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

Chapter 9

Halstead Park was one thousand acres of Devonshire hills falling away toward a river, and the house sat at the top of them like a fact.

Evelyn had been mistress of it for four days.

She had learned the kitchens and the stillroom and the linen cupboards. She had learned which of the thirty-eight servants bowed to her because they must and which bowed because they meant it, and she had learned that Mrs. Craddock, the housekeeper, kept a list of every tenant family and how many children had lived through the winter, and that she had kept that list for nineteen years without anyone asking her to.

On the fourth evening, at dusk, Evelyn stood in the doorway of the library and could not make herself go in.

It was three rooms long. It had a gallery. The spines ran in ranks of leather and gilt from the floor to twice her height, older than the Ashby name, older than the house, older perhaps than the family that had built the house. Somewhere in the middle of it, in the dark, a fire had been lit for her.

“They are yours,” said Sebastian behind her.

She turned. He was standing in the corridor in his shirtsleeves, having come from the stables, and he said it without teasing and without indulgence, the way another man might report a fact about the weather.

“Yours,” he said again. “Not the house’s. Not mine. Yours.”

Evelyn closed her eyes briefly.

No one had ever given her anything without a condition attached. The library had a condition too, she knew; everything did. But he had not said it aloud, and she understood that this was deliberate, and that he was waiting to see whether she would invent one for herself.

“Do you know,” she said, opening her eyes, “that in the six years since my father began to sell things, he sold the books first?”

“I know. There is a bookseller in Exeter who has them.”

“You have counted them.”

“I have a list.” He came and stood beside her, not touching. “Three hundred and eleven volumes, and the man will not part with them for less than nine hundred pounds. I thought you might like them back.”

She looked at him.

“Do not,” she said, very quietly, “be kind to me because you are sorry for me.”

“I am not sorry for you.” His voice was flat. “I am furious on your behalf, which is an entirely different thing, and I would like you to be able to tell the difference, because there will be occasions when it matters.”

Dinner that evening was quiet. He watched her the way he had watched her in London — attentively, analytically — but now there was something else under it, something warmer and more careful.

He asked about her reading. About Dante, and why she preferred the Inferno to the Paradiso. About why she sketched birds, and whether it was the drawing or the watching she liked.

“The watching,” she said.

“Then we are the same,” he said, and she did not know what to do with that, so she asked him a question instead.

“You prefer control.”

He did not deny it. “Control prevents chaos.”

“And what prevents loneliness?”

The question came out before she could stop it, and once it was in the air it stayed there.

He rose from his seat and crossed to her chair, and stopped beside it. Close, but not touching.

“You mistake me,” he said quietly. “I am not lonely. I simply do not permit anyone close enough to leave.”

Her breath softened. “Then why permit me?”

His hand hovered at the back of her chair, and she saw, with a small shock, that he was restraining himself — that the entire architecture of this man was at that moment being held in place by will.

“I did not permit you,” he said at last. “You entered regardless.”

Neither of them moved.

Then he said: “There is a page from a programme, in the drawer of that desk. Three years old. The Wrenford ball.”

Her heart struck once, hard.

“You kept it.”

“You drew a wagtail in the margin and gave the programme to a footman to throw away.” He was still standing behind her chair. “I took it out of his hand.”

“Why?”

“Because I had spent three years watching a woman be invisible,” said Sebastian Vane, “and I wanted one thing in this house that had not lied to me about it.”

The clock on the mantel — the newer one, which ran true — struck ten.

He straightened. “There is a room at the end of the west corridor,” he said. “The door is painted the same colour as the wall. I have not opened it since I was twelve years old.”

He walked to the door of the library and stopped with his hand on the frame, and did not look back.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “I will show it to you. And then you will tell me what you wrote in that letter you have been carrying since Wednesday.”