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

Chapter 8

“Mrs. Vane said it is true.”

Nell was sobbing so hard the words came out broken and wet. She had her fists in Maren’s skirts and her forehead against Maren’s stomach, and she was shaking the way children shake when they have been holding something in for days.

“Said what is true? Nell. Look at me. Said what?”

“She told her maid.” Nell’s breath hitched. “She said after the assembly the carriage will come anyway. She said the Duke’s promises are only breath. She said — she said only a husband could stop her sending you away while I go to the school.”

Maren went very still.

Only a husband.

So that was it. That was the whole of it. Nell had not invented marriage as a game, or heard some romantic notion from a servant, or copied anything from a book. She was eight, and she had been frightened, and she had heard a threat and reached for the largest weapon she could find in the world she had — a duke who had smiled at her — and thrown it as hard as she could at the problem.

Her sister had heard the words only a husband and had concluded that a husband was what they needed, and had gone and got one.

“You were trying to keep us together,” Maren said.

Nell nodded into her shoulder, miserable.

“I thought he looked kind,” she said.

The simple judgment struck harder than the tears had. Maren knelt and gathered her close and held on until the sobbing eased into the hiccupping exhaustion that follows crying, and then she carried her to the window seat and let her stay there against her shoulder until the breakfast bell had rung twice and gone quiet.

“I am not angry,” Maren said. “I am not angry with you. Not once, not for a single moment.”

“You’re not?”

“No.” She smoothed her sister’s hair back from her wet face. “You did a very brave and a very foolish thing, and I have been trying for two years to do exactly the same and I have never once managed it. So we are the same, you and I. Now go and eat. And if anyone asks why you have been crying, you may say you were told no about something. That is a normal reason to cry in a house like this.”

Nell nodded, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and was collected by the housekeeper, who looked at Maren over the child’s head with an expression Maren could not read — not unfriendly, which was strange, and which she filed away.

When the door had shut, Maren opened her drawing book.

She took out the two notes. The first, from under the chamber door on Thursday. The second, which she had found that morning beneath her breakfast napkin — same paper, same scent, same sloping hand, and the same sentence written out again as if she might have failed to understand it the first time.

A prudent woman knows when to lower her eyes.

Beside them she laid the pressed heather.

Then she went to the Duke’s study and knocked, and when he opened the door and saw her face, he stood up out of his chair so fast he knocked the inkwell sideways.

She laid the notes on his desk. She laid the heather beside them.

“Nell proposed because she heard Mrs. Vane threaten to separate us,” she said. “I want you to understand that I did not know it until this morning. I have not been clever with you. I have been exactly as confused as you have been.”

Adrian was reading the notes. His jaw had gone hard in a way she had not seen before, and there was something behind his eyes she recognised from the afternoon on the terrace, some cold machinery starting up.

“A prudent woman knows when to lower her eyes,” he read aloud. “Someone writes this. To you. Repeatedly.”

“She uses that phrase whenever she wishes cruelty to sound like wisdom. I have heard it for two years.” Maren touched the second sheet with one finger. “She also crushes whatever flower is in her hand when anyone speaks of my employment, or of Nell’s future. Lavender, usually. She broke two stems in the parlour in one afternoon.”

Adrian looked up.

“That is a peculiar thing to notice,” he said.

“I had nothing else to do but notice things,” said Maren. “It was the only thing anybody left me.”

There was a silence, and in it, something in the room changed its temperature.

“I shall remove her from the house today,” he said.

“No.”

The word stopped him as cleanly as it had in the library.

“Her family will say I turned you against her,” said Maren. “The Selwins are three miles away and they have cousins in six houses within a day’s ride. If she leaves this house in private, with no one present but servants who depend on you for their bread, the accusation will travel with her and grow a head taller at every mile. I will spend the rest of my life answering a story that no one will ever require her to prove. I have done that once already. I will not do it twice.”

Adrian looked at the notes, then at her.

“What do you want?”

The question was harder than any command he had ever given her.