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

Chapter 4

The carriage ride home took forty minutes, and Rosalind felt every one of them in her spine.

She sat rigid on the velvet seat with her gloved hands clasped in her lap and stared at the black glass of the window, where London rolled past in smears of gaslight and rain. The springs creaked. The horses’ hooves struck the wet stones in a rhythm she could not stop listening to, four beats, four beats, four beats.

Opposite her, Lady Honoria sat with her lips pressed into a thin white line. Beside her mother, Rosalind’s younger sister Cordelia shifted and fidgeted, seventeen years old and burning with questions she had not yet been given permission to ask.

“What did you say to him?” her mother demanded at last.

“Nothing.”

“Do not lie to me.”

“I am not lying. He came to me.”

“That is impossible.” Lady Honoria’s voice cracked upward. “Men like the Duke of Ravenmoor do not notice women like you without a reason. There is always a reason, and it is never a kind one. Did he speak of your father? Did he mention money?”

“He asked me to dance. Then he asked me to meet him tomorrow.”

The carriage lurched over a rut. Cordelia made a small sound, half gasp and half delight, and her mother silenced her with a look.

Rosalind did not argue further. She had learned long ago that truth did not matter to people who had already decided the story. Her mother had decided the story of her life three years ago and had never once reopened the file.

At home, Rosalind was dismissed to her room like a child who had been caught stealing sweets.

Nell was waiting with a lit candle and a face full of worry. She had been Rosalind’s maid since before the scandal, one of the two servants who had not been bought, and she had stayed when staying cost her. Together, in silence, they worked the black silk down over Rosalind’s shoulders and unfastened the twenty-two hooks at the back of her stays.

“Everyone will be talking,” Nell said quietly.

“Everyone is always talking.”

“Not about you, my lady. About him.”

Rosalind said nothing.

When Nell had gone, she sat at her dressing table long past midnight. The candle guttered. The house creaked around her, settling into its old bones. Slowly, she reached up and pulled the pins from her hair, one by one, and let it fall.

Dark auburn, heavy, loose to her waist. She barely recognized the woman in the mirror. Twenty-eight, but older around the eyes. Sharper through the jaw than she had been. Someone shaped by weather — the way a tree on a cliff is shaped, leaning always away from the wind.

The Duke’s question surfaced again, unbidden: mourning for the woman you were told you could no longer be.

Her hand went to the small jet locket at her throat.

Her father had given it to her the week after the scandal broke — a flat oval of black jet on a black ribbon, containing a lock of her own hair, cut off in the study while she stood there and watched. You will wear this every day, he had said. You will remember.

She had worn it every day. Three years of black jet against the hollow of her throat.

A knock came at the door.

“Rosalind. My study. Now.”

Her father did not invite her to sit.

Lord Ambrose Vane stood behind his desk with both hands braced flat on the wood, as though he needed the desk to hold him up, or as though he were restraining himself from throwing something. The fire had burned down to embers. The room smelled of old paper, tobacco, and the damp wool of his coat.

“You embarrassed this family tonight,” he said. “Do you understand the damage you have done?”

“I did not seek him out. I did nothing.”

“That does not matter.” He straightened. “What matters is that people will talk again, and this time they will talk louder. Do you know what I have had to do, these three years, to keep the Vane name from being dragged through the mud entirely? Do you know what it has cost me?”

Rosalind knew. She knew about the loans, the withdrawn invitations, the business partners who had found reasons to be busy. She had been the reason. She had been the cost.

“So,” her father said, studying her with a cool, assessing eye she had seen him turn on horses and ledgers alike, “you will go to Hyde Park tomorrow.”

Her breath caught.

“Father—”

“If the Duke of Ravenmoor has taken an interest in you, we will not waste it.” He said it the way one discusses the price of coal. “You will be agreeable. Respectful. You will not weep, and you will not shame us further.”

“And if I refuse?”

Something went out of his face — the last trace of anything paternal, banked like a fire being smothered for the night.

“Then you will return to your corner,” he said evenly, “and you will remain there for the rest of your life.”

The fire cracked. A coal settled.

Rosalind stood very still, and understood, finally and completely, something she had been circling for three years without ever touching.

She had never had a choice. Not tonight. Not three years ago. Not once.

“Yes, Father,” she said.

She walked out of the study and up the stairs, and the jet locket bumped against her collarbone with every step, cold as a coin.

Behind the closed study door, she heard her father cross to the sideboard. She heard the clink of glass and the pour of liquid.

She did not hear him make any sound at all that suggested he was sorry.

At the top of the stairs, Nell was waiting in the dark with a folded paper in her hand.

“My lady,” she whispered. “This came while you were below. A boy left it at the kitchen door.”

The paper was sealed with wax.

Crimson wax, deep as an old wound.