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

Chapter 9

The engagement was announced on a Thursday.

By Friday it was the only subject in London.

Some said the Duke of Ravenmoor had gone mad. Some said Lady Rosalind Vane had bewitched him — there was talk of a voodoo charm brought back from the East Indies, of a love letter written in blood, of a woman who had learned the secrets of the older sort of women and was using them on a grieving man. Others, with more cruelty and less imagination, simply said it made sense: a man who had been ruined by grief and a woman who had been ruined by scandal belonged together, like two broken chairs in an attic.

The old story was dragged out of its grave and dressed in new clothes.

Rosalind was twenty-eight again in every rumor. She was a seductress, a liar, a woman who had been caught and had learned to lie better. Her father’s debts were told as though they were hers. Her mother’s cold face at the opera was described as a mother’s shame.

Invitations arrived, and were withdrawn.

Cards came back with the corners folded down, which every house knew meant we are sorry, a mistake in the book, we shall not be able to receive you after all.

Two days before the first banns were to be read, Rosalind went to a milliner’s on Bond Street to order a gown for the wedding — not black, not white either, something in between, a deep wine-colored silk that she had chosen herself.

She stood in the shop with the bolt of cloth over the counter, and the milliner looked at her, and looked at the cloth, and looked at her again.

“I am very sorry, my lady,” the woman said. “We are — we are rather behind. We could not possibly have it ready.”

“Then I will take the cloth.”

“We cannot sell the cloth either, my lady. It is spoken for.”

“It is on the counter.”

“It was spoken for before you came in.” The milliner’s face was red and her eyes were wet, and Rosalind understood, with a dull ache, that this woman was not cruel. She was frightened. Somebody had been in this shop before her, or word had run down Bond Street the way it runs through a house, and this woman had a family to feed.

Rosalind said, “I understand.”

She walked out into the gray afternoon, and Nell, who had waited outside with the umbrella, saw her face and said nothing at all, which was the kindest thing anyone did for her that week.

They walked for a while without speaking. The rain was fine and cold and got into everything.

“My lady,” Nell said at last, “there is another shop. Off the Strand. They don’t know you there.”

“That is not how this works, Nell.”

“Then how does it work?”

Rosalind stopped walking.

She thought of the corner. She thought of her father’s hands on the desk. She thought of tolerated — the word she had lived inside for three years, like a coat that is too small.

She thought of the Duke’s voice: I want someone who has already been tested.

“I do not know yet,” she said. “But it will not work by my hiding.”

So she did not hide. She wore her black silk to every event that would still admit her, and she walked past the folded cards and the lowered eyes and the whispers that no longer bothered to wait for the second glass of champagne. She was not invited to sit at the good tables. She was not invited to the good tables at all. But she came, and she stood where she was told to stand, and when the Duke of Ravenmoor was announced in a room, he crossed it to her, every time, in front of everyone, and did not care.

That, more than anything, was what broke their composure.

Because in less than a week, London had learned something about the Duke of Ravenmoor that it had not known before.

He did not care what they thought.

Six days after the engagement, a note came from Ravenmoor House in the Duke’s own hand. Short, formal, and — to anyone who knew him — frantic.

Come at once. Bring the letters. Something has happened.

She went.

The light was going down gray through the high windows when she came into the library. He was standing at the table, and he did not greet her. He simply held up a folded square of paper and turned it over.

Rosalind saw the wax.

Crimson. The bird stamped slightly off-center.

“What does it say?” she asked.

He read it aloud, flatly, as though it were a report from a battlefield.

“Call off the wedding, or the world will learn that the Duchess of Ravenmoor took her own life. The certificate can be produced. The physician will speak. Let them all know what kind of woman you buried.”

Rosalind took the letter from him and read it herself, standing in the circle of lamplight.

“Do they have the certificate?” she asked.

“They have a physician,” he said. “And a physician can produce many things.”

She looked up at him. His face was gray. This was the thing — she saw it clearly now — that had been hanging over him for two years. Not the death. The question underneath the death.

If she took her own life, then at the end of it, his wife had decided she did not want him. And that was a door a man could stand outside of forever, without ever being let in.

“They want us to fear this,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Then we take the weapon out of their hands.”

He looked at her.

“Alistair.” She had never used his name before. It came out quietly and it did not sound wrong. “Your wife died. We will find out how she died, and we will say it aloud, whatever it is. They are holding a secret like a knife. We will put the knife on the table and describe it, and it will be an ordinary object, and then they will have nothing.”

The Duke of Ravenmoor was silent for a long time.

Then he said, “I will send for Blackwood.”