THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 12

The messenger was a boy of fourteen from the Ashby Grange stables, soaked to the skin, half-frozen, and carrying a letter with a broken seal.

Sir Percival’s hand was unmistakable. Sharp, impatient, the letters leaning forward as though running downhill.

My dear daughter,

I am informed that you have been asking questions of the sexton at Ashby St. Mary’s, and that you were seen in the churchyard before your wedding.

I am sure this is nothing — a young woman’s nerves, the sentimentality of brides. But I would remind you that a married woman’s business is her husband’s house, and that the affairs of Ashby Grange are mine.

Your mother, I need hardly say, is in peace. Let us permit her to remain there.

I shall call upon you next week. I am sure you will receive me with the affection a father has earned.

Your Papa

Evelyn read it twice at the hall table with the lamp held high, and then she handed it, without a word, to her husband.

Sebastian read it once. Then he held the corner of it into the candle flame and let it burn down to his fingertips before he dropped the last black curl of it into the grate.

“He knows,” said Evelyn.

“Yes.”

“He knows that I know.” She was very calm. It was the calm that came over her before difficult things, and it had never once failed her. “And he is frightened, so he is coming to look at us. To see whether we flinch.”

“Let him come.”

“No.” She turned to him. “Listen to me. I have lived with that man for three-and-twenty years and you have known him for six days. When he calls next week, he will come into this house as my father, and he will sit by the fire, and he will be charming, and he will lie to your face in the most agreeable manner you have ever heard, and if he thinks for one moment that we intend to move against him, he will write letters. To the creditors. To the county. To Lady Selby. I know exactly what he will write because I have watched him do it to other men.”

“And what would he write?”

“That his daughter is deranged with grief and has formed a false belief about her mother’s death. That the Duke of Halstead has been deceived.” She paused. “It would not matter. But it would cost us the summer, and it would cost us surprise, and it might cost us my mother.”

Sebastian stood very still.

“You would have me do nothing,” he said.

“I would have you do everything.” She stepped closer. “In the correct order.”

And then — because it was three o’clock in the morning, and she was exhausted, and because she had been holding the whole of it up with her two hands since the attic, and because she could see perfectly well that this man had spent his life solving every problem the way a hammer solves a nail — she said the thing that started the first real quarrel of their marriage.

“You cannot dismantle twenty years in a single night.”

He turned on her.

“Your mother has been confined for fifteen years,” he said, and his voice was not loud, which was worse. “There are women in it now, this hour, tonight, lying awake in unreasonable rooms because their husbands found them inconvenient. Every day we delay is a day my mother had, and lost.” His jaw worked. “You endured your twenty-three years. Do not instruct me in patience.”

The words struck her, and she let them.

“I did not say you were wrong,” she said. “I said you were in a hurry.”

“I am in a hurry because I have lost twenty-two years and I will not lose one more.” He took a breath and forced the control back into place, visibly, like a man buttoning a coat. “You are accustomed to carrying burdens alone. I am not accustomed to carrying one at all. Do not mistake my pace for recklessness.”

“And do not mistake my caution for cowardice.”

Their eyes held across the hearth.

“Force,” she said quietly. “That is your answer to everything.”

“You speak as though I were some brute.”

“No. I speak as a man who has never once in his life been denied anything.”

His jaw tightened. “You think I would mishandle this.”

“I think,” she said softly, “that you would burn the entire county to the ground if it meant easing my pain. And you would call it love. And you would be right, and you would still be ruined, and then there would be two of us in a locked house in Norfolk with nobody left to ride for us.”

He stared at her.

“You believe I am dangerous,” he said at last.

“No,” said Evelyn. “I believe you are capable of devastation.”

Something raw flickered beneath his composure.

“I was already capable of devastation,” he said. “You did not create it.”

“I know.”

“You are the only thing that restrains it.”

Her breath caught.

“I do not want you restrained,” she said. “I want you to be — just. Those are different things, and the difference is everything.”

“You ask me for mercy for him.”

“I do not.” She said it hard. “I am not asking mercy for my father. I am asking mercy for you, because I have watched what it does to a man to take a thing out of the world that he has hated for twenty years. He does not get the space back. And you are going to need that space, Sebastian. You are going to need it to live in. With me.”

He did not move for a long time.

Then he crossed the room in two strides and stopped a hand’s breadth from her, and said, very low, “You are the first person who has ever been afraid for me rather than of me.”

“Then you have been badly served by everyone who ever loved you.”

He lifted his hand and cupped her cheek.

“I will do it your way,” he said. “Orderly. Recorded. Lawful.” His thumb moved once across the edge of her jaw. “But if the law fails, I will do it my way. And you will not stop me. You will simply stand beside me, and we will both be damned together, and I find I do not object to that as I should.”

Evelyn closed her eyes.

“That,” she said, “is acceptable.”