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

Chapter 7

“There was no damage,” Atticus Vale said.

Wren stopped in the passage. Through the gap in the door she could see a slice of the room: the fire, the edge of the sideboard, her father’s shoulder in its wine-dark coat.

“A matter of discipline, Your Grace,” Lord Ambrose said. “The girl was careless. Carelessness must be paid for, or nothing is ever learned.”

“She was startled. The porcelain was caught.”

“Badly caught. And by a servant who ought to have known the carpet.”

Wren watched the Duke’s fingers tighten once around an untouched glass.

“Then I fear I am partly responsible,” he said.

Her whole body went still.

“The girl was startled,” Atticus continued, evenly, “because I moved behind her when I came in. I do not care to have a child turned out of doors over my own clumsiness.”

It was not true. It was not remotely true. He had entered through the main doors at the front of the room and had stood by the mantel the entire afternoon. But he said it in the flat voice of a man reciting a weather report, and Wren understood, all at once, with a kind of vertigo, what he was doing.

He was saving Nell.

He was saving Nell without ever once mentioning the girl in the gray dress who had caught the bowl against her skirt. He was putting his own considerable ducal weight on the other end of the scale so that the name Wren never had to be spoken and never had to be blamed.

Her father laughed — a quick, oily laugh, the laugh he kept for men he could not afford to offend.

“Then naturally there can be no question of dismissal. Naturally. Your Grace is too generous.”

“Good,” said Atticus Vale. One word. Nothing more.

Wren stood in the passage with the tray until her arms ached. Then she turned and walked to the kitchen, set the tray down, and stood with both hands on the edge of the scrubbed table while the cook’s boy stared at her.

Good. One word.

She had spent her whole life in a house where every kindness had a price and every price had a name attached to it. She had never once seen a man do a decent thing and then decline to be thanked for it. It had not occurred to her that such a thing was possible — that restraint and coldness could live in the same face and be mistaken for each other by everyone who looked too quickly.

For the first time that afternoon, she wondered whether the Duke of Thornbury’s reputation had been built by people who had never seen him do anything at all.