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

Chapter 4

“You have been gone half an hour,” Edmund said.

“The conservatory is very long.” Marianne’s voice was light and perfectly steady, the voice of a woman who had practiced steadiness for years. “And Mr. Crane is a devoted admirer of ferns.”

“I am a devoted admirer of Lady Marianne’s patience,” Crane said, smiling. “She has indulged my enthusiasm considerably this evening.”

He bowed again. He was a well-built man of forty or so, dressed with a careful elegance that stopped just short of vanity, and there was nothing in his manner that a room of eighty people could have pointed to and called improper.

That, Rosalind thought, was precisely the difficulty.

She watched his hand settle lightly at Marianne’s back — not gripping, not guiding, just resting there with the easy familiarity of a man who had decided that intimacy had already been granted.

Marianne flinched.

It lasted less than a second. A tightening at the shoulder, a fractional shift of weight. Then her smile returned, brighter than before, and Crane’s hand withdrew as if it had never been.

Edmund was looking at Crane’s face. Rosalind was looking at his hand.

She set down her tea.

“Your grace,” she said quietly.

He turned his head.

“How well do you know the gentleman standing beside your sister?”

Edmund’s gaze shifted toward Crane. “Well enough. His family has known ours for years. He has been attentive to Marianne since she came out of mourning.”

“Does she like him?”

He frowned. “Marianne rarely discusses such matters with me.”

“Perhaps because you look as though you might challenge the matter to a duel.”

“I do not duel matters.”

“No. You simply freeze them.”

His mouth twitched, and Rosalind did not smile at all. “Look at her hand, your grace.”

Marianne’s fan was trembling. Small movements, nearly invisible against the deep blue of her gown — but the fan shook as though she were standing in a wind that no one else in the drawing room could feel.

Edmund’s expression changed.

Crane leaned closer to Marianne and said something Rosalind could not hear. Whatever it was, Marianne’s shoulders stiffened as though she had been touched with something cold. Her chin came up a fraction. Her fan went still.

Edmund began to rise.

Rosalind’s hand closed on his sleeve. He looked down at her fingers, then at her face — and she withdrew her hand at once, though she did not soften what she had to say.

“If you cross the room looking like that,” she said, “she will spend the evening calming you instead of telling you what happened.”

He stayed where he was. Slowly, he sat back down.

“That,” he said, “is a remarkably inconvenient observation.”

“Most accurate ones are.” Rosalind’s fingers found the handle of her cup. “You are six feet of winter, your grace. When you move toward a problem, everyone reaches for their coats.”

“And what do you suggest?”

“Give her somewhere safe to go.”

She stood before he could answer, which she suspected was the only way to do it, and crossed the drawing room with an easy smile fixed in place. The distance was thirty feet. She felt his gaze on her back the entire way.

“Lady Marianne, forgive me.” She stopped at Marianne’s elbow and pitched her voice for pleasant conspiracy. “I desperately need another woman’s judgment.”

Marianne blinked. “On what?”

“On poetry. Your brother and I have reached an impossible disagreement, and I am outnumbered.”

Across the room, Edmund’s eyebrows rose. She caught it in the corner of her eye and ignored it.

“Have you?” Marianne said.

“A devastating one. If you do not rescue us, I fear his grace may begin issuing decrees.”

Marianne looked toward her brother. Something passed between them across the length of the drawing room — a question, and an answer that required no words. Then she let out a breath Rosalind suspected she had been holding for an hour.

“Then civilization depends upon me,” she said.

Rosalind slipped her arm lightly through Marianne’s.

Crane stepped forward. “Lady Marianne and I were speaking privately.”

Rosalind turned to him with pleasant incomprehension. “Were you? How unfortunate that I interrupted.”

His smile tightened by a degree a painter would have missed. He was close enough now that she caught the scent of sandalwood and something sweeter beneath it — brandy, perhaps, though his manner showed none of it. His eyes moved over her face with a quick, cataloguing attention that made her skin prickle unpleasantly.

“Another time, Mr. Crane,” Marianne said. Her arm stayed linked with Rosalind’s. Her voice, for the first time that evening, had weight behind it.

Rosalind brought her back toward the fire. Edmund rose when they approached, but he remembered her warning and kept his voice level.

“Marianne. Miss Ellery claims we disagree about poetry.”

“Do you?” Marianne sat, and some of the tension left her shoulders as the fire reached her.

“Apparently I have very strong opinions.”

Rosalind gave him a warning glance across Marianne’s head. He almost smiled.

They spoke of nothing for several minutes — the weather, the absurdity of Lady Marchwood’s punch, a cousin’s new horse — and gradually Marianne’s breathing eased, and her fan lay still in her lap. Rosalind kept her own voice easy, and asked nothing, and waited.

Crane did not attempt to approach again. She felt him watching from the doorway, though, with the patient calculation of a man revising a plan rather than abandoning one. Ten minutes later he collected his hat and left the drawing room without saying goodbye to anyone.

Only then did the air near the fire become breathable.

“Miss Ellery,” Edmund said quietly, “would you like me to have him removed from this house?”

Marianne’s head turned sharply. “No.”

His jaw tightened. “Did he insult you?”

“Edmund—”

“Did he touch you?”

Marianne looked into the fire and did not answer, and in that silence Rosalind heard the whole shape of it: not a touch, not an insult, but a threat, which was worse, because a threat could be kept in a pocket for weeks and taken out whenever it was useful.

“He proposed,” Marianne said at last.

Edmund stopped moving.

Rosalind watched Marianne’s fingers fold themselves around the handle of her fan.

“I refused him,” Marianne said.

“Then why,” Edmund said slowly, “were you frightened?”

Marianne looked down at her hands, and when she spoke, her voice had gone very quiet, as though she were reading the words off something she had been carrying a long time.

“Because he told me I should reconsider — before certain private details of my late husband’s debts became public.”