Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 19

He did not reach for her.

Wren would remember that. He stood in the cold hall with the gray light on his shoulders and his hands at his sides, and he did not reach for her, and that — more than anything he said afterward — was what convinced her.

“I want you,” he said, “because you were the only person in that house who never once performed for me.”

She said nothing.

“Half the room told me about the gardens at Thornbury yesterday. Celeste told me about her accomplishments. Verity played a piece with no mistakes and no music in it. Blythe laughed at four remarks I had not made.” His mouth moved slightly. “You caught a sugar bowl and lied about nothing.”

“That is a very low standard for a wife.”

“It is an extraordinarily high one,” said Atticus, “and you have no idea how rare it is.”

The clock in the hall ticked. Outside, the coachman coughed and stamped his feet.

“You remembered a tenant’s sick child,” he went on, “while everyone else in the room was remembering my title. You kept twenty-nine servants and eighteen families from paying for your father’s pride, and you did it in secret, for thirteen months, without one person thanking you, and you would have gone on doing it — would you not? — if he had not written that letter.”

Wren’s eyes shone, and she hated it.

“That sounds suspiciously like admiration.”

“It began as admiration.”

His voice lowered.

“Then I started looking for you whenever I entered a room.”

The carriage waited outside. Neither of them moved toward it.

“I have met,” Atticus said, “three perfect daughters. And I have not been able to stop thinking about the fourth.”

Wren’s mouth trembled into something that was almost a smile. “The one behind the tea table.”

“Especially her.”

He took one step closer — still not touching her — and his voice changed register, and Wren heard the change and understood that everything up to that point had been preamble.

“There is something you should know first.”

“About what?”

“About why I came to Ashmoor at all.”

She looked at him.

“I told your father,” he said, “that I was willing to meet his family. That was true. But I had a reason to be willing.” He looked at the closed drawing-room door, and then back at her. “Thirteen months ago, a man named Pike wrote a letter to my steward at Thornbury. He was the steward here — the one your father dismissed for bringing unpleasant numbers into the library.”

Wren’s breath caught. “Mr. Pike wrote to you?”

“He wrote to my steward, and my steward brought it to me, because he did not know what else to do with it.” Atticus’s jaw shifted. “It was four pages long. It said that Ashmoor was being run into the ground by a man who would not open his own letters, and that someone — he did not give a name — was holding it together with string. And it said that the person holding it together was a daughter, and that she was being kept from society so that nobody would ever ask her any questions.”

The hall was very quiet.

“I read it twice,” Atticus said. “Then I put it in a drawer for a year, because a man who arrives at a house uninvited to interrogate a stranger’s finances is generally not made welcome. And then, in January, Lord Ashby wrote to me, proposing to introduce me to his daughters.”

“By then,” Wren said slowly, “you had decided to come.”

“By then I had decided to come,” he agreed, “and I came suspicious, and I found a house full of borrowed candlesticks and hothouse flowers covering stains. And I found a fourth daughter standing behind a teapot with ink on her thumb.”

Wren pressed her lips together.

“That is why you asked whether we had met.”

“I asked,” said Atticus, “because I had read four pages of a man’s handwriting about you, and I had the strong impression you had no idea it existed, and I wanted to see your face when I said it.”

“You were testing me.”

“I was looking at you. There is a difference.” He tilted his head. “The result was not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“I expected a woman worn down.” His eyes did not leave hers. “I found one who caught a falling bowl without spilling her tea and then apologized for being noticed.”

Wren laughed — one small, broken, entirely real laugh — and it turned into something closer to a sob in the middle, and she pressed the back of her glove against her mouth until it stopped.

“I should tell you,” Atticus said, “that all of this is not the whole of it. There is more, and it is not a pleasant story, and it is why I recognized what your father had done to you before I had been in this house two hours.”

“You recognized it.”

“I recognized it,” he said, “because I grew up inside it.”