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

Chapter 6

Three days later the principal tenants came to luncheon on the south lawn, and Maren understood, watching Adrian move among them, why five years of absence had cost him more than he had admitted.

He was good at this. Unbearably good. He remembered a child’s name after hearing it once, asked after sick mothers, and admitted without excuse that he had been away too long, which is a rarer skill in a great man than any amount of charm. He carried his title the way some men carried a coat — easily, and with an air of having worn better ones.

But it was the toast that ruined him.

An elderly farmer rose, glass in hand, and made the sort of speech that tenants make when they mean it: gratitude for the Duke’s return, hope for the future, a plain wish that Elmswood would not again be left to distant decisions.

Maren saw the guilt cross Adrian’s face like a shadow moving over a field.

“You have my word,” he said, and his voice carried across the lawn without effort. “Elmswood will not abandon its own again. No child, tenant, servant, or ward shall be removed or cast aside without being heard. We shall protect those who depend upon this house.”

Applause broke out at once, honest and warm.

Maren looked down the table at Ottilie Vane.

The older woman was no longer smiling. She was looking at Adrian with an expression Maren had seen once before, on the face of a chess player who realises the board has been rearranged.

The promise was generous.

It was also, as promises went, about as load-bearing as a curtain.

Maren said nothing at the time. She said nothing through the toasts that followed, or the afternoon, or the walk back to the house. But she turned it over all evening, and by the next morning she had heard the first sentence of Ottilie’s answer, and it was exactly the sentence she had expected.

Two ladies crossed the gallery ahead of her, close enough to be heard and far enough to pretend they had not been.

“Mrs. Vane says the Duke has become quite ungovernable — no, quite governed — by Miss Thurlow.”

“Governed?”

“She said it with such sorrow. She said the woman has used the child’s tears to command him.”

Maren walked on. She did not quicken her pace; two years had taught her that much.

By dinner it had grown a body. In the drawing room, Ottilie repeated it with sorrowful precision — not as gossip, but as regret, which is gossip with better manners. Maren had coached her sister to the proposal. She had manufactured a betrothal out of a child’s innocence. The new school, the boots, the cottage, the speech to the tenants — every one of them was a demand extracted from an infatuated man by an ambitious woman who intended to spend Elmswood into ruin.

The story was not even badly constructed. That was what galled. If Maren had been the woman in it, she would have been formidable.

Adrian found her in the library after dinner, and he was angry, which was unlike him.

“They are saying you govern me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow I shall go into the village and tell them all plainly that it is not so.”

“No.”

He stopped.

Maren closed the book she had not been reading.

“Every fresh declaration you make,” she said, “makes their story larger. Today you stood on a lawn and told forty people that I am worth protecting. That was generous. It was also a brighter mark than either of us can afford. A proud man defends his intention. A wise one asks whether defending it helps.”

Adrian’s colour rose — she saw the flash of temper, the instinct to answer — and then, with an effort she felt from six feet away, he did not.

“I promised safety before I had secured it,” he said. “That is the truth of it. I wished them to feel that I had come home to them.” He looked at his hands. “And I handed Mrs. Vane another weapon against you. I am sorry, Maren.”

He did not ask whether she forgave him.

He waited.

“Withdraw the promise,” Maren said. “Not the duty. Only the part you cannot yet perform. Say what you can do now, and nothing else.”

He nodded once.

“Every decision concerning a ward comes before me and the solicitor until the trust is settled,” he said slowly, working it out. “Nothing more until I can honestly offer more. And to the tenants, I shall say that I spoke beyond what I had put in order.”

The correction would cost him their admiration. He would stand in front of the people who had applauded him and admit he had overpromised, and Ottilie would hear of it within the hour, and half the county would conclude that Miss Thurlow had made him do it.

That was exactly why Maren believed he would.