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

Chapter  20

Three weeks later, Lady Marchwood gave another party.

The Ellery claim had been tested and broken in nine days: the execution date was demonstrably two years after her father’s death, the parish register contained no such instrument, and the clerk whose name appeared on the witness line had been in Devonshire at the time. Mr. Pettifer, at his own request and with visible relief, withdrew the demand and offered to testify to the irregularity of his own instructions. The Prescott firm declined to pursue the matter any further, which is the way such things are always abandoned — without a finding, and with an exit that leaves no fingerprints.

The story went around the county in four days and settled, as such stories do, into the shape that society found most comfortable. Lord Prescott had been unwise in a business matter. His man of business, a Mr. Crane, had been overzealous. And Vivienne Prescott had gone to stay with relatives in the north, which in the language of the county meant: we will not discuss her until everyone has forgotten, and then we will discuss her more.

Rosalind attended only because Marianne had asked her to.

She came up from Marlbrook in Aunt Verity’s hired carriage with a trunk, one good dress, and a folded piece of paper locked in her writing case. Aunt Verity had seen her off with three sentences: Do not marry him for the house. Do not marry him for the family. Marry him because the man talks to you like a person, and because there is no second chance at that. Then she had closed the door, because the kitchen floor was wet.

When Rosalind entered the drawing room at Marchwood House, the conversation softened.

She heard it happen. This time, though, the whispering was different in kind. Three weeks ago, she had been a curiosity — a woman who had done something eccentric and was being discussed for it. Now she was a woman who had been attacked with a forged paper and had not been broken by it, which in drawing rooms produces an entirely different noise: half respect, half unease, and beneath both the uncomfortable suspicion that one had better be careful what one said about her.

Several women shifted away from the sofa where she sat down.

An empty chair remained beside her.

Rosalind almost smiled at the familiarity of it — at the memory of a fire, a warm chair, a room full of women performing three evasions in four minutes.

Across the room stood Edmund.

Around him, naturally, were ladies who had reacquired an interest in his conversation now that his finances were no longer tangled with Prescott’s, and who had been perfectly willing, three weeks ago, to let him be ruined in peace. Lady Marchwood was introducing him to a wealthy widow from Dorset with two sons and an estate of eleven thousand acres.

His gaze found Rosalind across the room.

He excused himself in the middle of the widow’s sentence. Lady Marchwood’s expression flickered, and recovered, and did not fool anyone.

Then the Duke of Harnwood crossed the entire drawing room — past the baronet, past the card table, past four ladies who each believed they had been about to be approached — and stopped at the empty chair beside Rosalind.

He looked down at her.

“Miss Ellery.”

“Your grace.”

“Tell me.” His eyes had a warmth in them now that she had never seen him permit himself in public. “Whose chair is that?”

“Yours, I assumed.”

“And you remained.”

“Was I meant to run?”

“I was hoping you might not.” He sat down.

The room had gone entirely silent. She could hear the clock in the hall.

Edmund leaned back in his chair beside her, close enough that she could smell cedar and rain on his coat, exactly as she had on the first night of her life. “I have something to tell you, and then I have something to ask you, and I would prefer to do the second one where eighty people cannot watch you arrive at an answer.”

“Then let us walk.”

Outside, the evening had gone gold across the lawns. They walked until the voices behind them disappeared, down the long slope past the stables, along the stream, to the stone bridge where she had once told him to consider marrying Vivienne Prescott.

He stopped there and told her the rest.

“The claim is dead. Your father’s name is clean, and will stay clean, and the parish registers in Exeter will say so to anyone who asks.” He put his hands on the rail. “Prescott has withdrawn from the county. His business practices are receiving a great deal more attention than he expected — there is a matter with a bank in Bristol that he is unwise to have left lying about. I did not arrange that. I simply stopped covering for it.”

“And Mr. Crane?”

“Crane is answering questions put to him by men he cannot bribe, in a different sort of room than he is used to.” Edmund’s mouth was flat. “The documents he held against Marianne have been recovered and destroyed in his presence. There is nothing left of him that can hurt anyone in this county.”

Rosalind let out a breath she had been holding since a morning at Marlbrook.

“And Harnwood?”

“The London house is sold. The horses go next week.” A faint grimace crossed his face. “I kept two.”

“A devastating sacrifice.”

“You mock my suffering.”

“Someone must.”

His smile faded into something gentler, and he turned to face her, and the gold light was coming across the water at an angle that made the two of them into the only lit things in the landscape.

“The northern farms are secure,” he said. “No tenant land will be sold. Forty-three households will plant in the spring, and their grandchildren will plant after them, and none of them will ever know your name.”

Rosalind’s eyes burned. “You found another way.”

“There is almost always another way, once people stop insisting that tradition is the only one.”

He reached into his coat and brought out a small box, dark green and worn at the hinge, and did not open it.

“I spent years believing duty meant surrendering whatever part of me mattered most.” He turned the box once between his fingers. “Then a woman sat beside me because she needed somewhere to put her tea.”

She laughed through the tears. “Not terribly romantic.”

“It ruined my life completely.”

“Edmund—”

“Before you, rooms were easy. Everyone wanted something, so I knew exactly how far to keep them.” He stepped closer. “Then you wanted tea.”

“Milk. No sugar.”

“I remember.”

“I know.”

He looked at her with a quiet certainty that made any joke impossible, and she stopped trying to find one.

“Why me?” she whispered. It was the question she had carried out of the ruins, through the scandal, through every room that had spent her whole life teaching her she was too ordinary to be chosen by anyone.

Edmund did not answer quickly.

“Because you see people when no one is rewarding you for seeing them. Because you protected my sister without making her helpless. Because you tell me when I am unbearable — frequently, disturbingly frequently.” His thumb moved across the worn hinge. “Because silence with you feels like company. And because when you left, every room in this house became empty in exactly the place where you should have been.”

Her tears slipped free.

“I do not want a convenient wife. I do not want a settlement wearing a woman’s face. I want the woman who looked at the man beneath the title and decided he might be worth talking to beside a fire.”

He opened the box.

Inside was a ring — an old one, a deep green stone in a plain gold setting, and Rosalind, who had spent her life around the edges of great houses and knew their ways, recognized it at once as a piece a century out of fashion and worth more sentiment than money.

“It was my mother’s,” Edmund said. “She married the most unsuitable man in three counties and never once regretted it, and she used to tell me that the only proper use of a great house is to fill it with people who cannot be made to leave.”

Then the Duke of Harnwood went down on one knee in the wet grass beside the stone bridge.

“Rosalind Ellery. Will you marry me?”