Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked
Chapter 18
Afterward, they stood in the ruins of the morning.
Mr. Quill’s men packed their valise. The bank men shook hands with the solicitor and did not shake hands with Lord Ambrose, which was its own kind of sentence. Lady Isobel rose and left the room without speaking to anyone, and Wren heard her go up the stairs, one step at a time, as though each one were a decision.
Celeste stopped in front of Wren at the door.
They had not spoken a real word to each other in eight years — not since Celeste had been presented, and the household had quietly rearranged itself around the assumption that one of them was the future and the other was the help.
“Was it true,” Celeste said, “about the December pages? The leases?”
“Yes.”
“Would they have been turned out? All of them?”
“By spring.”
Celeste looked at her for a long moment.
“Then you were right,” she said, and left, and Wren stood in the doorway and found that the words she had waited her whole life to hear did not taste the way she had imagined.
Lord Ambrose remained by the fire with his hands behind him, staring at nothing, an old man in a good coat. Atticus watched him with a stillness that was not quite contempt and not quite pity, and Wren understood, watching the two of them, that a great deal had just ended and almost nothing had been decided.
Then her father looked up.
“Your Grace,” he said quickly, and the salesman’s warmth came crawling back into his voice. “Surely an alliance could still—”
“There will be no financial alliance between Thornbury and Ashmoor.”
Wren’s chest tightened.
Atticus continued in the same level tone. “Nor will I purchase an estate by marrying any of your daughters. Not one of them. Not for a settlement, not for land, not for the name.”
Lord Ambrose stared at him.
“Then why,” he said slowly, “are you still here?”
Atticus’s eyes moved to Wren.
“Because I was wrong about something.”
Wren picked up her traveling gloves from the table.
“That can wait,” she said.
She walked past him, out of the drawing room, down the long hall toward the entrance, where her small case stood beside the door with the brass corners and the cracked strap that had been her mother’s.
She heard his footsteps behind her. She did not slow down.
In the entrance hall, the light came gray and cold through the fanlight over the door, and the floor tiles were worn pale in the middle where four hundred years of Ashbys had walked. Wren pulled on one glove.
“Wren.”
She pulled on the other.
“I have a coach to catch.”
“You said you would not beg me to believe you.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
She looked up, and he was only a few feet away — close enough to touch, and not touching her, and she understood in that moment that he had made a decision about that, and that the decision was deliberate.
“I doubted you,” Atticus said, “when trusting you became inconvenient. You were right to leave me standing in that.”
Wren’s fingers stopped on the second glove.
“Atticus. You gave up the alliance.”
“It was never mine to keep by lying.”
“Your inheritance. The land—”
“Money is replaceable.”
“Your family—”
Pain crossed her face, quick and unguarded, before she could arrange it back.
“Apparently,” she said, “that was never what I thought it was.”
Atticus breathed in slowly, and let it out, and for a moment he looked at the closed door and the gray light beyond it and the case with the cracked strap.
“Then there is nothing left for me to misunderstand.”
Wren searched his face.
“What does that mean?”
Outside, carriage wheels rolled across the frozen drive — the hired coach, come early, crunching the ice in the ruts. The sound travelled through the cold hall and seemed, to Wren, to be arriving from a life she had already left.
Atticus glanced toward it. Then back at her.
“It means,” he said, “that the woman your father tried to hide has just walked away from every reason anyone could accuse her of wanting me.”
He stepped closer.
“And now, Wren Ashby, I need to tell you why I still want you.”