She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 14

Two days before the wedding, Rosalind went home.

She had not been summoned. She went because there was one question whose answer she could no longer wait for, and she had known, since the moment she saw her father’s face in the Ravenmoor library doorway, what the answer was going to be. She simply needed him to say it.

The house was the same — the same dim hall, the same smell of old wood and tobacco, the same clock that had struck eleven on the last night she had stood in this hall as a daughter of this house.

Her father was in his study.

He did not rise. He looked at her for a long moment, at the plain gray walking dress, at the absence of black, at the set of her shoulders.

“You have come to be told something,” he said.

“I have come to ask you something. And I will know if you lie, because I have become very good at knowing.”

Lord Ambrose Vane looked at the fire.

“How much did the Harrow family pay you,” Rosalind said, “to keep silent while I was destroyed?”

The silence in that room was total.

Her father’s hand tightened on the arm of his chair. He did not deny it. He did not even pretend to be offended. He simply sat there, an old man in a cold study, and looked at his own fire.

“Four thousand pounds,” he said.

Rosalind had prepared herself for this. She had rehearsed it in her head, on the ride over, a dozen different ways, and she had told herself that when it came she would be steady, and cold, and dignified.

It came, and she was none of those things. She had to put a hand on the back of the chair to stay upright.

“Four thousand pounds.”

“There were debts.” Her father’s voice was flat. “Your mother did not know the worst of them. If I had not accepted, the house would have gone. Cordelia would have had no dowry and no name. Everything this family has built would have—”

“You sold me,” Rosalind said. “Say it plainly. Say the words.”

“I did what a father—”

“Say it plainly. You knew that I was innocent. You knew it.” Her voice cracked, and she let it. “You stood in that drawing room and watched me beg Lionel Harrow to believe me, and you knew. And the next morning you sent for the bootmaker to make me a black dress that would last ten years.”

Her father’s jaw worked.

“Your reputation was already gone,” he said. “By the time I heard about the money, the story was out of the house. I could not have stopped it. I only—”

“You could have told me. You could have told me who did it, and why, and let me fight.”

He said nothing.

“You took four thousand pounds,” Rosalind said slowly, “and you gave me a jet locket with a lock of my own hair in it, and you stood in this room and told me that I would remember. And I did remember. Every single day. Every time I walked into a ballroom and stood in the corner you assigned to me. I remembered.”

She reached up with both hands.

The ribbon was old and soft. It came apart easily.

She laid the black locket on the desk between them, on the wood, in the light of the fire.

“Here is your mourning,” she said. “I am finished with it.”

She turned and walked to the door, and her father said, behind her, in a voice that had finally broken: “Rosalind.”

She stopped with her hand on the door.

“Does he know?” her father asked. “Does the Duke know what I did?”

“He will.”

“Then I am ruined.”

“No,” Rosalind said, without turning around. “You are paid. Those are not the same thing.”

She went out into the hall.

Cordelia was standing at the top of the stairs with her hands pressed over her mouth, and she had clearly heard everything, and her eyes were enormous and wet.

Rosalind climbed the stairs and took her sister’s hands and held them.

“Pack a bag,” she said. “You are coming to the wedding. And after that, if you like, you are coming to my house.”

“Mother will never—”

“Mother is not the one who decides anymore,” Rosalind said.

She went out of the house of Vane for the last time as a daughter of it, into a cold gray afternoon that smelled of wet stone and coming rain.

And in the carriage, on the way back, she took out the pieces of the jet locket’s ribbon, and she slipped them into her pocket, and she thought, with a strange, fierce calm:

Now. Now there is only one door left, and it is at Lady Halstead’s ball.