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

Chapter 7

Ravenmoor House sat at the end of a gravel drive lined with bare lime trees, and it had the look of a place that had stopped expecting guests a long time ago. The windows were tall and dark. The stone was old and gray, cut with rain, and the ivy had been allowed to climb higher than good housekeeping permitted.

A butler admitted her without expression, which told her that somewhere in this house, someone had been warned she might come.

She was shown into the library and left there.

It was a room built for grief. Shelves to the ceiling, four thousand volumes and more, the fire banked low in a grate large enough to roast a sheep. The air smelled of leather, ash, and cold stone. Over the mantle hung a portrait of a young woman with pale hair and kind eyes, painted at perhaps twenty-two.

Rosalind stood beneath it and looked up.

She did not hear the Duke come in. She felt him instead — the temperature of the room changing, the way air changes before a storm.

“Lady Rosalind.”

She turned. He was standing just inside the door in a plain dark coat, sleeves rolled to the wrist, his collar open. Without his evening dress he looked less like a monument and more like a man. There was ink on his fingers.

“I came,” she said, “because of these.”

She laid both letters on the library table.

He crossed the room and looked at them, and did not touch them. His hands went very still at his sides. One hand — the one with the scar — closed slowly into a fist and then opened again.

“When did these arrive?”

“The first, the night we walked by the Serpentine. The second, yesterday afternoon.” She watched him. “Somebody does not want this marriage.”

“Somebody does not want something uncovered,” he said quietly.

“You know who it is.”

His gray eyes came up to hers. For a long moment he did not answer.

“There is a matter,” he said at last, “that I have not spoken of to anyone. Not to my solicitor, not to my aunt, not to my colonel. I will tell you now because you have arrived holding evidence that it is no longer mine alone to keep.”

He gestured at the chair. Rosalind did not sit. He did not insist.

“My wife died two years ago,” he said. “In this house. The physician certified it as fever following childbirth. There was no child. There was never a child.” His jaw tightened. “I was in the north, at the estate in Cumberland, for six weeks that autumn. I came home to a funeral.”

The fire cracked softly.

“I have never believed it,” he said. “Not for a single day. There was a locked door. A maid sent away that same night and paid off. A physician who could not look at me. And a letter — my wife left a letter, the physician told me. He told me it was a farewell note, full of illness and confusion, not fit for a husband to read. And he burned it.”

“Or said he did,” Rosalind said.

“Or said he did.”

He turned his head slightly, listening.

A moment later she heard it too — footsteps in the hall, quick and uneven. The library door opened without a knock.

The man who came in was younger than the Duke by several years, fair where his brother was dark, dressed with great care and great expense, with a face built for smiling and eyes that moved constantly around the room, checking and rechecking, like a man at cards who wants to know what everyone else is holding.

He stopped when he saw Rosalind.

“Brother,” he said. “You have company.”

“Edgar.” The Duke’s voice was very flat. “Lady Rosalind Vane.”

“Lady Rosalind.” Edgar bowed, and his smile was impeccable, and Rosalind felt her skin crawl. “I had heard you were to be congratulated. I came down from town as soon as the news reached me. One likes to be present for a family occasion.”

“News reached you quickly,” Rosalind said.

“It travels fast when it concerns my brother. Everyone is watching him, you know.” Edgar poured himself a drink from the decanter without being invited, which told her a great deal about the household. “Two years of black silence, and then suddenly a ballroom, a waltz, and a scandalous bride. London is delighted.”

“Edgar,” the Duke said.

“Some of us wondered if he would ever come out of it. I said as much to our aunt only last month — that he would never marry again, that the loss of Celia had—”

The name did something to the room.

It was as if the air itself flinched. The Duke became absolutely motionless. And Edgar — Edgar’s face changed color, going from that easy pink of a man who has just come in from the cold to something gray and wrong, and for a half-second his hand tightened on the glass with enough force that Rosalind thought it might break.

Then the smile was back.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I did not mean to be indelicate.”

Edgar set his glass down and turned toward the door. And as he turned, the lamplight caught what he had been holding in his other hand, dangling from two fingers by a chain he had not thought to hide.

A small bright thing. Gold, with a dark stone in it.

Rosalind had seen it before. She had seen it in a portrait, painted two years ago, and tonight, for the second time in one hour, she was looking at it — hanging from the hand of the wrong man.

The Duke’s voice, when he spoke, was quiet enough to freeze the blood.

“Where did you get that?”