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

Chapter 4

“Places,” Lord Ambrose whispered.

They took them like pieces on a board. Celeste moved toward the fire and arranged herself where the light was kindest. Verity seated herself at the pianoforte, hands folded, waiting to be asked. Blythe opened a book she had no intention of reading and held it at an angle that showed her profile.

Wren reached for the teapot.

The drawing-room doors opened. The Duke entered, and the room rearranged itself around him without anyone moving at all. He exchanged the required courtesies with Lord Ambrose — ducal to baronial, correct down to the syllable — and permitted himself to be introduced to Celeste. Then Verity. Then Blythe.

He listened to each with impeccable courtesy and no visible pleasure whatsoever, the way a man listens to a clock strike.

Celeste smiled. Verity sparkled. Blythe laughed. Wren poured.

She was good at pouring. She had poured for the vicar, for the magistrate, for two bankers who had come to Ashmoor in October and left with the smell of it still on her father’s coat. She had learned to fill a cup to the same depth every time, to turn the spout inward, to set the saucer down without a sound. It was, she thought sometimes, the only thing in the house that anybody had ever praised her for.

It was Nell who broke it.

Nell was fourteen and new, hired at Michaelmas from the village, and she came through the door behind the sofa carrying the second sugar bowl — the good one, the one with the chip on the underside that nobody saw. Her heel caught the edge of the carpet.

Time did a strange thing then, the way it does in the second before something breaks.

Wren moved before she had decided to. She stepped sideways off her mark, caught the falling bowl flat against her skirt with both hands, and felt the cool weight of it settle against her hip an inch above the floor. Porcelain, silver rim, sugar scattering across the wool like snow. Nell’s face had gone the color of the ash in the grate.

“I’m sorry, miss. I’m sorry. I’m sorry—”

“Nothing broke,” Wren said, low. “Straighten your cap. Breathe.”

She set the bowl back on the tray, righted the scatter with her shoe, and stepped back behind the table, all of it inside four seconds.

What she did not see was that Atticus Vale had stopped listening to Celeste in the middle of a carefully rehearsed sentence about the restoration of the Thornbury gardens.

He had turned his head.

And he was looking, with an attention that had nothing to do with courtesy, at the woman behind the tea table.

Wren only understood it later — understood that she had felt it without naming it, the way you feel a change in weather. When she finally raised her eyes, Celeste had stopped speaking. The room had that same wet-wool quiet again. The Duke of Thornbury was watching her, not boldly, not with the lazy appraisal that men sometimes gave unmarried women at the end of an evening, but quietly and carefully, as though he had found in the corner of a painting a detail that did not belong to the rest of it.

She lowered her eyes first. “Your Grace.”

“Your Grace,” Celeste said, recovering her smile, “as I was saying — my father tells me you recently restored the gardens at Thornbury. I understand the tenants’ drainage—”

“Failed,” the Duke said. “The gardens were dug up to repair it.”

Celeste hesitated. “How practical.”

“They were designed by a man who had never once in his life had mud on his boots,” Atticus said. “They came up in a week.”

Verity came to her sister’s rescue. “Perhaps Your Grace would prefer music.”

She did not wait for an answer. She settled at the pianoforte and began, and the drawing room filled with bright, technically perfect Mozart — every note correct, every trill exact, the whole piece executed the way a clerk copies a letter.

Wren hid the beginning of a smile behind the teapot.

She was too late. He had seen it.

Atticus stood near the mantel with one hand behind his back and listened with absolute attention and no enjoyment at all. When Verity finished with a flourish, he inclined his head.

“Excellent,” he said.

Verity brightened. “You are too kind.”

“You play with remarkable precision.”

“Thank you, Your Grace.”

“My late father’s mathematics tutor would have admired it enormously.”

Wren’s hand stopped over the milk jug.

Blythe coughed into her glove. Lady Isobel stared at the fire as though it had personally insulted her. Verity’s smile stayed exactly where it was while a slow red climbed her throat, and Lord Ambrose stepped forward the way a man steps in front of a carriage.

“Blythe has recently returned from Bath,” he said loudly. “Blythe, tell His Grace about the assemblies.”

Blythe closed her unread book and began.