“You Should Marry My Sister,” the Girl Told the Duke — The Duke Smiled at the Child’s Bold Proposal

Chapter 1

The heather was still warm from her fist when it struck the Duke of Elmswood square in the waistcoat, and for one long second nobody on the flower terrace breathed — not the ladies beneath the striped awning, not the footman frozen with his tray of champagne, not Maren Thurlow, whose hand had shot out too late to catch her sister’s cuff and now hung useless in the summer air.

Purple bells scattered across the Duke’s lapel. A single sprig clung there, trembling, as if it had chosen him.

Maren’s blood went cold in a way she had learned to recognize — the particular chill of a room turning to look at her. She had come to Elmswood two years ago with a portfolio of pressed specimens and a ruined name, hired at half the wage a drawing mistress was owed because no one else in the West Riding would have her. She had taught children to see the veins in a leaf. She had kept her eyes down and her mouth shut and her sister fed. All of that — every careful, silent, unremarkable day of it — hung now on the thread of what an eight-year-old had just done in front of forty witnesses.

“Do you see?” said a woman near the roses, not quite softly enough. “Do you see how the child was put up to it?”

For there was Nell — thin as a reed, chin up, hands still shaped around the ghost of the bouquet — standing before the greatest gentleman in the county and refusing to be frightened. She had rehearsed nothing. That was the terror of it. Nothing about Nell had ever been rehearsed; she simply did what she thought was right and let the world catch up or fall over.

“You should marry my sister,” Nell announced. “She is the best person here.”

The Duke of Elmswood looked down at her.

He had been home for four days after five years away. He had returned from London in a travelling coach with dust on his cuffs and an expression his tenants had already begun to describe, cautiously, as interested. Adrian Halewood, ninth Duke of Elmswood, was thirty-four, unmarried, and rumoured to be incapable of sitting through a full set of accounts without proposing something expensive. He had a face built for laughter and a conscience built for blame.

He smiled at the child.

Then he did the thing that ruined Maren completely — the thing she would turn over for weeks afterward in the dark, the way one turns a stone and finds the whole wall underneath it is loose.

He knelt.

Not far — not to her level, a gentleman in evening dress does not kneel in the mud of a flower bed — but enough. Enough that his eyes were level with Nell’s, and the terrace, which had been rustling with delight at a bold child’s joke, went quiet in a different key.

“Then I shall ask her properly,” he said, “when no one else may answer for her.”

Maren heard the second half of the sentence before the first half finished, and her stomach dropped. When no one else may answer for her. He knew. He had been on the terrace nine minutes and he knew exactly what was happening to them.

Because the man who did answer for Nell was already crossing the gravel, and he was not smiling.

Mr. Bracken had been the child’s appointed guardian for eleven months, ever since their mother’s death had settled the last of the family’s affairs into the hands of a solicitor’s clerk who disliked untidiness. He was a compact, careful man with a greatcoat buttoned to the throat in August and a manner that made every sentence sound like a clause.

“Miss Thurlow,” he said — not to Nell, but past her, to Maren, as if the child were a parcel being addressed. “Remove your sister from the terrace.”

“Mr. Bracken —”

“You will take her upstairs and pack her things.” He produced a folded paper from inside his coat, and the sight of it made Maren’s hand tighten on Nell’s shoulder without her meaning it to. “Her carriage for the charity school at Halifax leaves this afternoon. I warned you in the spring that I would not keep an unruly child merely because her sister had ambitions.”

The terrace had opinions. Maren could feel them moving behind her like weather.

Ambitions. That was the word. Two years ago another word had been used, and a married guest had gone home to his wife with a story, and the story had grown legs and a voice, and Maren Thurlow had ceased to be a drawing mistress and become a cautionary tale. She had never once been permitted to answer it. You cannot answer a thing that was never said to your face.

“Pack her things,” Bracken repeated. “The carriage is ordered.”

Maren did not move her hand.

She did the arithmetic with the cold clarity that had kept her alive for two years: if she released Nell now, the carriage would be gone before supper, and her own dismissal would follow by breakfast. She would have no place, no wage, no means of finding her sister again in a school two counties away that took girls whose families did not want them. She would have nothing but the road.

So she held on, and she said nothing, because everything she could say would only make it worse.

Adrian looked from the crushed flowers in Nell’s hand to the child’s white face. The amusement left him as if someone had opened a window.

“A carriage,” he said slowly. “I was not informed that a child under my trusteeship was to be sent away.”

“It was arranged during your grace’s absence,” said Bracken. “For her own good.”

“My absence,” said the Duke, “appears to have allowed a great deal to be arranged without me.”

He straightened. Somewhere behind them a woman laughed, high and short, and stopped.

“The carriage is cancelled,” he said. “Mr. Bracken, you will present me with every paper relating to this child’s guardianship before you sleep tonight, and you will present it to me, not to my steward, not to my solicitor, not to any person who has been doing my thinking while I was in London.” He turned. His eyes found Maren’s, and held, and she felt seen in a way she had not been seen in two years — thoroughly, and without pity, which was somehow worse.

“It may be cancelled only for today,” he said quietly. “Another order may follow tomorrow, and I will not be able to undo it if the ground beneath it is not first made sound.” He inclined his head, a formal gesture entirely at odds with the dust on his sleeves. “Miss Thurlow. What aid will you permit me to give you?”

Maren opened her mouth.

Behind her, Mrs. Ottilie Vane set down her teacup on the balustrade with a click that carried across the entire terrace — and every head turned, as if the click had been a gavel.