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

Chapter 6

“I was engaged,” Eleanor said, “to a man named Frederick Ashcombe. His family are in shipping out of Bristol. It was, as my mother liked to say at the time, a singularly suitable arrangement.” She tasted the phrase and found it still bitter. “He had the right family, the right money, and apparently the right intentions.”

Marcus walked at her side in the dark, hands behind his back, saying nothing. The silence was a kindness. She felt it.

“My father was a merchant in the wine trade, Your Grace. He invested well for thirty years, and then he invested badly—in a canal scheme out of the west, banked on a firm that failed in the same month as two of its partners’ houses. Fourteen thousand pounds, which is less than a duke spends on a ballroom renovation but rather more than a merchant can lose and stand up straight afterwards.”

“I am sorry,” Marcus said, and she heard, to her surprise, that he meant it.

“So was Frederick. He called at our house one afternoon a month after the news broke. The ring—he was very careful, Your Grace, to ask for it back rather than to demand it. I remember thinking that was civilized.” Her voice was steady, detachable, the way one describes a stranger’s misfortune. “And then he explained, with enormous regret, that his father’s firm could not countenance the alliance under the circumstances, and that his own feelings—while real—could not survive contact with a family’s ruined credit.”

“And you believed him?”

“I believed that he meant it,” she said. “I have learned that men can be perfectly sincere in their cruelty.”

They walked on. Far ahead, the path curved toward the cliff edge where the sea breathed below.

“Did you love him?”

“I believed I did. That is a different thing, and I have spent two years learning the difference.” She stopped and turned to him. The moon was behind her, silvering the edges of her shoulders. “I learned that suitability can vanish remarkably quickly when circumstances change, Your Grace. A week ago I was one of eight women invited here because I am of decent family and no impediment to advancement. If all of this—this walking in the moonlight, this asking of honest questions—is only a more elaborate version of that, I would rather know it now.”

“Know what now?”

“Whether you are choosing me,” she said quietly, “or only choosing the idea of me.”

The phrase landed between them like a stone in still water. He felt the weight of it spread.

“I think,” she went on, looking away, “that I would rather be chosen by someone who knows the difference between wanting a wife and wanting a convenient arrangement. My mother thinks I am a fool. Perhaps I am. But I learned the price of confusion precisely, Your Grace, and I do not intend to pay it twice.”

“And if someone chose you now?” he asked.

She was quiet for a long moment. “I would need to know that he chose me. Not the peace I offered at dinner, not the novelty of a woman who asked if he was tired, not the pretty fiction of an honest girl in an honest dress.” She looked at him, and her eyes were steady and unarmored. “I should need to know that he had looked at me and wanted the complicated, cross, unimpressive truth of the matter.”

Something in his chest had gone still. He had spent his adult life surrounded by people who wanted things from him—money, favor, the echo of his name in their mouths at dinner parties—and he had become an expert in recognizing ambition because ambition, when he saw it, always wore the same clothes.

This was not ambition. This was, for the first time he could remember, a woman placing her own worth on the table and asking what his was.

“Miss Linden,” he said, “I have no answer for that yet.”

“Then you are honest, at least.” She smiled, small and rueful. “I have received worse answers from better conversationalists.”

They walked back to the house in the dark, and when they reached the terrace steps she turned and held out her hand, and he took it, and her fingers were cold and small and did not hurry away.

“Goodnight, Miss Linden.”

“Goodnight, Your Grace. Do not let the chairs pinch you.”

He laughed once, softly, into the dark.

But neither of them saw that from the shadow of the carriage-house door, a figure had watched them walk the whole length of the path together—and by the time the candles were snuffed at Marnfeld Hall that night, the first seed of rumor had already been planted, watered, and covered over with dark soil where it would grow fast and ugly in weather none of them could foresee.