Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 3

“Do you?” He paced in front of a fireplace that had not been lit in three years. Ashmoor burned coal only in rooms where guests might stand. “The Duke of Thornbury is not coming here for conversation, whatever he may pretend. He requires a wife. We require—” He stopped, weighed the word, and chose a lighter one. “We require an advantageous connection.”

Wren waited. Waiting was the single skill she had been permitted to perfect.

“Celeste has beauty. Verity has accomplishments. Blythe has charm.” He said it the way he said the names of horses at Tattersall’s. Then he looked at her, and there was something almost irritated in it, as though he resented being made to finish the thought himself.

“And I have steady hands for the teapot,” Wren said.

His mouth tightened. “This is not the day for your humor.”

“No, Father.”

She was twenty-two, and she had learned — slowly, the way you learn a bruise — that silence was not the absence of an answer. Silence was the answer that could not be used against you. She had learned it the winter the steward left. She had learned it in the nine months since, standing at a desk in the estate office long after the candles were out, moving figures across paper as though arithmetic could manufacture money.

She left the study and walked into a theatre.

Ashmoor had been transformed in a week. Fires burned in rooms normally kept cold to save coal. Hothouse flowers from Aunt Constance’s greenhouse concealed the water stains beneath the drawing-room windows. Two silver candlesticks, borrowed and gleaming, had been positioned exactly where the Duke could not fail to see them. The estate was failing politely. That was how respectable families preferred to fail — behind closed doors, with unpaid bills, anxious tenants, and whispered arguments about mortgages, while the front rooms smelled of beeswax and lilies.

Wren went up to the dressing room. Celeste stood before the glass in pale green silk while their mother fastened a pearl at her throat.

“Wren. The blue ribbon.”

She found it on the table and threaded it through her sister’s sash.

“Tighter.”

She tightened it.

“Not that tight.”

She loosened it.

From the window seat, Blythe watched with her chin on her hand. “Do you suppose Thornbury is as unpleasant as everyone says?”

“He is not unpleasant,” Lady Isobel said, and did not look up from the pearl. “He is reserved.”

“They say he dismissed his own cousin from Thornbury House in the middle of Christmas dinner.”

“Blythe.”

“Well, they do.”

“He did,” said Lady Isobel, in the tone of a woman closing a door.

Verity struck a wrong note at the piano in the corner, then struck it again, harder.

“Why?”

“The man lied to him.”

Wren smoothed the ribbon flat beneath Celeste’s sash. “Then perhaps one shouldn’t lie to him,” she said.

Three faces turned toward her at once.

“Wren, please,” her mother said.

“I was only—”

“Help quietly.”

Wren lowered her eyes. “Yes, Mother.”

She finished the ribbon and went down to the tea table, where a tray had been laid with nine cups, a pot she had scoured herself, and a bowl of sugar she had watched the kitchen maid fill twice because the first sugar had a scum on it.

By late afternoon, carriage wheels sounded on the frozen drive, and the whole house seemed to inhale at once.

Wren moved behind the table. As she did, she passed the great mirror in the hall, and for half a step she saw herself the way things look in glass — gray dress, brown hair pinned flat, a young woman shaped by other people’s arrangements. She did not stop. She had stopped, once, years ago, and had learned that it changed nothing.

Through the tall windows she watched a black carriage draw up beneath the portico. The door opened. A footman reached for it and was too slow.

Atticus Vale stepped down without waiting for assistance, and the first thing Wren noticed — before the coat, before the shoulders, before the scar — was that he did not look like a man arriving to choose among beautiful women.

He looked like a man arriving to settle an account.