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

Chapter 8

Dinner was announced at seven.

The household shifted into its second performance: candles lit, silver polished again, the good salt brought out. Wren was sent upstairs to change out of her plain gray dress into a slightly less plain blue one, which her mother laid out on the bed as though presenting evidence.

“You are to stand near the tea service after the introductions,” Lady Isobel said, fastening the clasp at Blythe’s throat. “Your father intends to make the formal presentations before we go in.”

“I thought we had the introductions.”

“Those were merely the arrivals. Tonight is the presentation.” Her mother’s fingers did not pause. “Stand near the tea service. It gives you something to do.”

“I might develop an alarming attachment to the teapot.”

Her mother sighed, and for a moment the careful architecture of her face sagged into something tired and real. “Must everything become difficult with you, Wren?”

Wren lowered her eyes. “No, Mother.”

Downstairs, the drawing room had been rearranged again — chairs moved, the tea table advanced six inches, the light from the fire angled. Atticus Vale stood alone beside the tall windows at the far end, watching the drive, where snow had begun to fall in thin, deliberate flakes.

Wren came in carrying fresh tea and found him there.

“Do you ever stop working?” he asked, without turning.

“Do you?”

“Occasionally. I sleep.”

“How extravagant.”

He looked at her then, and there it was again — that almost-smile, entirely at the corner of his mouth, entirely in the eyebrow with the scar through it. “Miss Ashby.”

The sound of her name in his voice startled her badly enough that she nearly set the tray down crooked. “You remembered.”

“Was I expected not to?”

She arranged the cups, buying herself a second. “People generally remember whichever sister is standing in front of me.”

His gaze stayed on her face. “That sounds practiced.”

“Most truths become practiced, if repeated often enough.”

Before he could answer, the doors opened, and Lord Ambrose entered with his three daughters arranged behind him like portraits in a gallery: Celeste in green, Verity in cream, Blythe in rose, and behind them the empty space where a fourth should have been before the tea table took her place.

“Your Grace,” Lord Ambrose said, expansive. “Now that everyone is properly assembled, perhaps I may formally present my daughters.”

Wren stepped back behind the table. Automatically. Without thinking. The way a hand flinches from a flame it has been burned by before.

Atticus noticed.

Celeste curtsied. Verity curtsied. Blythe curtsied. Each received the Duke’s measured courtesy and each, in turn, received nothing else at all — no warmth, no interest, no second glance. And when the third name had been spoken and the third curtsy completed, Lord Ambrose smiled and began to say something about the soup.

The Duke of Thornbury did not answer him.

Instead, his eyes moved past the three sisters in their beautiful dresses, past the borrowed candlesticks, past the conversation Lord Ambrose was offering him like a card from a deck, and settled — with the calm of a man who has found the thing he came for — on the fourth daughter standing behind the tea table.

Lord Ambrose followed his gaze.

The color drained slowly out of his face.

“You appear,” said Atticus Vale, quietly, “to have forgotten someone.”