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

Chapter 17

Seraphina Harrow did not run.

Rosalind would give her that much, afterward, when she thought about it in the quiet years. Seraphina Harrow stood in the middle of the Halstead ballroom in her white silk and her pale gloves and did not run, and did not weep, and did not do any of the things that everyone else in the room was waiting for her to do.

She smiled.

“My dear,” she said — and her voice was steady, and pitched to carry, and absolutely calm — “what a remarkable performance. The ruined woman and the grieving widower. It has everything. Grief, betrayal, a wronged lady in a beautiful dress.” She tilted her head. “You should be careful with that, Your Grace. He cannot be married twice, you know. You will be the second. You will always be the second. You will lie in her bed and raise children in her house and he will turn away from you on some nights and you will know precisely whose face he is seeing.”

The room drew breath.

Rosalind felt the words land. They were well aimed; she would have to be a fool not to see that. They had been made out of the exact truth of the situation, and the truth was the only material Seraphina had left.

She stepped forward onto the floor.

“You destroyed me,” she said. “You wrote the letter. You paid the servants. You put the paper into Lionel’s hand at his club, because you needed him to be the one who told, so that every drawing room in London would hear it from a man of honor instead of from a servant.” She was close now, four feet away, close enough to see the tiny diamonds in the woman’s hair, close enough to smell her scent, roses and something sharp beneath. “And when you had finished with me, you went on. Because ruining me achieved nothing. It was never about me.”

“It was never about you at all,” Seraphina said, with perfect calm. “You are a process, Lady Rosalind. You were the thing that had to be done in order to—”

“In order to marry him?”

Seraphina’s mouth closed.

“You wanted him.” Rosalind said it quietly, without cruelty, and that was the thing that finally cracked the white composure — not the accusation, but the pity. “You wanted him when he came back from the war, and he married Celia. You could not have him. Three years ago you destroyed me because you wanted control over Lionel. Then, when Alistair chose me, that old cruelty became useful to you again. And Celia’s death gave you something even more powerful to hold over him. And for two years you have held a letter in your hand that named his brother as a murderer, and you never once used it.”

Seraphina did not answer.

“Why not?” Rosalind said. “Why hold a letter for two years and never send it?”

The silence stretched.

“Because he would have wanted it,” Seraphina said at last. “Because he would have wanted the truth, and if I gave it to him he would have thanked me, and I would have been the woman who did him a service. And he would have looked at me with gratitude, and then he would have looked away again, and I could not bear it.” Her composure was going now; her voice had risen and roughened. “As long as he did not know, he was still looking. He was still searching. He was still mine to know.”

The whole ballroom stood in absolute stillness.

“Alistair,” Rosalind said, “would have wanted the truth,” she said. “That is exactly what you could not survive. That is what all of this has been about.”

She turned to the Duke.

“The letter,” she said. “Ask her for the letter.”

Seraphina laughed — a bright, terrible, brittle sound.

“I do not have it,” she said. “I burned it a week ago. The moment I heard your engagement was announced. I burned it in my own grate and I watched it curl up and die, and there is no copy, and no witness, and nothing you can ever do.” She looked triumphant. She looked ruined. Both were true. “So you may have your confession from the poor doctor, and your weeping brother, and your laundress. But the Duchess’s letter is ash, and I am the only one who read it, and you will never know what she said.”

“Wrong.”

The word came from the doorway.

Everyone turned.

Lord Ambrose Vane was standing on the threshold of Lady Halstead’s ballroom with his hat in his hands and rain on the shoulders of his coat, an old man with a gray face and very little left to lose.

“I did not burn mine,” he said.