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

Chapter 8

Rain came over the ruins all at once, a silver curtain that arrived faster than anyone could run from it. Guests shrieked, hats flew, Lady Marchwood’s carefully defended seating collapsed into chaos, and somewhere a footman was heard to observe that the ham had not been covered.

Edmund caught Rosalind’s hand.

“This way.”

They ran beneath the trees, along a gravel path already running with water, toward a small stone folly at the edge of a dark lake — one of those ornamental conceits that eighteenth-century gentlemen built to prove they could afford uselessness. Rain hammered the slate roof like a hundred fingers.

They reached it just as the downpour became genuine weather, which was to say: the kind that lasts.

Inside, Rosalind laughed breathlessly, leaning against the wall while water ran off the ends of her sleeves and made dark coins on the floor.

Edmund stared at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“That expression is not nothing.”

He stepped closer. Rain had darkened his hair and flattened his coat to his shoulders, and he looked considerably less like a duke and considerably more like a man who had been caught out in something.

“I was wondering,” he said, “how many people have been fools where you are concerned.”

Rosalind’s laughter disappeared entirely, and the folly became very small — a round room of carved stone with one window and one bench and nowhere else to put her attention.

Outside, thunder rolled again, distant now, moving east.

Then she noticed something beyond his shoulder.

A carriage stood on the estate road at the bottom of the hill, half concealed by the trees, its horses patient, its driver hunched under an oilskin. It had not come to collect anyone. There was no one on the path between the folly and it, and the picnic party was still stranded beneath the oak two fields away.

A face was at the carriage window. Even through the streaked distance, Rosalind could feel the calculation in its stillness.

Edmund followed her gaze. He looked for a long moment, then his expression cooled into something she had not seen before — not anger, exactly, but the particular hard quietness of a man filing away a fact.

“Does Miss Prescott often watch people from behind curtains?”

“Perhaps we are today’s entertainment.”

“Then she should have purchased a better seat.”

Rosalind smiled despite herself, but the unease stayed under it, like a stone under a fold of cloth.

Edmund noticed. He always noticed. “You are thinking about what she said at breakfast.”

“I am thinking that being noticed is considerably less peaceful than I expected.”

The rain hammered on the roof. He was close enough now that she could see the rain on his collar and the small scar at the edge of his eyebrow that she had not observed before; close enough that the question, when it came, was quieter than the rain.

“Would you rather I stop noticing you?”

Rosalind looked at him.

“Could you?”

“No.”

The single word stripped away every easy joke she might have made. It left her standing in a stranger’s ornamental folly in a wet dress with nothing between her and a fact she had spent the entire day refusing to look at directly.

She turned toward the window and the gray lake beyond it.

“That is precisely what worries me.”

He came to stand beside her, close without touching, and waited.

“Because I know how to be overlooked.” Her fingers traced the damp seam of one glove. “There are rules to it. You smile when spoken to. You never assume an invitation includes you until your name has been said aloud. You learn not to mistake kindness for interest, or courtesy for being seen.”

“And now?”

“And now I have no rules for it.”

For several seconds only the rain spoke.

“Neither do I,” Edmund said.

She glanced at him. He was watching the lake, and his face had gone flat and closed in a way that was entirely different from the severity he wore in drawing rooms.

“People see you everywhere,” she said. “They see Harnwood.”

“They see the estate. The title. The fortune. The man who is rumored to dismiss servants for breathing incorrectly.” His voice had gone dry. “And they decide what I am before I have crossed the room, and then they spend the evening performing at me. I have not been asked a genuine question at a dinner table in eleven years.”

“You are being asked one now.”

“So I am.” He looked at her. “And I do not know what to do about it.”

Rosalind laughed softly, and the sound startled them both.

“You keep saying things like that.”

“I am aware.”

“My father died when I was twenty-six,” he said, and she went still, because it was not the answer to any question she had asked. “Within a week, men twice my age were asking me to make decisions about hundreds of families and debts I had not known existed. Some of those men were honest. Most were not. If I hesitated, they pushed. If I listened too long, they lied. So I stopped hesitating. Within a year I had acquired a reputation.” His jaw moved. “It proved extremely useful.”

“Until no woman would sit beside you.”

He turned toward her. “One did.”

Outside, the rain softened to a whisper.

Rosalind became aware, with an absurd clarity, that his hand was resting on the stone ledge beside hers — not touching, but close enough that she could feel the warmth of it, and that the space between their fingers was the only thing in the folly that mattered.

“You said my name,” she said. “Last night. In the corridor, when the carriage came. You said ‘Rosalind’ and then you avoided it for the rest of the evening.”

“Perhaps I was preserving your mystique.”

“It is apparently all I have left.”

Their laughter faded into the same silence, and in that silence Edmund’s little finger brushed against hers. It might have been an accident. The folly was small; the ledge was narrower than it looked; neither of them had chosen the distance.

Neither of them moved away.

The contact was almost nothing. Less than nothing, by the standards of a ballroom, where hands were taken and released a hundred times a night with no more significance than a handshake. And yet Rosalind felt it with a ridiculous, cinematic clarity — every inch of her attention narrowed to the single point where her skin met his.

Then he turned his hand palm upward.

He did not take hers. He simply opened his hand on the ledge and left it there, and looked at her, and said nothing at all.

The choice remained between them.

Rosalind looked at his open palm for a long moment. She thought about ten years of rooms, and the arithmetic she had made of herself, and the fact that no one had ever before put something in front of her and left it to her to decide.

She placed her fingers lightly across his.

Edmund’s breath changed.

His hand closed around hers, warm and steady, and no declaration followed it — no promise, no reassurance, nothing to hold on to later. Somehow that made the moment more dangerous than any words could have.

A carriage splashed through mud somewhere outside.

Rosalind withdrew her hand first. “We should return.”

He nodded, though something crossed his face — disappointment, briefly — and they walked back through wet grass toward the ruined arches and the rescued ham.

By evening the storm had passed, but something between them had not.

At dinner, across a table of twenty, Edmund sought her eyes whenever the conversation became unbearable. She learned the language of it inside an hour: one raised eyebrow meant rescue me; the smallest movement at the corner of his mouth meant he was trying not to laugh. Later, in the drawing room, they sat apart — because society, having decided they were a subject, was now intensely interested in the placement of their chairs — and somehow the distance across the carpet felt more intimate than the chair beside him had ever been.

Marianne noticed.

“My brother has looked at you seven times in ten minutes,” she murmured, from the sofa.

“Perhaps there is something on my face.”

“There is.” Marianne smiled. “Happiness.”

Rosalind’s hand fell. “Do not make more of this than it is.”

“What is it?”

Rosalind looked across the room at the man who had opened his hand on a stone ledge and let her choose.

She would have an answer by the end of the week.

She would wish she did not.