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

Chapter 25

One year later, in the spring, the Duke and Duchess of Ravenmoor gave a ball.

It was the first they had given since the marriage, and half of London accepted within a day, and the other half accepted within three, and Lady Honoria Vane wrote to ask whether she might attend and received, after four days, a letter that said only: You may.

The house was full to the doors — candles, music, the smell of hot wax and hothouse flowers and a hundred different perfumes laid over each other like weather. The servants had been polishing for a week. The garden, which had been dead, was planted with roses that would not do anything remarkable for another two years and had been watered, in the meantime, with great stubbornness.

Rosalind came down the staircase at ten.

She was wearing crimson silk — not the wine-red of the marriage season, something brighter and deeper, a red that had no apology anywhere in it — with her hair high and a single strand of pearls, and the small jet locket was at her throat on its black ribbon, with a curl of a baby’s hair folded inside it.

The music faltered when she appeared.

They did that, now, these rooms — faltered when she came in, the way a room falters for a duke. It had taken her a year to get used to it, and she had never entirely decided whether she liked it.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

There was a corner in this ballroom, near the terrace doors, where the air was cooler and the light never reached.

It was empty. It had been empty all night. Nobody stood in it, and nobody would, because in the house of the Duchess of Ravenmoor there was no such thing as a corner you were assigned to, and everybody had heard by now exactly why.

A young woman in gray approached her at the drinks table.

She was perhaps twenty, badly dressed for a ball in a plain gray silk that had been altered twice, and she was holding her glass hard, and she was standing the way Rosalind had once stood at the far end of a long room: with her back to the wall, watching the exits.

“My lady,” the girl whispered. “May I ask you something?”

“You may.”

“They told me to sit in corners,” the girl said. “My father’s solicitor, and my aunt, and everyone. They said my story was finished and I should be grateful to be allowed anywhere at all. They said—” Her voice wobbled. “They said I should learn to be invisible.”

Rosalind looked at her for a moment.

There was no tragedy in the girl’s face, not yet. Just the beginning of it, the look that said she was still trying to decide whether to believe the people who had told her she was over. That look could go two ways, and Rosalind knew both of them: the corner, or the aisle.

“It isn’t,” Rosalind said.

“My lady?”

“It isn’t finished.” She smiled, gently, and reached out and straightened the girl’s shoulder ribbon without asking, the way an older sister does. “It never is. That is not a comfort, I know. But it is the truth, and you should have the truth.”

The girl stared at her.

“Come and stand with me,” Rosalind said, “and if anyone in this room says a word about it, they will find out what I have become.”

Across the room, the Duke of Ravenmoor set down his glass.

He crossed the floor — the whole of it, in front of everyone, the way he had crossed the Halstead ballroom three years ago — and the room turned to watch, because they always did.

He stopped in front of her and held out his hand.

“Dance with me,” he said.

And this time it was not a command.

Rosalind looked at his hand — the wide knuckles, the pale scar, the soldier’s hand she had stared at in terror once, in a room full of people who had wanted her gone.

She took it.

The orchestra struck up a waltz. They were not the only couple dancing, this time. There were a dozen others, young and old, laughing and serious, and none of them cared, and none of them watched with folded arms, and that was the whole of what had changed.

She moved, and he moved with her, and it was exactly the same as it had been at the beginning: the turn, the counter-turn, the small surrender of weight from one foot to the other.

“Is it what you wanted?” he asked quietly, after a while.

“It is the first thing I have ever wanted,” Rosalind Vane said, “that nobody chose for me.”

They danced under the chandeliers, in a room where no corner was waiting for her, and the windows stood open to a garden that would be full of roses in two years, and the small black locket at her throat held a lock of her daughter’s hair, and there was not one person in that room who did not know exactly who she was.

Outside, London had stopped whispering about Lady Rosalind Vane.

Outside, London was going to have to find something else to do.

THE END