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

Chapter 6

By eight the next morning, Mr. Crane had gone.

He had ordered his carriage before dawn, left a note for Lady Marchwood apologizing for urgent business in the north, and paid his respects to no one. The servants reported it the way servants report weather — without judgment, but with perfect accuracy.

Rosalind heard it from the maid who brought her water, and she stood at the window a long while afterward, watching the drive for tracks that the overnight rain had already erased.

At breakfast, Edmund was absent.

He returned shortly before noon, and the mud on his boots reached nearly to the knee.

By then his solicitor had already been at work for three hours. Rosalind learned the shape of it from Marianne, who came to find her in the morning room with a letter in her hand and something like bewilderment in her face.

“The debts were exaggerated,” Marianne said. “Not invented. Exaggerated — which is apparently a legal way of saying that a man took something real and inflated it until it looked like a weapon.”

“And the letters?”

“There are no letters.”

Rosalind set down her book.

“There is a bundle of documents,” Marianne went on, “concerning my husband’s last accounts, and Mr. Crane does possess copies. But two of them are documents he had no legal right to possess at all. My solicitor says that possessing them, and threatening me with them, would interest a court a great deal more than it would interest my brother.”

“And what will you do?”

“I will write to him through my solicitor.” Marianne’s chin lifted. “Not through Edmund. He offered to do it and I said no, and he sat down and said nothing for four minutes, which I believe is the closest my brother comes to a compliment.”

Rosalind laughed. “It is.”

“He suffers beautifully.”

“He does.”

Marianne folded the letter and tucked it away, and for the first time since the conservatory she looked like a woman standing on her own ground. “He asked me what I wanted. Twice. In one day.” She shook her head slowly. “I have known him thirty-five years and I have never once heard him ask that question without already knowing the answer he intended to give.”

That afternoon, Rosalind went out to the terrace.

The rain had stopped, but the sky over the lawns was the color of old pewter, and the air smelled of wet grass and stone. Edmund stood at the balustrade with his back to the house, watching the clouds gather beyond the far hedges as though he could read something in their arrangement.

“You saw what I didn’t,” he said, without turning.

“I was looking at her.”

“So was I.”

“No.” Rosalind came to stand beside him, a careful arm’s length away. “You were looking at him.”

He was quiet for a moment. “That may be the difference.”

Below them, gardeners were rolling the lawns. Somewhere beyond the stables, a horse complained about nothing. The wind moved along the balustrade and lifted the edge of her shawl.

“Everyone notices you,” he said at last.

Rosalind gave a quiet laugh. “That is demonstrably untrue.”

“I noticed you.”

She looked at him then, and found him already looking back. “Only because I sat in the wrong chair.”

“Was it the wrong chair?”

His voice had changed — softer, with the caution of a man walking on ice he could not see the thickness of. Rosalind became suddenly and inconveniently aware of the small distance between their hands on the stone rail, of exactly how many inches it was, of precisely how little effort it would take to erase them.

“According to every other woman in the room,” she said, “it was the wrong chair.”

He turned toward her, and the movement was small, and it changed everything about the terrace. “Then every other woman was mistaken.”

Before she could answer — before she had even decided what answer she would have given — the terrace doors opened behind them.

Lady Marchwood came out in a light pelisse, followed by Vivienne Prescott and several guests already dressed for an afternoon excursion, all of them carrying the particular brightness of people who have been talking about someone who has just arrived.

“There you are, your grace.” Lady Marchwood’s smile was wide enough to cover the whole terrace and thin enough to cover nothing. “We are arranging tomorrow’s drive to the abbey ruins, and Miss Prescott has saved you the seat beside her.”

Vivienne Prescott inclined her head with a modesty that had clearly been rehearsed in front of a mirror. “Only if it suits you, of course.”

Edmund’s eyes did not leave Rosalind’s face.

“Has she?” he said.

Lady Marchwood laughed. “Naturally — unless you have another preference, your grace.”

Rosalind stepped back. It was an old reflex, worn smooth by a decade of use: the moment a room required a woman to make herself small, she made herself small, and did it quickly, and was grateful to be permitted to do it quietly. She was already turning toward the door when she heard him speak.

“As a matter of fact,” Edmund said, “I do.”

Lady Marchwood’s smile stayed exactly where it was, a fixed and pleasant thing.

Vivienne Prescott’s did not.

He stepped past the company on the terrace — past Lady Marchwood’s pelisse and the excursion guests and the seat that had been saved for him — and stopped in front of Rosalind. Then he offered her his hand.

“Miss Ellery. Will you join me for the drive tomorrow?”

For one suspended second, Rosalind was certain she had misunderstood him. The rain began again somewhere far off, a soft drumming on the far side of the park, and on the terrace nobody said anything at all, and she could hear her own pulse in her ears like a clock in an empty room.

Vivienne Prescott recovered first.

“Surely Miss Ellery has already made arrangements,” she said pleasantly.

Rosalind glanced at her — at the beautiful, composed, careful face of a woman who had spent the whole evening before arranging a future in her own mind — and found that she felt nothing about it at all.

“None that I recall,” she said.

“Then it is settled,” Edmund said.

She looked down at his extended hand. Every instinct she had spent ten years acquiring told her not to be ridiculous, not to imagine meaning where there was none, not to confuse a duke’s taste for eccentricity with genuine regard. And refusing him merely because everyone was watching seemed to her another kind of cowardice — the very kind she had been quietly refusing to practice since she was twenty-two.

She placed her gloved fingers in his.

“Thank you, your grace.”

His hand closed gently around hers. “Edmund,” he said, under his breath.

Lady Marchwood pretended not to hear.