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

Chapter 26

Juliana’s daughter was born in July, after nine hours, in the blue room at the end of the east corridor, and they called her Emmeline, which nobody had expected, least of all Juliana.

Owen Ferris was there for it. He had arrived in June on leave, thin and shamefaced and with a lieutenant’s pay and a lieutenant’s debts, and Sebastian — who had every reason in the world to despise him — had taken him out to the stables on the second afternoon and spoken to him for two hours, and what was said was never recorded, but Lieutenant Ferris came back from it white and did not touch a glass of wine for the whole of the following year.

“She wanted to call her after Mama,” Juliana said, two days later, holding the baby with the awkward, astonished competence of a woman who has just discovered a talent she did not know she had. “I said it was a terrible name — people will think she is fifty — and she said that was the point.”

Evelyn, sitting on the edge of the bed, laughed for the first time in a fortnight.

“You have grown up,” she said.

“I have had a baby, which is a different thing.” Juliana looked down at the child. “Evelyn. I am sorry about October. Not for going — I am not sorry for going, he is my husband and I would go again — but for the note being three lines long. I could not think what to say that Papa would not read.”

“It was three lines more than he deserved.” Evelyn took her sister’s hand. “You wrote to me in September. From Plymouth. That was the important one.”

“I wrote to you eleven times.”

“You wrote once that reached me. It was enough.” Evelyn stood up. “That is a lesson I have learned this year, Juliana, and I want you to have it now, while you are young enough to use it. One letter that arrives is worth forty that do not. Keep writing. Send it twice. Walk fifteen miles if you have to.”

Juliana frowned. “Who on earth walked fifteen miles?”

“Someone I am going to tell you about over dinner,” said Evelyn, “and you will not believe a word of it, and it is all true.”

The Michaelmas auction at Selby House fell that year on the eleventh of October, and the Dowager Countess of Selby, aged seventy-five, declined absolutely to postpone it again, and wrote to the Duchess of Halstead to say that if she were not there she would never speak to her again.

They went.

Evelyn wore plain grey, which caused three separate sensations, and stood in the middle of the floor with her husband and her mother and her sister, and drank one glass of champagne, and was happy.

There were six ladies on the platform that evening, and they were all dauntless and all nervous, and the room was kind to five of them.

The sixth was a woman of about nine-and-twenty, small, brown-haired, with ink on her second finger and a dress that had been turned twice, and she stood under the chandeliers with her hands clasped in front of her while the auctioneer called for an opening bid, and the room answered with nothing.

Evelyn watched it happen from four feet away — the cough, the stifled laugh, the man by the terrace doors who said something to his neighbour and made him put his hand over his mouth.

Twenty-three years fell open in her chest like a book.

Miss Carruthers offers the pleasure of her company for one evening’s engagement.

Nothing.

“Ten pounds,” someone said, and laughed.

Evelyn set down her glass.

She crossed the floor of Lady Selby’s ballroom at Selby House in a grey gown worth four hundred pounds, and she climbed the steps of the velvet-draped platform, and she stopped one pace from a woman she had never met.

“My name is Evelyn Vane,” she said. “I bought nobody. I was bought.”

The room went silent.

“I stood here last October in a black veil, and this room laughed at me, and one man in it said three words, and I want you to know that I have spent every day since trying to deserve them.” She turned to the auctioneer. “One thousand pounds.”

The auctioneer’s mouth opened and closed.

“My lady — the bidding is not—”

“One thousand pounds,” said the Duchess of Halstead, “for Miss Carruthers’s evening. And the evening will be spent at Halstead Park, with me, in the library, talking about whatever she likes. And if any gentleman here would care to advance on that, I would be delighted to hear him.”

No one advanced.

“Sold,” said Lady Selby, from the side of the room, with enormous satisfaction, banging her stick on the floor.

Afterwards, in the carriage, Evelyn took out the folded length of heavy black Brussels lace that she had kept since the night of her own auction, and gave it to Miss Carruthers, who was sitting opposite her with her hands in her lap and her eyes still very wide.

“You will not need this,” said Evelyn. “It is yours to keep. And one day you may meet a woman who does.”

Miss Carruthers looked at her.

“Everyone says your husband bought you,” she said.

“He did.” Evelyn glanced at Sebastian, sitting beside her in the dark of the carriage with his hand resting on his knee, watching her the way he had watched her for three years before he ever spoke to her. “He bought me, and then he saw me, and those are two entirely different transactions, and I have never once stopped being grateful that he knew the difference.”

Sebastian Vane said nothing. He simply took her hand and held it, all the way home.

At the end of the west corridor at Halstead Park there is a door that was once painted the same colour as the wall.

It is not painted that colour any longer. The shutters are open, and the fire is lit, and there is a chair by the window with a writing desk beneath it, and on the sill there is a tin jug with three sprigs of lavender in it, and on the desk there are four hundred and sixty pages in a hand that has never once been careful.

Sometimes Lady Emmeline Ashby sits there in the morning and writes, because the record must be kept, and because she has discovered in her early fifties that she likes writing and is rather good at it.

Sometimes the Duchess of Halstead comes and sits on the floor beside her mother’s chair with her back against the wall, the way she did when she was small, and sketches wagtails in the margins of whatever paper is nearest, badly.

And sometimes the Duke of Halstead stands in the doorway for a moment before either of them notices him, in his coat, with the mud of the fields on his boots, and looks at the two of them in the room that was locked for twenty-two years and is now full of the smell of ink and lavender and a fire that is too high.

He does not say anything on those occasions.

There is nothing that needs saying.

Because one year earlier, in a ballroom full of people who had spent an entire evening teaching a woman that she was worth nothing, a man who had never once in his life bid for anything had looked at her — the plain one, the elder one, the one they had all agreed to overlook — and he had understood something that nobody else in England bothered to notice.

She had not bent.

And so he had stood up, and the whole of Mayfair had gone quiet, and he had said the three words that rearranged two lives: I will take her.

Not bought.

Taken.

Held. Kept. Chosen, and then seen — which is a thing no fortune can purchase and no cruelty can prevent, and which had been waiting, all along, in the last place anyone thought to look.

In a plain woman in a black veil, who had already counted every crack in the ceiling.

The end