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

Chapter 5

Edmund’s chair scraped against the floor and he was half out of it before Rosalind spoke.

“Sit.”

His head turned toward her. There was a storm behind his eyes, and she understood that she had perhaps five seconds before it broke over the entire drawing room.

“Your grace,” she said, gently, “your sister is still speaking.”

He looked at Marianne. Marianne looked back at him — and something in her face, some mixture of exhaustion and defiance and hope, brought him slowly back down into his chair.

“Thank you,” Marianne whispered. It was impossible to tell which of them she meant.

She told it quickly, then, as though afraid that stopping would cost her the courage. Mr. Crane had been courting her for six weeks. Always attentive in public. Always careful when Edmund was near. He had brought her flowers, remembered her preferences, defended her in conversation, and made himself so agreeable that half the county had begun assuming an arrangement was already understood.

That evening, in the conservatory, he had mentioned the debts.

He had said it kindly. That was the part she kept returning to — how kind he had been about it. He had said how cruel the world was to widows, how a single rumored obligation could turn a woman’s friends into strangers, how a lady’s reputation was a delicate instrument that could be broken by a careless hand. And then he had explained, regretfully, that he happened to possess letters.

Letters concerning her late husband’s final accounts.

Letters that could damage her reputation, and might — he was so sorry to say it — threaten part of her widow’s settlement, which was the only money between her and a life lived at the edge of her brother’s charity.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Edmund asked.

Marianne gave a small, exhausted laugh.

“Because you would have done exactly what you nearly did tonight.” She did not look away from him. “You would have protected me. You would have taken control. And Mr. Crane would have known within a day that he had lost the game, and he would have taken his letters somewhere else and used them there, and I would never have known where they went.”

The words landed hard. Edmund’s hands went still on his knees.

Rosalind looked away, and gave brother and sister the dignity of a moment that did not include her. Beyond the window, rain had begun again — a soft, persistent tapping that would not be noticed until it stopped.

At length Edmund said, “What do you want me to do?”

Marianne stared at him as though he had spoken in a foreign language. “You’re asking?”

“I am attempting something new.”

Her mouth trembled into a smile she clearly had not authorized. “Find out whether the letters are real. Quietly. And let me decide what happens to them.”

He was silent a long moment. Then he nodded. “Then I will.”

They sat together while the fire burned lower. Marianne asked about poetry, of all things, in a voice that was almost steady again, and Edmund invented an opinion about Cowper, and Rosalind argued with him about it, and for twenty minutes it was an ordinary evening in an ordinary house.

But under the conversation, Rosalind’s mind was running its own arithmetic, and it did not balance.

If Crane had letters that could damage Marianne, why had he never used them before? A man who wished to force a marriage did not wait six weeks to mention his weapon.

He had mentioned it tonight.

What had changed tonight?

She turned the evening over, slowly, the way she turned over a page to check the reverse for ink. Her arrival. The chair. Edmund crossing the room. Vivienne Prescott watching from the sofa with her beautiful smile. Every woman in the drawing room discovering, in the space of one hour, that the most feared man in three counties was willing to sit beside a woman no one had ever thought to notice.

Marianne had been a target for six weeks, sedately and patiently cultivated — and then, on the single evening her brother’s attention had fixed itself somewhere new, Crane had chosen to tighten his hand.

That was either a coincidence, which she did not believe, or it meant that someone had told Crane what was happening in that drawing room, and had told him tonight, and had told him because Crane’s pressure on Marianne and Edmund’s attention on Rosalind were, in some way she could not yet see, the same piece of business.

She put down her cup, and it clicked softly against the saucer, and Edmund heard it over the murmur of the room.

“Miss Ellery?”

She looked up, and decided not to say any of it. Not here. Not tonight. It was speculation, and speculation in a drawing room was gunpowder in a room with eighty lit candles.

“Nothing,” she said. “I was only thinking that your opinion of Cowper is indefensible.”

He accepted that with a small bow of his head, and the conversation moved on, and the evening ended the way evenings end — with carriages, and wraps, and Lady Marchwood standing at the door thanking people whose names she was already sorting into next season’s uses.

At the foot of the staircase, as Rosalind gathered her gloves, she looked once more along the corridor toward the drawing room doors.

Mr. Crane was not there. He had gone an hour earlier, without farewell, without his hat being fetched by a servant that anyone had noticed, and with the smooth competence of a man who was accustomed to leaving rooms and making sure nobody watched him do it.

And that was when the realization arrived, complete and unpleasant, like a draught under a door.

Mr. Crane had not spent the evening watching Edmund, whom he needed to deceive. He had not spent it watching Marianne, whom he had already cornered.

Twice that night, she had caught him looking at her.

Once over Marianne’s shoulder in the doorway, and once — much earlier, before the tea, before the chair, before any of it — from across the drawing room, when she had still been standing near the fire with nobody’s attention on her at all.

She had thought at the time that he was simply a man surveying a room.

She climbed the stairs with her candle, and the wind pushed against the windows all the way up, and she told herself that she had imagined it.

She had not imagined it.