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

Chapter 19

“Rosalind.”

She had said his name a hundred times in her head during the journey, in the inn yard, over bad tea, against the clatter of the turnpike. Now she could barely get it out.

“Edmund.”

He crossed toward her, and then stopped, because he had noticed Vivienne — and everything soft in his face went away, not into rage but into something far colder, and Rosalind had spent enough time in drawing rooms to know that this was the expression that had built his reputation.

“Miss Prescott. What are you doing here?”

“Telling Miss Ellery the truth.”

“A new occupation?”

Vivienne flinched as though he had struck her. She did not answer. She had, in fact, nothing at all to answer with, and Rosalind — who could feel the whole drive waiting for the sentence that would end this woman’s season — put her hand on his sleeve.

He looked down at her fingers. It was the second time she had touched his sleeve to stop a storm, and this time she did not take her hand away, and she watched him notice that too.

“She has told me,” Rosalind said. “The note. The dates. The purchase. She wrote the warning herself; her father holds the claim.”

Edmund’s jaw moved once.

“And the man of business,” Vivienne said.

They both looked at her.

She had gathered herself. She was standing very straight beside her father’s carriage, and her face had the particular pallor of someone who has decided, at the last possible moment, to buy something with everything she has left.

“You will find it in your own papers, your grace, if you look at who arranged the instrument. Our family’s solicitor never touched the Ellery matter. My father keeps a man for the rough business. He has been at Marchwood twice this fortnight.” She swallowed. “Mr. Crane.”

The name went through the morning air like a wire drawn tight.

Rosalind heard her own voice, very level, as though it belonged to someone else. “Mr. Crane. Who was courting Lady Marianne Vane for six weeks. Who mentioned her late husband’s debts to her in a conservatory. Who told me, on a landing, that forty-three households was a great many chimneys to keep burning.”

Vivienne did not speak.

“Two women,” Rosalind said. “Two years apart, in the same house. He built a debt for Lady Marianne to be frightened by, and he built a debt for me. Someone paid for both.”

Edmund’s stillness became absolute.

“Your father’s man of business,” he said to Vivienne, “was in my sister’s ear in June and in Miss Ellery’s path in October, and he was paid out of the same pocket.”

“I did not know about the lady.” Vivienne’s voice cracked. “I swear to you I did not. I knew only — I knew only that there was a man who arranged difficult things.”

Edmund turned away from her, toward the hills, and stood looking at nothing for the length of three long breaths.

Then he turned back and said, without cruelty and without any warmth at all:

“Your father’s solicitor will receive notice within the day that I intend to challenge the claim, and the circumstances under which it was acquired. He used a dead man’s name to frighten a woman who had done nothing to either of you. I will not destroy your family, Miss Prescott. But neither will I protect it from the consequences it created.” He paused. “You wanted to be married to my title. You will know, before this is finished, exactly what my title is for.”

Vivienne Prescott looked at him for a moment, and then at Rosalind, and there was something in the look that Rosalind did not expect and would think about for years afterward: not hatred. Something closer to the expression of a woman watching a door close on a room she had spent her whole life being told was the only one worth entering.

She nodded once, climbed into her carriage, and was driven away down the lane.

Edmund followed Rosalind into the small garden behind the cottage, where late roses bent under the morning dew, and stopped beside a wooden bench that had been weathered the color of bone.

“You left,” he said.

“I thought I was helping.”

“You were terrible at it.”

Despite everything, Rosalind laughed — one syllable, and then her eyes burned.

“The forty-three families,” she said. “They are keeping their homes.”

“I am selling the London house. Most of the racing stable. Three investments my trustees regard as a species of religion.” He looked at her. “Rigby will not forgive me before Christmas.”

“You refused Prescott before you knew any of this.”

“Yes.”

Her voice came out small. “Why?”

Edmund looked at her for a long moment.

“Because I could replace a house. Horses. Investments.” He stepped closer. “I could not replace you.”

Rosalind lowered her eyes, and he waited, and he did not touch her — she noticed that, and would remember it, because it was the most deliberate gift anyone had ever given her.

“Look at me,” he said softly.

She did.

“I am not asking you for an answer today. You left because the world spent eleven days convincing you that being chosen by me had to be temporary, or foolish, or ruinously expensive.” He paused. “I intend to give you better evidence.”

There was one more thing, and he said it while the dew dried on the roses.

“Crane will be dealt with. The documents he held for Marianne are already returned, and the ones he arranged against your father will not survive a single morning in a courtroom.” His mouth was hard. “But I will have him in a place where he can be asked questions by men he cannot bribe. And I will know who else he was working for.”

Rosalind nodded slowly.

“Three weeks,” Edmund said. “Lady Marchwood is giving another party. Marianne says you will not come.”

“Marianne is frequently right about me.”

“Then come,” he said, “for the wrong reason. Come because you want to see the chair.”