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

Chapter 3

The terrace went very quiet.

Maren felt Nell’s hand find hers and grip, and in that grip she understood that her sister had no idea what she had done — none at all — and that this was both the most frightening and the most lovable thing about her.

“Encouraged,” Adrian repeated.

“Children repeat what they hear at home,” said Ottilie pleasantly. “It is the way of children. I am sure Miss Thurlow would agree — she is a teacher, after all.”

Maren’s voice, when it came, was low and very steady, which took more effort than shouting.

“Nell heard no such thing from me, Mrs. Vane. I have never spoken to her of his grace at all.”

“Then she invented it,” said Ottilie. “How inventive.”

“She is eight,” said Maren.

“Exactly.”

Adrian looked at the two women — the one silver and smiling, the one dark and still — and Maren saw something move behind his eyes that she could not name, some calculation that had nothing to do with either of them.

“I find,” he said, addressing the terrace at large, “that I have had a long journey and a short temper. Ladies, gentlemen — the afternoon has given us enough to discuss. I believe there is tea indoors.”

It was dismissal, and everyone knew it. The party dissolved the way such parties do, in twos and threes, with much commentary held until the gravel crunched underfoot. Maren turned to take Nell inside, and Adrian’s voice stopped her without rising above the ordinary.

“Miss Thurlow. A word. In the library. Bring your sister — I would rather not have this conversation in a room where she cannot hear it.”

Maren’s heart was a fist.

“Your grace —”

“Bring her,” he said, and walked on ahead.

The library at Elmswood was long and low and smelled of leather and damp stone, with a fire laid but unlit and four thousand books that nobody had opened in a decade. Adrian stood at the window with his back to them and did not speak for the length of a slow breath.

“You will think me clumsy,” he said at last. “I have been clumsy. I have been away five years, and I came home to find that arrangements had been made in my name that I would not have made, and I have just made one of them worse by talking about it in front of the county.”

Maren said nothing. She had learned that silence was the only garment that never came off in the wrong place.

“Your guardian — Bracken — has authority over the child because your mother’s will named him,” Adrian said, turning. “He can remove her. He can place her at Halifax. He cannot be stopped by me today, because the trust under which he acts is not one I have read in five years, and I will not pretend to a power I have not verified.” He paused. “That is the whole of my honesty. I want you to hear it plainly before I say anything else.”

It was, Maren thought, the strangest thing a duke had ever said to her.

“Then what is there to say?” she asked.

“This.” He came away from the window. “If I cancel the carriage today, Bracken orders another next week. If I dismiss him, the trust falls to the courts, and courts move slower than spite. The only thing that outranks a guardian in the public eye — the only thing — is a claim of marriage. A man who intends to marry into a family assumes its protections. Nobody questions it. Nobody dares.”

Nell’s head came up.

Maren’s did not move at all.

“You are proposing,” she said, “that I marry you.”

“I am proposing that we say we will.” He held up a hand before she could speak. “For four weeks. Privately understood between us to be false. Long enough to stop the carriage, to see the guardianship transferred to a trustee of your choosing, and to put you and your sister into a house of your own with an income attached that no marriage can take from you. At the end of it — the night of the harvest assembly — you end it, publicly, exactly as you please. I will not contest it. I will not explain it. I will take whatever blame belongs to me and none that belongs to you.”

The fire settled in the grate. Somewhere in the house a clock struck four.

“Why,” said Maren.

“Because I slept in a house in Sussex last month and a girl of about her age made my tea,” said Adrian, “and I thought about how little it would take for her to be sent anywhere at all, and I have been uneasy ever since.” He looked at Nell. “And because I am a coward who would rather look foolish for four weeks than lie awake for forty years.”

“You do not know me,” said Maren.

“No,” he agreed. “But I know what I saw on that terrace. You did not release her hand. Not once, in all of it.”

Maren looked at her sister — at the thin shoulders and the proud chin and the purple stain on her fingers where the heather had bruised.

“I will accept,” she said slowly, “upon three conditions.”

Adrian’s brows lifted. “Name them.”

“Nell remains with me. At all times, in all places, without exception. You will never claim to know my private feelings — not to me, not to anyone, not in jest. And I may end the arrangement on the night of the assembly, for any reason or none, and you will not ask me why.”

She expected him to bargain. Men always bargained; it was the one thing two years of being whispered about had taught her thoroughly.

“Agreed,” said Adrian.

Not a word more. Not a condition of his own.

He crossed to Nell and put the crushed heather back into her hand, closing her small fingers over the stems as if they were something valuable.

“A proper proposal requires the lady’s consent,” he told her gravely. “I shall have to earn it.”

Nell looked at the flowers, then at him, and said, with the devastating practicality of eight years, “How long will that take?”

“I have no idea,” said Adrian. “I am told I am slow.”

The carriage had been stopped. Nell was still in Maren’s hand. That, Maren decided, walking back along the corridor with her sister’s fingers laced through hers, would have to serve as the first victory — because the whispers were already beginning again behind them, louder than before, and the false engagement, which had saved them from one departure, had just made their disgrace the most interesting story in Elmswood.