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

Chapter 8

Edgar looked down at his own hand as though he had never seen it before.

“This?” His smile did not quite reach his eyes now. “A trinket. I found it in the… in a box of odds and ends from the London house. I was going to give it to Aunt Louisa, she collects such—”

“That is Celia’s brooch,” the Duke said. “It was in the locked room. It was on the inventory. It has been missing for two years.”

Something fluttered behind Edgar’s ribs; Rosalind saw it in the way his breath caught. “Then it was mislaid, brother. Things are mislaid. You have been unwell and grief-stricken and the household has been run by ghosts. If I had known—”

“You kept it.”

“I forgot it.” Edgar’s voice rose a notch, and then he caught himself and smoothed it back down. “I am sorry. I am truly sorry. I will return it at once. Lady Rosalind, forgive me, I have clearly interrupted something.”

He put the brooch down on the library table, beside the two crimson-sealed letters, and he walked out of the room with all the dignity he could assemble.

The door clicked shut.

The Duke did not move for a long moment. Rosalind watched his hands, which were her hands now, in a way — she was standing in this, whether she wished it or not. She had brought the letters here. She had put herself inside this room.

“He took it from her room,” the Duke said at last.

“Yes.”

“He has had it for two years, and he called it a trinket, and he smiled.”

“Yes.”

He turned and looked at her — really looked, the way he had by the Serpentine, reading the page in poor light.

“You walked into this house with two letters from someone who wants you destroyed,” he said, “and you laid them on my table in front of me. Why?”

Rosalind considered the question honestly, because he had earned that much by asking her an honest one at the water’s edge.

“Because there is no version of this marriage in which I am safe,” she said. “If I marry you, the person who ruined me three years ago will try again. If I refuse you, I go back to a corner and spend forty years being tolerated.” She looked at him steadily. “I decided I would rather know what I am standing next to.”

“And what are you standing next to?”

“An enemy who writes in crimson wax,” she said, “and a man who has been lied to for two years by his own household, and a brother who cannot keep his hands out of a dead woman’s jewel box.”

The Duke exhaled — almost a laugh, though there was no humor in it. He walked to the window and stood looking out at the black lime trees.

“I am revising my proposal,” he said.

Rosalind waited.

“Forget my terms. I no longer want a wife who will ask nothing of me.” He turned. “We are being threatened by the same hand. Whoever paid my physician and whatever happened in that locked room, it draws the two of us the way a wound draws infection. I will not marry a stranger and spend my life guarding my back.”

“Then what do you propose?”

“An alliance.” The word came out plainly, without ornament. “We marry. We marry quickly, before the crimson letters have time to work. And we uncover the truth together — the truth about you, and the truth about her.”

Rosalind looked at him.

Not a rescuer. Not a tyrant. A man tired of ghosts, standing in a room that smelled of his own grief, offering her the only thing he had left to give that was worth anything: a place at his side while they both fought.

“I have conditions,” she said.

“Name them.”

“I will not be hidden in this house like a piece of furniture. I will not be paraded either. I will not be told what I may know and what I may not. And when we find who did this to me — to us — I will be in the room when it is said aloud.”

The Duke studied her for a long moment.

“Agreed,” he said, and held out his hand, and this time it was not a command.

Rosalind took it. His fingers were cold and dry, and beneath them she could feel the tremor of a man holding himself together by discipline alone.

“When?”

“I will call on your father tomorrow morning,” he said. “The banns can be read from Sunday. Two weeks, at the outside. Perhaps less.”

“Less.”

“Less,” he agreed. “Whoever wrote to you believes they still have time. They must not.”

The library door opened again.

They both turned.

Lord Ambrose Vane was standing in the doorway in his hat and gloves, his coat still wet across the shoulders from the rain, looking at Rosalind’s hand in the Duke of Ravenmoor’s hand — and on his face there was not anger, not surprise.

There was recognition.

Something that looked, for one awful instant, like a man who has just heard a clock strike an hour he had been dreading for years.

“A word, Your Grace,” he said. “Alone.”

Rosalind did not move her hand.