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

Chapter 15

Nothing in London was talked about that spring except the ball at Halstead House, and every person who was talked about was determined to be there.

The invitations had been sent before the engagement, and Lady Halstead had considered, briefly and seriously, whether to withdraw the Duke’s. She had decided not to. Lady Halstead was a woman who had lived in society for forty years and had learned the value of a scandal and the value of a favor, and she had concluded that if the Duke of Ravenmoor was going to appear in public with a ruined bride, she would rather he did it in her ballroom than in someone else’s.

So the invitations stood.

Rosalind stood in front of the long mirror in her room at Ravenmoor House and looked at herself.

Nell had wept twice while dressing her, which had made Rosalind laugh, which had made Nell weep harder.

The gown was the wine-colored silk, the shade Rosalind had chosen herself in the shop on Bond Street, and it had taken three weeks and a seamstress sworn to secrecy and paid double, because no shop in London would sell to her. It was deep as a spill of claret, almost black in the shadows and unmistakably red in the light. Not mourning. Not white, either. A color that had decided what it was.

Nell had woven a single strand of pearls through her hair and pinned it low.

“You look like—” Nell began, and stopped.

“Say it.”

“Like a woman who has stopped apologizing.”

Rosalind looked at her reflection.

The corner was not in this mirror. There was no corner in this room. The shape of her was upright, and the jet locket was not at her throat — there was nothing at her throat at all, just the plain line of her collarbone.

“Yes,” she said. “That is what I wanted.”

The Duke came for her at ten, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw her.

He said nothing for a moment, and then he said, “I have seen a great many things,” and stopped, and did not finish the sentence.

“You will have to finish.”

“No,” he said. “I would make a fool of myself.”

Halstead House was full to the doors.

They entered on his arm — a duke and his scandalous bride, and the crowd at the top of the stairs parted for them and then closed behind them and hummed, low and constant, like a hive.

Rosalind heard every syllable. She was a whore. She was a witch. She had trapped him. She had trapped him with money, or with grief, or with her body, or with all three. She was a woman who had climbed out of the mud by her fingernails and would take him for everything he had.

She walked down the staircase with her chin level and did not look at a single one of them.

But she looked for two faces in that crowd.

She found the first almost at once.

Seraphina Harrow stood near the orchestra, in white, as she always did — pale silk, pale gloves, pale hair dressed high, all of it arranged to make her look untouchable. She was talking to a woman in green and laughing at something, and she was very good at being looked at.

Her laugh died when she saw Rosalind.

For the space of one breath, over the heads of four hundred people, the two women looked at each other.

Seraphina’s face did not move. It simply closed, the way a door closes, and something behind it was very ugly, and Rosalind looked at it and did not look away first.

The second face took her longer to find.

She found it near the card room, half-hidden by a pillar: Edgar Marsh, in a coat of deep green velvet, holding a glass and smiling at a young woman who was finding him charming.

The Duke’s arm, beneath her hand, went hard as iron.

“Not yet,” Rosalind said quietly. “Not in the doorway.”

“No,” he agreed. “Not in the doorway.”

They moved through the room. They accepted a glass of wine. They stood where they could be seen — deliberately, in the open, at the edge of the dance floor, where there was no corner to retreat to.

Rosalind thought of the last ball. She thought of the dark silk and the folded hands and the whispers that had not bothered to lower themselves. She thought of a man walking toward her through a parted crowd and every throat closing at once.

And when the music slowed and the dancers began to drift, and the room settled into that soft hum of a thousand small conversations, the Duke of Ravenmoor handed his glass to a footman.

“Stay where I can see you,” he said to Rosalind.

“I will be beside you.”

“No,” he said. “You will be here, and everyone will see you, and that is the point.”

He turned.

The Master of Ceremonies, catching some signal she did not see, struck the floor twice with his staff.

The music stopped.

The room turned, slowly, all four hundred of it, toward the man standing alone in the middle of the floor.

And the Duke of Ravenmoor spoke.