered that lie to my bedroom door. Whatever happens next is not something I intend to arrange. It is simply the result of what you did.”

Vivienne closed her eyes.

Then, from the lane beyond the hedge, hoofbeats sounded — fast, impatient, wrong for the hour and the road.

Both women turned.

A rider came around the bend at a canter, on a horse white with sweat along the shoulder, and pulled up hard at the gate, sending gravel skittering, and swung down before the animal had fully settled.

Edmund Vane stood in the drive of a cottage he had never seen, in clothes he had clearly not changed out of in a day, with mud to the knee and a face like a man who had ridden forty miles without once slowing down.

He saw Rosalind first.

Something in his expression broke open, unguarded, so nakedly relieved that Vivienne Prescott took a step backward as though she had been given a physical push.