Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 4

To her credit, and his considerable surprise, Miss Linden showed no sign the next morning of having been altered by their conversation. No coquettish glances. No lingering near his chair at breakfast. When he entered the dining room, she was across the room, absorbed in correspondence, and she raised her eyes exactly long enough to register his arrival and then returned, entirely without awkwardness, to her letter.

It was, he thought as he took his seat, either the most skillful campaign of the season or the most genuine disinterest he had ever encountered, and he could no longer tell which was more dangerous.

He found her an hour later on the south terrace, alone, while the rest of the house was still polishing off its kedgeree. She was standing at the stone balustrade with her back to the house, looking out over the valley where the mist lay in white ropes between the elms, and she did not notice him until his boots sounded on the flags.

“Avoiding everyone again, Miss Linden?”

“I prefer to think of it as giving them room to impress you without interference.”

“That is very considerate of you.”

“I have been told so.”

He fell into step beside her. For a long while they walked in silence—fifty yards, a hundred—and he found that he did not need to speak, and that she did not seem frightened by his silence, and that this astonished him more gently than anything else that week. Most people, confronted with a duke’s quiet, rushed to fill it with offerings. She walked, and watched the mist, and let the silence simply be.

“Miss Linden,” he said eventually, “what would you change about this house?”

She shot him a suspicious sidelong glance. “Is this a test?”

“No. I am only curious.”

“You paused before answering,” she said. “I was deciding whether to be offended.”

“That seems an efficient use of your consideration.”

She studied the great pale face of Marnfeld Hall—the marching windows, the towers at either end, the stone that locals said came from the same cliffs the sea still ate at, a mile away. And then, without any hesitation at all: “The chairs.”

He stopped walking. “I beg your pardon?”

“The chairs, Your Grace. Your mother’s drawing room is a museum of discomfort. I have sat in a Chippendale that pinched me behind both knees and a Hepplewhite that silently hated me for an entire evening.”

“There are hundreds of rooms in this house.”

“Yes.”

“And you would begin with the chairs.”

“They are beautiful,” she said, “and they are deeply uncomfortable. That seems an expensive combination to maintain.”

He laughed, and the sound scattered the rooks from the far elms. “I believe you are the first guest in years to insult my furniture.”

“I am sure the furniture will recover. Perhaps sooner than the guests.”

They walked on, and he noticed that she did not touch his arm, did not take his elbow, did not angle her shoulder toward his the way the other women did when he walked beside them. She simply walked, at his pace, her hands clasped behind her back the way he had seen schoolboys walk.

“You don’t find me intimidating, Miss Linden?”

“What a strange question. Why should I?”

“I am a duke. My mother tells me it is my chief occupation.”

“Your mother has never been pinched by your chairs, then, or she would know that the furniture is the true terror of this house.” She paused. “You are a man who looks tired because he is tired, and who wants to be asked about something other than his estates, and who laughed at my poor joke about the cows—yes, I was watching you all through breakfast, I know exactly who you are when you think no one is looking.” She turned to face him. “Why would I find that intimidating?”

“Because most people do.”

“Most people,” she said, starting to walk again, “have never been asked to dine as a cow. It builds character. Also callus.”

In the afternoon, he sought her out again—in the long gallery, among the paintings, where she was standing before a portrait of his great-aunt with her head tilted exactly as she had tilted it over the library window the night before. He came in under the pretense of checking the window latches, and stayed forty minutes.

He was, he realized, being far too obvious.

Lady Amara had watched him cross the lawn to find her. Lady Gwendolyn had watched the long gallery door close behind them both. The house, which had been built on a hill to see everything for miles, had acquired an interior climate of its own: rumor, drifting seed in wind.

Yet Miss Linden remained herself. She did not appear at his side when he entered rooms. She did not ask about his income or his prospects or his intentions. When he talked about drainage schemes in the low meadows—because he genuinely cared about drainage schemes in the low meadows, and could never discuss them with anyone who did not want something—she asked a sensible question about the soil, and when he talked too long, her eyes went dreamy in exactly the way his did at tedious dinner conversation, and he found that honesty more attractive than any performance he had ever been offered.

That evening they sat by the drawing-room windows while the card tables gathered for whist. From across the room, Marcus watched Lady Gwendolyn quietly rearrange the seating plan so that her chair sat closer to his; watched her do it in tiny, surgical increments, like a general stationing artillery.

Miss Linden followed his gaze. “Do you have an opinion, then, about the sort of wife you want?”

The question caught him mid-sip and nearly cost him his wine. His mother had asked about rank, about fortune, about family connection, about temperament, about the usefulness of a wife’s smile. No one had asked him what he wanted.

“I suppose I should have one,” he said.

“That sounds dangerously similar to no.”

“I know what I do not want,” he said slowly. “That is usually easier. I do not want someone who spends every morning wondering whether she is behaving like a duchess.” He paused. “I do not want to arrive home—exhausted, unarmored, ordinary—and find that I must present myself.”

“And what do you want instead?”

He looked at her. The lamplight had caught her hair, turning the edges of it to pale fire, and she was looking back at him with an attention he had not earned and could not account for.

“Someone I can be quiet beside,” he said.

The words surprised them both.

Miss Linden’s expression softened. “That seems reasonable.”

“It apparently eliminates most of society.”

“Then you may have to become less fashionable.”

He laughed again, too loudly for the drawing room; two heads turned from the card tables; and from her chair at the whist table, Lady Amara Colthurst watched the duke laugh at a nobody in a pale blue dress, and her cards grew white at the knuckles, and she smiled the small tight smile of a woman beginning to keep score.