Chapter One

 

 

“You are small, round, and very certain of your own importance,” Theodora Davies murmured to the robin perched upon her windowsill, her quill scratching across the page in her lap. “In that respect, you rather resemble most of the gentlemen I met last Season.”

The robin regarded her with one bright, beady eye, then hopped twice to the left, as if offended by the comparison.

“Oh, do not look at me so. You are far better groomed than Lord Petersham, and I strongly suspect you bathe more regularly than Sir Reginald Moss.” She tilted her head, considering the creature’s puffed breast and imperious stance. “Though I must grant you share their conviction that the world exists chiefly for your benefit.”

The robin chirped once, sharp and declarative, and flew away.

Thea watched it go, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth. She glanced down at her journal, where she had captured the bird in precise, flowing script beside her observations. Four Seasons had taught her many things: how to enter a ballroom without treading on her hem, how to hold a glass of lemonade for three hours without complaint, and how to render the absurdities of the ton in ink and wit when she could not render them in conversation.

The journal was her refuge. Her weapon. The one place where shyness held no dominion and invisibility was a choice rather than a curse.

She added a final line beneath the robin’s entry: He departed with more dignity than I have ever managed at a ball. I aspire to its confidence, if not its diet.

Morning light slanted through the windows of her small bedroom at Briarfield, catching the dust motes in a golden suspension. It was early spring, that tentative, hopeful season when the world pretended warmth was on its way and everyone would soon be happy. Thea was not deceived. She knew what spring meant.

Spring meant London.

Spring meant her fifth Season.

Fifth.

The word sat in her chest like a stone.

“Miss Theodora?”

The knock at her door was followed immediately by its opening, a sequence that rather defeated the purpose of knocking, in Thea’s opinion, but one which had characterised her mother’s approach to privacy for as long as Thea could remember.

Sarah, the upstairs maid, bobbed a curtsy in the doorway. “Your mother requests your presence in the drawing room, miss. Immediately, she said.”

Sarah’s eyes held that particular mixture of sympathy and relief servants often wore when delivering an unpleasant summons: sympathy for the recipient, and relief at not being the recipient themselves.

“Did she say why?”

“No, miss. Only that it was urgent. And that you were to come immediately.” Sarah gave the word an emphasis which suggested Lady Davies had given it several of her own.

Thea closed her journal with a soft sigh. “Thank you, Sarah. Tell her I shall be down directly.”

Immediately, apparently, permitted no delay. No steadying breath. No moment in which to prepare whatever armour one might require against maternal urgency.

She tucked the journal beneath her arm before she could think better of it. Then she straightened her shoulders, smoothed her morning dress—a sensible blue muslin that did little to flatter her complexion and everything to avoid notice—and went to meet her fate.

The drawing room at Briarfield was a comfortable space, neither grand nor shabby, decorated in the soft greens and creams that had been fashionable when Thea’s parents married and had not been altered since. Lady Davies sat in her usual chair by the fire, her posture suggesting a woman braced for battle. Cecily occupied the settee, her embroidery forgotten in her lap and her expression troubled. Louisa perched on the window seat, ostensibly engaged upon her own needlework, but in truth staring at Thea with the barely contained excitement of one anticipating drama.

Thea’s stomach tightened.

She knew this arrangement. She knew what it meant when her mother placed the family like chess pieces before a conversation.

“Theodora. Sit down.”

Not ‘darling.’ Not even ‘Thea.’ ‘Theodora,’ in that particular tone, meant serious business.

Thea sat in the remaining chair and folded her hands in her lap with the composure she had spent four-and-twenty years perfecting. “You wished to see me, Mama?”

Lady Davies was still beautiful; that was perhaps the cruellest part of it. At six-and-forty, she retained the high cheekbones and delicate features that had made her the belle of her own Season: the incomparable Margaret Whitley, who had captured Sir Lionel Davies’s heart with a single smile across a crowded ballroom. She had expected to produce daughters equally dazzling.

She had got Thea.

“I have come to a decision,” Lady Davies announced. “About your Season.”

“My fifth Season,” Thea said quietly. Not a correction, merely an acknowledgement. A reminder to herself of precisely how far she had fallen short of expectation.

“Yes. Your fifth.” Lady Davies’s fingers tightened upon the arms of her chair. “And your last, Theodora.”

The word landed in the room like a physical thing. Thea heard Cecily’s sharp intake of breath. Saw Louisa lean forward, her embroidery wholly abandoned.

“My last,” Thea repeated, her voice remarkably steady for a woman whose heart had just stopped.

“If you do not secure at least one credible suitor this Season—not a proposal; I am not unreasonable, merely visible interest from an acceptable gentleman—you will not have a sixth.” Lady Davies lifted her chin. “You will go to live with Great-Aunt Hortensia in Northumberland. Permanently.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

Aunt Hortensia.

Thea’s mind supplied the particulars with horrible clarity: three-and-seventy years old. Deaf in one ear. A remote estate in Northumberland, miles from any town of consequence. Seventeen cats—Thea knew the number because Aunt Hortensia’s letters named them with greater regularity than they named any human acquaintance. Seventeen cats, and a house arranged almost entirely for their comfort.

“Mama—” Cecily began, her voice sharp with objection.

“This is not open for discussion, Cecily.” Lady Davies did not look at her middle daughter. Her eyes remained fixed upon Thea, searching for some reaction Thea was determined not to give her. “Your sister has had four opportunities. Four Seasons. Four years of introductions and balls and morning calls and promenades, and what has she to show for it?”

Nothing, Thea thought. Nothing visible, at least.

Four years of standing against walls. Four years of introductions that evaporated like morning mist. Four years of learning, in exquisite detail, precisely how invisible a person might become in a room full of people.

“She has—” Cecily tried again.

“She has nothing.” Lady Davies’s voice cracked slightly, and Thea realised, with a start, that her mother was not angry. She was desperate. “No suitors. No prospects. No indication that another Season would produce a different result. And meanwhile—” She gestured towards Louisa, who had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable. “Meanwhile, your younger sisters wait. Louisa should have been out last year, and Cecily ought by now to be receiving serious attention. I cannot bring them both forward while you remain exactly where you were four years ago. It would look ill. It would invite comment. And it would do none of you any good.”

The unspoken accusation hung in the air.

You are the dam blocking the river. You are the obstacle. You are the problem.

Thea knew she ought to feel something. Anger, perhaps. Hurt, certainly. The humiliation of having her failures so precisely catalogued before her sisters. But all she felt was a kind of distant resignation, as if she were watching the scene from a great way off and it were happening to someone else.

“I understand, Mama,” she said quietly.

Lady Davies blinked, as though she had expected argument. “You… understand?”

“Yes.” Thea folded her hands more tightly in her lap, pressing her fingernails into her palms where no one could see. “This is my final Season. I shall make every effort to attract appropriate attention. And if I fail, I shall go to Aunt Hortensia without complaint.”

For a moment—only a moment—something flickered in her mother’s eyes that might have been pain. Regret, perhaps, or the ghost of the affection that had existed between them before Thea’s first Season, before disappointments began to accumulate like fallen leaves.

Then it was gone, replaced by brisk practicality.

“Good. That is… good. We depart for London in three days. Your trunk is already being packed.” Lady Davies rose, signalling that the interview was at an end. “I trust you will use the time to prepare yourself. Mentally. For the effort required.”

Mentally, Thea translated, for the performance. For the smiling and the sparkling and the desperate attempt to be someone she had never been and could not become.

“Of course, Mama.”

Lady Davies swept from the room, Louisa trailing behind her with one last dramatic glance back at Thea. The door closed, and Thea was left alone with Cecily and the suffocating weight of all that had just occurred.

“It is barbaric.” Cecily was on her feet the moment their mother’s footsteps faded, her embroidery thrown aside and her cheeks flushed with anger. “You are not a horse at auction. You are not goods to be warehoused when they fail to sell.”

“Do not be dramatic, Ceci.” Thea was surprised to find that her voice still worked, that words still came out in their proper order. “I am clearly more of a quiet pony. The sort used for very small children and very low fences.”

Cecily did not laugh. Her brown eyes—so like Thea’s own, but brighter, more expressive, less guarded—were filling with tears Thea could not afford to mirror.

“This is not funny, Thea.”

“No,” Thea agreed softly. “It is not.”

“I will not let her send you away. I shall refuse to have a Season. I shall tell every suitor who approaches that I cannot marry before my elder sister—”

“You will do no such thing.” Thea stood, crossed to her sister, and took her hands. Cecily’s fingers were warm and trembling slightly. “You will have your Season. You will charm everyone you meet, because you are charming, genuinely and effortlessly, in a way I have never managed. And you will not sacrifice your future upon the altar of my inadequacy.”

“You are not inadequate!”

“By society’s measure, I am the very definition of it.” Thea squeezed her sister’s hands once, then released them, stepping back before the comfort of touch could undo her composure. “Four Seasons, Ceci. Four opportunities to demonstrate my worth upon the marriage mart, and I have managed to make myself so thoroughly forgettable that most gentlemen do not remember meeting me by the next morning. That is not a failure of circumstance. That is a failure of… of me.”

“That is a failure of them.” Cecily’s voice was fierce. “Of every blind, stupid man who could not see—”

“What should they see?” Thea asked quietly. “A woman who cannot make conversation with strangers? Who stands near walls and holds her glass too tightly and watches everyone else dance? I am not mysterious, Cecily. I am not intriguingly reserved. I am simply…” She searched for the word. “Overlooked. By nature rather than circumstance. Some people are born to command attention. I was born to fade into the wallpaper.”

Cecily opened her mouth to object, but Thea shook her head.

“I need to be alone for a while. Please.”

She left before her sister could argue further. Before the tears burning behind her eyes could fall. Before she could say something that revealed how deeply this had wounded her—not the ultimatum alone, but the horrible, creeping suspicion that her mother might be right.

The library at Briarfield was small, cramped with books accumulated over three generations of Davies residence, and entirely Thea’s domain. No one else in the family read for pleasure. No one else sought refuge among dusty shelves and leather-bound spines. It was, by default and by disposition, her sanctuary.

She sat in the worn armchair by the window, watching the last light fade from the sky, and tried not to think at all.

It did not work.

Northumberland. Seventeen cats. A parlour arranged with more regard for feline comfort than human society. Aunt Hortensia, who believed fresh air caused consumption and had not left her estate in fifteen years. Aunt Hortensia, who would not be unkind, precisely, but would be… nothing. Nothing at all. A slow, quiet burial in some remote corner of England, where no one would ever have to look at Thea and remember that she had failed.

Perhaps that would be easier, whispered a small, treacherous voice at the back of her mind.

Perhaps invisibility by geography would be simpler than invisibility by nature. At least in Northumberland, no one would expect her to sparkle. No one would look at her with hope and then look away in disappointment. She could simply… exist.

Quietly.

Alone.

Thea closed her eyes against the thought.

She did not want Aunt Hortensia’s exile. But neither did she want what her mother demanded: the performance of being someone she was not, the desperate grasping at attention she had never been able to hold. She did not want to be paraded through ballrooms like a horse that had failed to sell at four previous auctions.

Look, she still has all her teeth. Surely someone will take her this time.

What did she want?

The question was almost too dangerous to consider. Thea had spent so long cataloguing what she was not—not pretty enough, not lively enough, not charming enough—that she had nearly forgotten to ask what she might actually desire.

A home of her own, perhaps.

Not a husband for the sake of a husband, not a title or a fortune or an escape from her mother’s disappointed gaze, but a home. A place where she belonged. Someone who—

No.

That was too much to hope for. Too specific a dream for a woman who had already failed four times to attract even general interest.

She opened her eyes and reached for her journal, which she had carried downstairs without quite meaning to. The robin stared up at her from the page, round and certain and entirely itself.

She picked up her quill.

Four Seasons of invisibility, she wrote.

Perhaps the fifth will be no different. Perhaps that is all I am: a woman the world politely looks through, like clean glass.

Mama has given her verdict. One last chance. One final performance. And then, if I fail again, I am to be sent away to a place where my failure can no longer embarrass anyone.

I ought to feel something about this. Anger, or fear, or determination. Instead, I feel only tired. So very tired of trying to be someone I have never known how to be.

She paused, her quill hovering over the page. Then she added, with the dry honesty that only the journal ever received:

On the positive side, Aunt Hortensia’s cats are apparently quite well-behaved. And I understand Northumberland has excellent weather for reading.

Assuming, of course, that one keeps the windows firmly closed against the consumption-inducing air.

She closed the journal and thought of the gowns that would soon be brought out, inspected, altered, and declared suitable or hopeless according to her mother’s judgment. The Season had already been arranged. Only now it was not merely another attempt. It was a sentence with conditions attached.

One more Season, she thought. One more attempt to be seen.

How terribly original.

She pressed her hand flat against the journal’s cover and made herself breathe.

Three days. Three days until London. Three days until the machinery of the marriage mart began to turn again, grinding her through its gears as it had four times before.

She would try. Of course she would try. But she already knew, with the quiet certainty of a woman who had spent four years learning the precise dimensions of her own insignificance, how this story would end.

The wallflower would return to the wall.

And eventually, the wall would become Northumberland.

At least, she thought grimly, the cats would be pleased to have company.

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Excellent family. Thirty thousand. Tolerable face.

Edison Cavendish, sixth Duke of Westmere, stared at his grandmother’s precise handwriting and wondered whether it was too early in the day to drink.

The letter had arrived with his morning correspondence, nestled innocently between an invitation to Lord Warton’s musicale—no, absolutely not—and a bill from his tailor that suggested his valet had once again been ordering waistcoats without authorisation. Edison had opened it expecting the usual: reports from the dower house, commentary upon the weather, perhaps a thinly veiled complaint about his continued bachelorhood.

Instead, he had received a list.

Fourteen names. Fourteen young women his grandmother had deemed acceptable candidates for the position of Duchess of Westmere. Each entry was annotated in the Dowager’s elegant script with the clinical precision of a horse breeder evaluating stock.

Lady Honoria Cresswell. Excellent family. Thirty thousand. Tolerable face.

Miss Arabella Finch. Good connections. Twenty thousand. Musical.

Lady Catherine Vance. Impeccable lineage. Forty thousand. Somewhat tall.

Edison turned the page.

The list continued.

Miss Prudence Whitmore. Adequate family. Fifteen thousand. Biddable.

He picked up his quill and wrote in the margin: Biddable. As though I am acquiring a spaniel.

This, at least, provided some small satisfaction. He continued down the list, adding his own observations beneath his grandmother’s assessments.

Lady Helena Stanhope. Old family. Twenty-five thousand. Accomplished.

He had met Lady Helena at a dinner last Season. She had asked whether he enjoyed ‘sport’. He had said he enjoyed reading. She had looked at him as though he had confessed to an enthusiasm for plague.

He wrote: Asked about sport. Visibly alarmed by books. Ruled out on grounds of basic incompatibility.

Miss Diana Fellowes. Excellent breeding. Eighteen thousand. Pleasant disposition.

Miss Fellowes had cornered him at a garden party and spent three-quarters of an hour describing her watercolours. Edison had no objection to watercolours in principle. He objected strenuously to being trapped against a hedgerow while someone described them in exhaustive detail, particularly when the hedgerow contained bees.

He wrote: Watercolours. Bees. Never again.

The study door opened without ceremony.

“Edison! Are you brooding again?”

Lady Angelica Cavendish swept into the room like a small, determined hurricane. At twenty, she had inherited their mother’s warmth and their father’s stubborn jaw, combining them into a character that refused to accept closed doors, gloomy brothers, or any situation that could not be improved by direct intervention.

Edison loved her more than almost anyone alive.

He also found her exhausting.

“I am not brooding,” he said. “I am reviewing correspondence.”

“You are brooding over correspondence.” Angelica crossed to his desk and peered at the papers spread before him. Her eyes widened. “Oh. Is that Grandmother’s list?”

“She prefers to call it ‘guidance’.”

“Of course she does.” Angelica picked it up and read a few lines. “Fourteen names. She has been thorough.”

“She has been exacting.”

“Has she met them all?”

“Apparently. She approves of them all. I am expected to choose one before the Season is over.”

“And if you do not?”

“She was not specific. That was not reassuring.”

Angelica gave him a look of real sympathy. “Have you ruled any of them out?”

“All of them.”

“Edison.” Her sympathy gave way to exasperation. “On what grounds?”

Edison leaned back in his chair, adopting a casualness he did not feel. “On the grounds that I would rather not be cornered in a linen room again.”

Angelica’s expression shifted from sympathy to recognition, and then to amusement she did not quite manage to suppress. “That was one time.”

“Lady Fontaine had accomplices, Angelica. Her aunt occupied the corridor, her companion contrived to misdirect Marcus, and I found myself obliged to admire a shelf of folded damask while Lady Fontaine explained, at length, the advantages of marrying a woman of experience.”

“Lord Rowley is a good friend.”

“Lord Rowley laughed for ten minutes before attempting a rescue. He is a tolerable friend at best.” Edison paused. “He did eventually recover himself and draw her aunt away. I suppose that counts for something.”

Angelica bit her lip, her shoulders shaking with the effort of containing her amusement. “And you truly believe any of these women”—she gestured towards the list—“would corner you in a linen room?”

“Miss Fellowes has already cornered me beside a hedgerow full of bees. I see no reason to suppose she would object to indoor arrangements.” He tapped the list. “Lady Helena Stanhope strikes me as capable of it as well. She has a determined look about her. And Miss Prudence Whitmore—” He pointed at the relevant entry. “Grandmother describes her as biddable. Do you know what that means? It means she will do whatever she is told. It means she will smile and nod and agree with everything I say. It means I shall never have a single interesting conversation for the rest of my natural life.”

“Perhaps she is secretly fascinating.”

“Perhaps. I am not encouraged by the evidence.”

Angelica set down the list and perched on the edge of his desk, ignoring his pointed glance at the correspondence she was creasing. “You could simply refuse. Tell Grandmother you will marry when you are ready and not before.”

“I could. And then I should spend the next six months enduring her disappointment in all its forms. The sighs alone would be enough to unsettle a weaker man.”

“You are being dramatic.”

“I am being accurate. Last Christmas, she sighed so heavily over the soup that the candle flames trembled. Father would have admired the lung capacity.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Mentioning their father often was. Edison saw the shadow pass across his sister’s face before she smoothed it away.

Their father had been dead six years now. Long enough that grief had settled into something manageable, a dull ache rather than a sharp wound. But it was still there. It would always be there.

“Father would have told her to mind her own affairs,” Angelica said quietly.

“Father could say such things and somehow be forgiven for them.” Edison’s mouth twisted. “I am also a duke, technically. But Grandmother has a way of making one feel like a schoolboy caught with stolen biscuits, regardless of one’s title.”

“That is because you let her.”

“That is because she is terrifying, and I choose my battles.”

Angelica slipped down from the desk. “Well. The Season does not begin for another week. Perhaps you will meet someone tolerable at one of the early entertainments. Someone who is not on Grandmother’s list. Someone who likes books and does not consider watercolours a subject for extended conversation.”

“Your optimism is touching.”

“Someone has to be optimistic in this family. You have plainly abandoned the effort.”

She crossed to the window and twitched aside the curtain to peer down at the street below. Westmere House occupied a prime position in Mayfair, its façade elegant and imposing in a way Edison had always found vaguely oppressive. It was a house that demanded things of its occupants. Dignity. Reserve. The proper performance of ducal responsibility.

He had spent his entire adult life performing.

“Do you remember,” Angelica said suddenly, still looking out of the window, “when Mother used to hold her reading parties? She would invite her friends to the blue drawing room, and they would sit there with their books, and sometimes read a passage aloud if it particularly pleased them.”

Edison’s chest tightened. “I remember.”

“You used to creep in and hide behind the settee. You thought no one noticed, but Mother always knew. She read the funny passages a little louder for your benefit.”

“I was eight.”

“You were happy.” Angelica turned to look at him, her expression soft. “I should like to see you happy again.”

The words unsettled him more than a question would have done. Not because they were cruel—Angelica was never cruel—but because they asked nothing of him and accused him all the same.

He could not remember the last time he had been genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy. Content, perhaps. Satisfied with a duty well performed. But happy? The kind of happiness that did not require performance or pretence?

He could not recall.

“I am perfectly content,” he said, which was not an answer, and they both knew it.

“You are perfectly practised at appearing content. It is not the same thing.” Angelica crossed back to him and laid her hand briefly upon his shoulder. “I want you to find someone, Edison. Not because Grandmother demands it, and not because the title requires an heir, but because you deserve someone who makes you laugh. Truly laugh. Not that polite little sound you make at dinner when some dreadful man mistakes dullness for wit.”

“I do not have a polite little sound.”

“You absolutely do. It sounds like this—” She produced an imitation that was, Edison had to admit, alarmingly accurate. “You use it constantly. It is very convincing. I do not think anyone realises it is not real.”

“You realise.”

“I am your sister. I remember the real one.” She squeezed his shoulder and released him. “Promise me you will at least try. Not to find a wife—I know that is asking too much—but to enjoy yourself a little. The Season need not be a six-month siege. It might even contain one or two tolerable evenings.”

“You have a very hopeful view of London.”

“And you have a very gloomy view of everything.” She bent and dropped a kiss upon the top of his head, a gesture he permitted only from her. “I am going to unpack. Try not to brood with excessive dedication while I am gone.”

She swept out as she had swept in, leaving a faint trace of her perfume and a silence that felt larger than it had before.

Edison sat for a long moment, staring at nothing.

A tolerable evening. Yes. That was one possibility.

Another was a hunt. Another was a siege. Another was the orderly dismantling of his privacy and peace by every ambitious mother and marriageable daughter in London.

He picked up his grandmother’s list again. Fourteen names. Fourteen women who might, according to the Dowager Duchess of Westmere, be suitable candidates for his hand. Fourteen women who had looked at him across ballrooms and seen… what?

The title. The fortune. The influence. The Mayfair house, the country estate, the ancient family name.

Not him. Never him.

He thought of Lady Helena Stanhope and her horror at the mention of books. Of Miss Fellowes and her interminable watercolours. Of Lady Fontaine and her linen-room manoeuvres. None of them had ever asked what he wanted. None of them had ever seemed to wonder what lay beneath the polished surface of the Duke of Westmere.

They saw the marble. They did not look for the man.

Would they want him if they found him? whispered a voice at the back of his mind. The man who makes terrible puns and gets emotional about novels and does imitations of society matrons when no one is watching? Would anyone want that man? Or would they be disappointed to discover that the marble was only a façade?

He did not know.

He had never been brave enough to find out.

A knock at the study door interrupted the thought. Before he could answer, the door opened to reveal Marcus Thorne, Viscount Rowley, his closest friend and occasional rescuer from matrimonial ambush.

“You look dreadful,” Marcus announced, dropping into the chair across from Edison’s desk. “Also, I passed Angelica in the hall. She said you were brooding and asked me to interfere.”

“I am not brooding.”

“You are sitting alone in a darkened study, staring at a piece of paper as if it has ruined your life. That is sufficiently close.” Marcus leaned forward to inspect the paper. “Is that your grandmother’s list? I heard she had compiled one. Fourteen names, is it?”

“Word travels quickly.”

“Word always travels quickly when it concerns the most eligible bachelor in England and his matrimonial prospects.” Marcus grinned. “Half the ton is already speculating. My money is on Lady Helena Stanhope. She looks as though she would manage a household beautifully.”

“Lady Helena Stanhope is horrified by literature.”

“Then marry her and keep separate libraries. Or separate wings, if necessary.”

Edison rubbed his temples. “You are not helping.”

“I rarely am. It is part of my charm.” Marcus stretched out his legs, the picture of aristocratic ease. “In all seriousness, though, you might try finding a woman you actually like. It has been known to happen.”

“I might also sprout wings. Both seem equally likely in a ballroom.”

“You are too pessimistic.”

“I am realistic. I have attended—” Edison paused, calculating. “Far too many society events since reaching my majority. I have been introduced to every eligible woman in England at least once. I have danced with most of them. I have made conversation with all of them. And not once—not once—has any of them appeared interested in who I actually am.”

Marcus was quiet for a moment. Then he said, more gently, “Have you ever shown them who you actually are?”

The question struck with uncomfortable accuracy.

“I—”

“Because from where I sit, you have spent years building a very convincing wall. The Ice Duke, the Marble Duke, whatever they have decided to call you this Season. You are polished and proper and utterly unreachable. Then you are surprised when no one reaches.”

“I am not—”

“You are.” Marcus leaned forward, his expression unusually serious. “I know you, Edison. I have known you since Eton. I have seen you do an imitation of Lady Fontaine that would make a professional actor despair. I have seen you become suspiciously silent over the final chapter of a novel and then deny all feeling for three days. I have heard puns from you so dreadful they ought to be prohibited by statute. But the ton has seen none of that. They have seen the wall.”

Edison said nothing.

There was nothing to say. Marcus was right. He knew Marcus was right. And he had no notion how to be otherwise.

Marcus stood, his brief seriousness apparently exhausted. “I should go. I only came to remind you of the Whitfield musicale next week. Attendance is not optional. Lady Whitfield asked me specifically to ensure you would be there, and I have no wish to disappoint her.”

“I shall be there.”

“You will not hide in the library.”

“I make no promises.”

Marcus laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Try, at least. For my sake, if not your own. Who knows? You might meet someone tolerable.”

“Your optimism is as touching as Angelica’s.”

“We both love you. That is why we persist.” Marcus paused at the door. “And Edison? Consider, just this once, letting someone see behind the wall. You might be surprised.”

He was gone before Edison could form a reply.

The study fell silent again. The afternoon light had shifted, casting long shadows across the floor. Edison looked down at his grandmother’s list, at his own sardonic annotations in the margins, at fourteen names that represented fourteen women who had never known him and very likely never would.

He picked up his pen.

Slowly, deliberately, he drew a line through every name.

Then, beneath the crossed-out list, he wrote:

Find a woman who does not want to marry the Duke.

He stared at the words.

They were absurd. Impossible. The kind of wishful thinking he ought to have outgrown years ago.

And yet.

If he could find someone who wanted nothing from him—no title, no fortune, no position—then perhaps, for one Season, he might simply breathe. Stop performing. Stop hiding behind the marble façade.

Find a woman who does not want to marry the Duke.

He had no idea how prophetic those words would prove.

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“That woman’s hat contains an entire aviary,” Thea murmured to Cecily as they strolled along the Serpentine. “I fear for the structural integrity of her neck.”

Cecily followed her gaze to Lady Fortescue, who was indeed wearing a confection of feathers, ribbons, and what appeared to be a small bird perched at a precarious angle above her left ear. “Perhaps it is a statement.”

“It is certainly something.” Thea tilted her head, considering. “Do you think the bird is real?”

“I sincerely hope not. Though, knowing Lady Fortescue, she would consider a live one the height of fashion.”

They walked on, arm in arm, navigating the crowded paths of Hyde Park during the fashionable hour. This was London on full display: carriages rolling past at precisely the correct speed for seeing and being seen, riders moving along Rotten Row with studied elegance, promenaders gathering in little clusters to exchange gossip and assess the latest arrivals of the Season.

One week.

Thea had been in London for one week, and already the pattern of her previous four Seasons had reasserted itself with depressing efficiency.

She had attended two events: a small dinner party at the Ashtons’ and a card evening at Lady Morton’s. She had been introduced to three gentlemen—Sir Robert Crane, Mr William Abernathy, and a young baron whose name she had already forgotten, which seemed only fair, since he had plainly forgotten hers before the introduction was complete. She had made conversation. She had smiled appropriately. She had done everything correctly.

And she had been, as always, invisible.

Not dramatically ignored. That, at least, might have been interesting. Simply overlooked. Passed over. The sort of woman whose presence registered only as ‘someone standing near the window’ or ‘the elder Miss Davies, I think—or was it the younger one?’

Her mother was already despairing. Lady Davies had spent the carriage ride to the park delivering a comprehensive critique of Thea’s performance at the card evening—“You barely spoke to Mr Abernathy.” “He was discussing horse breeding, Mama.” “That is no excuse.”—interspersed with pointed comparisons to other young women who had managed to secure attention despite similar, or even greater, disadvantages.

Louisa, meanwhile, was already impatient. She had accompanied them to the park ‘for the air’, but was in truth conducting reconnaissance for her own future Season, cataloguing eligible gentlemen with the focus of a military strategist preparing a campaign.

“There is Viscount Rowley,” Louisa announced from Thea’s other side, nodding towards a group of gentlemen near the water. “They say he is quite charming. And rich. And unmarried.”

“How comprehensive,” Thea said.

“I am simply being prepared.” Louisa tossed her golden curls. She had their mother’s colouring, fair and bright, while Thea had inherited their father’s unremarkable brown. “When my Season comes, I intend to make an impression.”

“I am certain you will.”

“A good impression,” Louisa clarified, with the particular emphasis of a younger sister who had spent years watching an elder sibling fail.

Thea did not respond. There was nothing to say that would not sound either defensive or defeated, and she was tired of being both.

“Oh, look.” Cecily’s voice cut through the tension. “Mama has found Mrs Whitfield. We should perhaps walk in the other direction.”

Thea followed her gaze. Their mother had indeed intercepted Mrs Agnes Whitfield, society matron and purveyor of gossip so prolific that she practically functioned as her own newspaper. The two women were deep in conversation; their heads bent together in the universal posture of women exchanging intelligence.

“Agreed,” Thea said. “I have no desire to be exhibited.”

They altered course, moving towards a quieter stretch of the path where the crowds thinned slightly. Louisa protested—she had spotted another eligible gentleman and wished to promenade past him—but Cecily overruled her with the firm authority of a middle sister accustomed to managing competing interests.

Thea let herself drift slightly apart from her sisters, her mind composing journal entries as she walked.

 

The fashionable hour in Hyde Park is rather like observing animals at a menagerie, if the animals were dressed in expensive clothing and desperately pretending not to notice one another while noticing one another intensely.

Lady Fortescue’s hat continues to defy both gravity and good taste. I have named the bird Harold. He appears resigned to his fate.

Mr William Abernathy is here, speaking to someone about horses. I am devastated to have missed the opportunity for further equine discourse.

 

She was so absorbed in her mental composition that she almost missed him.

A man stood only a little ahead of her, near the edge of the path where the shade of an old oak offered some relief from the afternoon sun. Tall. Dark-haired. Alone. His posture was perfect, the sort of perfect that came from years of training, but there was something in the set of his shoulders that suggested he would rather be anywhere else.

As she drew nearer, she noticed that he was watching the spectacle of the park with an expression of barely concealed suffering, like a man attending his own execution and finding the proceedings tedious.

Thea felt an unexpected flicker of recognition. Not of him—she had never seen him before, she was certain—but of that particular species of discomfort. The sense of being surrounded by people and somehow more alone than if one were actually by oneself.

He looks exactly as uncomfortable as I feel, she thought. How oddly comforting.

She had just passed within a few paces of him—cataloguing details for the journal, she told herself, nothing more—when everything happened at once.

A shout from the riding path. A horse shying violently from its rider’s control, white-eyed and panicked, veering towards the pedestrians. Screams. People scattering. Someone jostled Thea hard from behind; Cecily cried out somewhere to her left.

Thea stumbled backwards, her feet tangling in her skirts, her arms lifting uselessly as she tried to regain her balance and failed—

Strong hands caught her.

She was pulled firmly aside, against a solid chest, held securely as the chaos broke around them. An arm was at her waist. Her hand had landed—oh, mercy—on a very broad, very warm, very male chest. She could feel the buttons of his waistcoat beneath her palm, and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath her fingers.

For one suspended instant, the world seemed to pause.

She looked up.

He looked down.

His eyes were blue. Not the pale, watery blue she so often saw in ballrooms, but a deep, startling blue, like the sky just before a storm. They widened slightly as they met hers, and something flickered in their depths—surprise, perhaps, or something she could not name.

Say something, her mind commanded. Say something clever, say something graceful, say anything that is not—

“Well,” she heard herself say. “That was graceful.”

A beat of silence. Then the corner of his mouth twitched, so slightly she might have imagined it.

“I have seen worse,” he said.

His voice was low and composed, with an undertone that might almost have been amusement. It was the voice of a man accustomed to keeping himself very carefully in hand, and Thea found herself wondering what he might sound like if he ever forgot to be careful.

“You are very kind,” she managed. “I believe I have discovered an entirely new species of public mortification: stumbling into strangers during equine emergencies. I shall endeavour not to repeat it.”

That flicker in his eyes again.

Definitely amusement.

“A prudent resolution, I am sure.”

They were still standing very close. His arm was still around her waist. Her hand was still pressed against his chest. She could feel the heat of him through the layers of fabric, and smell something clean and masculine—sandalwood, perhaps, with something darker beneath it.

She ought to step back. She knew she ought to step back. But her body seemed to have forgotten how to move, and he had not yet released her, and for one suspended moment, the whole of Hyde Park might have ceased to exist for all she noticed it.

Then reality returned.

People were staring. Of course they were staring. A woman in a strange gentleman’s arms in the middle of Hyde Park was not an everyday spectacle, even during the fashionable hour. The horse had been caught, the danger resolved, and the afternoon’s entertainment had shifted to the far more interesting possibility of scandal.

Thea understood all of this in a single, horrifying instant.

She stepped back.

He released her.

His expression had returned to careful neutrality, but there was something in his eyes—a question, perhaps, or the echo of whatever had been there before—that made her stomach do an uncomfortable little turn.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Only my dignity.” She smoothed her skirts with hands that were not entirely steady. “Which was already somewhat battered, so the additional damage is negligible.”

“That is… refreshingly pragmatic.”

“I find pragmatism pairs well with humiliation. It is very efficient.”

He was looking at her strangely. Not with the polite dismissal she was accustomed to, the quick glance and quicker loss of interest that characterised most of her interactions with gentlemen, but with something that felt almost like attention. As though he were actually seeing her. Actually listening. Actually present in the conversation in a way most people never were.

It was unnerving.

It was also, she realised with some alarm, rather wonderful.

“Thea!” Cecily appeared at her elbow, flushed and breathless. “Are you all right? That horse—I thought you were going to be trampled.”

“I am fine. This gentleman—” Thea gestured, then realised she had no idea who this gentleman was. “I beg your pardon. I do not believe we have been introduced.”

Something shifted in his expression. The briefest hesitation, quickly suppressed.

“No,” he said. “We have not.”

He did not offer his name. She did not ask. Cecily was already drawing her away, murmuring about their mother and propriety and the necessity of leaving at once, and Thea allowed herself to be led because staying seemed, somehow, more dangerous than going.

But as they retreated through the crowd, she glanced back.

He was still standing there.

Still watching her.

His face was unreadable, but he had not looked away. Had not dismissed her. Had not forgotten her existence the moment she left his immediate vicinity.

For the first time in forever, someone was watching her go.

She turned away before she could make too much of it.

 

***

 

The gossip had begun before they reached their townhouse.

At the park, Thea and her sisters had been sent to wait in the carriage while Lady Davies remained behind to receive expressions of concern, assure acquaintances that no harm had been done, and conduct whatever social repairs the situation required. By the time she joined them, her expression had settled into one Thea knew too well: outward composure, inward calculation.

She said almost nothing during the drive home.

“Mrs Whitfield saw everything,” Lady Davies announced the moment they stepped through the door. Her eyes were bright with an emotion Thea could not immediately identify, something between alarm, excitement, and strategic calculation. “She came straight to me after you left. Theodora, do you have any notion who that gentleman was?”

Thea’s stomach sank. “No. There was no time for introductions.”

“That was the Duke of Westmere.”

The words landed in the hall like a thunderclap.

“The—” Thea’s voice failed her. She tried again. “The what?”

“The Duke of Westmere. The most eligible bachelor in England. The man every ambitious mother in London has been pursuing, in one form or another, for years.” Lady Davies clasped her hands together, practically vibrating with barely suppressed purpose. “And you, Theodora, were seen in his arms. In Hyde Park. Before half the fashionable world.”

Thea felt the blood drain from her face. “I fell. There was a horse, and I stumbled, and he caught me. It was not— It was an accident.”

“An accident.” Lady Davies smiled the smile of a general who has just received unexpected reinforcements. “An accident that Mrs Whitfield has already described to at least six people of consequence. An accident that will be repeated in every drawing room in London by morning. An accident that has accomplished more in ten seconds than your previous four Seasons combined.”

“Mama—”

“We must act quickly. There is Lady Whitfield’s musicale tomorrow evening, and the Ravencrofts’ ball later in the week. We shall discover where he is expected. You must be seen. You must speak to him. You must—”

“Mama.” Thea’s voice came out sharper than she intended. “I fell into a duke. That is not a courtship. That is a disaster.”

“It is an opportunity.” Lady Davies’s eyes were fierce. “Do you understand what this may mean, Theodora? The Duke of Westmere has been considered untouchable for years. He is civil to everyone and encouraging to no one. He has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in any of the young women presented to him Season after Season. And yet you—quiet, retiring, invisible you—have caught his attention in a way no one else has.”

Quiet. Retiring. Invisible.

The words should not have hurt. They were true, after all. But hearing them spoken aloud, by her own mother, with that particular mixture of frustration and desperate hope, made something in Thea close.

“I am going to my room,” she said quietly.

“We are not finished discussing—”

“I am going to my room.”

She turned and walked up the stairs, ignoring her mother’s protests. Her legs felt unsteady. Her chest felt tight. Her mind kept returning to the moment: his hands catching her, his eyes meeting hers, that flicker of something that had seemed almost like genuine interest.

The Duke of Westmere.

She had fallen into the arms of the most eligible, most sought-after, most notoriously unapproachable man in England.

And her mother thought it was an opportunity.

That night, Thea sat at her writing desk with her journal open before her, the candle burning low and the house at last quiet.

She stared at the blank page for a long time.

Finally, she wrote:

 

I have, through the dignified medium of falling over in public, attracted more attention in one afternoon than in four entire Seasons.

Father always said I should make an entrance. I do not think this is what he meant.

 

She paused, her quill hovering over the page. Then she added:

 

His eyes were very blue. I do not know why I noticed that. I notice all manner of useless things. It is a particular talent.

He said he had seen worse. I do not know whether that was kind or merely accurate. Probably both.

His hands were warm. Steady. He held me as though I weighed nothing, as though catching falling women was a common ducal accomplishment. Perhaps it is. Perhaps dukes are trained for that sort of thing.

 

She closed her eyes, remembering the press of his chest beneath her palm. The solid certainty of him in a moment of chaos. The way he had looked at her—really looked—not through her or past her, but at her, as though she were worth seeing.

It does not matter, she wrote firmly.

 

He is a duke. I am a wallflower. This is not a novel, nor a fairy story. By tomorrow, he will have forgotten my name, if he ever knew it, and I shall return to my regularly scheduled invisibility.

That is, assuming Mama does not find a way to manufacture further ‘accidents’ in his vicinity. I would not put it past her. She has the look of a woman contemplating elaborate schemes involving horses, inconvenient weather, and possibly trained dogs.

 

She smiled slightly despite herself, then sobered as she remembered her mother’s words.

Quiet. Retiring. Invisible.

Is that truly what she sees when she looks at me? Is that what everyone sees?

Is that what he saw?

She did not know. She would probably never know. Dukes did not explain themselves to wallflowers, and wallflowers did not ask.

She closed the journal and extinguished the candle, but sleep was a long time coming.

 

***

 

The gossip column arrived with the morning chocolate.

Thea read it while her sisters watched, their expressions ranging from horrified, in Cecily’s case, to delighted, in Louisa’s.

 

A certain Miss D was seen yesterday in the arms of a certain Duke of W, following a disturbance in Hyde Park. One cannot help wondering whether the lady’s stumble was as accidental as it appeared. Desperate times, as they say, call for desperate measures; and what, dear reader, could be more desperate than a fifth Season?

 

Thea set down the paper.

She looked at Cecily. She looked at Louisa. She thought of her mother downstairs, no doubt already considering how best to turn this disaster to advantage.

“Oh no,” she said quietly. “Oh no, no, no.”