“You Should Marry My Sister,” the Girl Told the Duke — The Duke Smiled at the Child’s Bold Proposal

Chapter 10

Adrian came into the library shortly before noon with the door swinging back hard enough to strike the wall.

“I shall announce tonight that we are truly to marry,” he said. His usual warmth had gone somewhere; what was in its place was almost fierce. “Once it is settled before them all, she can order no carriage and spread no doubt. It ends tonight.”

Maren rose from the table.

He began to pace the length of the rug, rehearsing the first line under his breath — my friends, neighbours, it is my honour — and she watched a man assembling a declaration the way other men assembled a battery of guns.

She crossed the rug and put one hand flat against his sleeve.

Adrian stopped instantly. He always stopped when she touched him. She had noticed this early and had never once remarked on it, even to herself, because there was no use in it.

“If you announce a marriage tonight,” Maren said, “you will make her accusation appear true. She will stand up and say, You see, they are marrying to hide it, and half the room will believe her, because half the room believed her before you opened your mouth. A marriage announced under threat looks like a surrender. The real proposal cannot be used as a weapon. It must be a choice.”

His gaze dropped to her hand.

For one breath he covered it with his own — warm, dry, entirely still — and she let it stay there, and neither of them said anything at all.

Then he stepped back, restoring the space between them, because he had promised not to presume, and he had not once broken a promise to her since the day on the lawn.

“You are right,” he said. “I was about to offer you another promise before asking what it would cost you.”

“You asked this time.”

“Only after I had nearly begun the speech.”

A flicker of something crossed his face — rueful, and not quite a smile. “Improvement, though not triumph.”

He spent the afternoon away from the house.

Maren did not ask where he went. She learned afterwards — from the steward, from the cobbler, from a tenant’s wife who stopped her at the gate and took her hand — that he had gone to the tenant farms, the kitchen offices, the school families, and the cottage doors of the women who had once employed her as a drawing tutor and then quietly stopped.

He was not collecting secrets. He was asking people whether they would be willing to say aloud what they had already seen.

That evening he came back at dusk with mud to the knee and no report for her, and said only, “It is arranged as far as it can be arranged,” and went to change.

Maren spent the hours until the assembly in the schoolroom with Nell.

For the first hour, every instinct in her urged her to write letters, to search Ottilie’s desk, to find the maid who had been told the phrase and make her say it in front of witnesses, to prepare a speech she had solemnly sworn not to make.

She sharpened pencils instead. She corrected a child’s drawing of an oak leaf, which had been drawn upside down. She answered Nell’s questions about the evening gown laid across the bed upstairs — was it green, was it silk, could she wear the ribbon, would there be music — and she kept her hands steady, which was the only victory available to her.

At last, small in the window seat, Nell whispered, “Will he come back?”

Maren looked at the empty place in her drawing book where the heather had rested.

“He said he would,” she answered.

It was the first time in her life she had allowed another person’s promise to quiet her own fear.