“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 5

By the third day, Clara had met the cousin.

He appeared in the breakfast room at ten o’clock, which she later learned was his usual hour, wearing a coat of excellent cut and the expression of a man who had never once been embarrassed in his life and intended to make up for it now.

“You are the Birdwoman,” he announced.

Clara lowered her cup. “Excuse me?”

“The family has named you. I voted for Birdwoman. My aunt preferred Necklace Girl, but she was overruled.”

Adrian, at the far end of the table, said without looking up from his paper: “Nobody was overruled. There was no vote.”

“There was a vote. You were not invited.”

“There are four people living in this house.”

“And the cook, and Mrs. Ellis, and both grooms, and the boy who cleans the boots. That is nine. You have a very narrow idea of democracy.”

Clara looked between them. “You named me.”

“We named you. I am Theo, by the way. Cousin, heir presumptive, professional disappointment.” He sat down and helped himself to her toast. “You will find that everyone in this house has been waiting for something to happen for approximately a decade. You are the something.”

She looked at Adrian. “You did not tell him to stop.”

“I tried. It has never once worked.”

“He is right,” Theo said, mouth full. “It has never once worked.”

Clara smiled sweetly at him. “I shall remember you voted for Birdwoman.”

Theo’s grin faltered by a degree. “You look dangerous.”

“I am.”

Adrian laughed — properly, the second time she had heard it — and Theo looked at him as though a chair had spoken.

The days after that came easier than they had any right to.

They rode in the mornings, before the house woke, along the ridge where the park fell away into farmland. They walked the walled garden in the afternoons, arguing about books. She discovered that the Duke of Ashbourne had a dry, nasty sense of humor and read poetry in secret and pretended he did not. He discovered that Clara Hale could take a simple question and turn it into an interrogation chamber, and that she never, not once, apologized for being right.

He liked it. That was inconvenient.

She liked that he listened. That was worse.

On the fifth evening, at dinner, with the table set for two because Theo had ridden into the village, she asked it.

“Why did you never marry before?”

Adrian cut his meat with great care. “I was busy.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the answer.”

“No. It is an excuse.”

He looked up. The candle flames stood straight in the still air. She waited, and she had learned already that waiting was the only tactic that ever worked on him.

Finally: “My parents had an unhappy marriage.”

The fork stilled in her hand. “I am sorry.”

“My mother was miserable,” he said, in the flat voice of a man reciting a fact he had carried for a long time. “She was cleverer than everyone at this table, including me, and she spent thirty years being decorative. My father was proud. Proud of being right. He was right about everything, apparently, except the one thing that mattered.”

Clara set the fork down. “That sounds exhausting.”

“It was. They stayed married anyway. To the end.”

He said it as though the words were a rusted gate he had to push open.

“You are afraid,” she said.

His head came up.

“You are afraid of becoming him,” she continued, quietly. “Or of marrying someone and discovering, twenty years in, that you have recreated that room. That you have made someone miserable by being right.”

She watched him decide whether to deny it. He did not.

“Yes,” he said.

The honesty landed between them like a stone in water.

“Then you should know something,” Clara said. “My father died when I was young. My mother never recovered. She loved him and it killed her slowly, and when she went, there was nothing left of her but a necklace and a rented room.” She looked at him. “I learned the opposite lesson from you. I learned that loving someone can ruin you.”

Adrian studied her for a long moment across the length of the table, and something in his face changed — not softened, exactly. Opened.

“Then we are both fools,” he said.

“Apparently.”

The clock in the hall struck nine.

Neither of them spoke again, and the silence was not uncomfortable, which was its own kind of alarm.

Clara was on the stairs an hour later when the bell at the front door sounded — too late for a neighbor, too late for a caller. She heard voices below. Then Theo’s, sharp and surprised.

She came back down the last three steps.

A footman was holding a salver with a card on it, and Adrian stood in the hall with the card in his hand and his face rearranged into something she had not seen on him before — courteous, closed, and entirely lifeless, the way a house looks when the family has gone.

“Who is it?” Clara asked.

He turned the card over once.

“Lady Vivienne Ellery,” he said. “She is staying at Marchgate. She sends her compliments and asks whether she may call tomorrow.” A pause. “She was my betrothed, three years ago.”