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

Chapter 9

The following afternoon, Rosalind walked alone along the path behind Marchwood House, where the stream ran down off the hills and the woods closed over the water like a hand.

She had come out to think, which was another way of saying she had come out to keep thinking the same thoughts in a different location. It had been four days. In four days she had gone from being furniture to being a subject of speculation in every conversation in the house, and she had discovered that attention, which she had spent ten years believing she wanted, was in fact a species of weather: it came from every direction, it could not be closed out, and it made her want to sit indoors.

“She escaped,” said a voice behind her.

She turned. Edmund was walking down the slope with his coat over his arm and his hat nowhere in sight, and he looked, for once, entirely unlike a duke — merely a tall man with a rumpled collar who had come out of doors to find one person.

“I was beginning to feel exhibited,” she said.

“Then I shall pretend we met accidentally.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

He fell into step beside her. They walked without speaking, and Rosalind realized with some surprise that silence beside him required no performance at all — that she was not assembling a remark, or monitoring her face, or waiting for a cue. It was the first silence in ten years that had not cost her anything.

At the stone bridge, she stopped.

“I have been invited to London next month,” she said.

“How tragic.”

“There is a reason.” His expression had changed, and she saw it, and went cold before he said anything further. “My trustees want me to meet with Vivienne’s father.”

Her stomach tightened. “Oh.”

“Regarding a marriage settlement.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t.”

Rosalind looked at the stream below, where the water went over a shelf of rock in a thin white blade. “Vivienne is beautiful, wealthy, accomplished, and clearly interested. It seems straightforward.”

“It isn’t.”

“Then why meet him?”

Edmund’s jaw tightened, and he told her, and she understood that he was telling her because he did not want her to hear it as rumor. “Part of Harnwood is carrying debt. My grandfather left it badly managed, and my father made it worse decoratively, and the northern estates have been losing money for nine years while the rest of the property carries them. Prescott money would settle it without selling a single field of tenant land.”

“How many families?”

“Forty-three.”

The number went through her like a dropped plate.

Forty-three families. Winter roofs. Fields planted by men whose fathers had planted them. Children walking to a school that was kept open by an arrangement no one in a drawing room would ever have thought about.

She had spent the past four days learning the way he watched a room, the way he said apparently I do that, occasionally, the way he left his hand open on a stone ledge. And now, standing on a bridge that had been there for two hundred years, she understood precisely what kind of arithmetic he had been doing since the day he turned twenty-six.

“Rosalind,” he said.

“I am thinking.”

“I have agreed to nothing.”

“But forty-three families cannot live on whether you enjoy Vivienne’s conversation.”

He flinched as though she had struck him.

“Nor should they live on whom I marry.”

“Perhaps dukes do not always receive the luxury of choosing the two things separately.” Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “Lord Prescott’s money is not a wedding gift. It is a subsidy paid in exchange for your name, and it will be paid for the rest of your life, and everyone in that marriage will know exactly what it was.”

His eyes searched her face. “What are you saying?”

Rosalind looked at him and discovered the cruelest truth about being seen.

Once someone mattered, disappearing could become an act of love.

She could feel the shape of the sentence before she said it — could feel how it would land, how he would look afterward, what it would cost them both. And she said it anyway, because she had spent thirty-two years learning to be sensible, and sensible people do not stand on bridges and let a duke choose them over forty-three families.

“I am saying you should meet Lord Prescott.”

Edmund stared at her as though she had struck him.

“I believe forty-three families deserve consideration,” she said.

“That was not my question.”

Her fingers tightened on the rail. “Perhaps it is the only question that matters.”

“Not to me.”

The stream moved quietly beneath them. He stepped closer.

“Three days ago,” he said, “you accused every other woman in that drawing room of seeing only my title. Now you are doing precisely the same thing.”

Rosalind looked up, and her eyes were hot. “That isn’t fair.”

“Neither is asking me to marry a woman I do not love because my grandfather left me badly managed land.”

The word love hung in the air between them, and he did not attach it to anyone.

She lowered her eyes first.

“Then find another solution.”

“I intend to.”

“And if there isn’t one?”

His silence answered, and it was the worst answer she had ever been given.

Rosalind nodded once — a small movement, the way she might have acknowledged a piece of news in a drawing room — and turned and walked back toward the house along the path she had come by.

He did not follow.

The stream went on under the bridge, and the afternoon went on over the hills, and by the time she reached the lawn her face was dry and her resolution was set, and she did not know yet that she had just made the first mistake of the rest of her life.

She did not know that someone else had been walking the same path an hour earlier.

She would learn it in eleven days, in the form of an envelope beneath her door, and by then it would be far too late.