Chapter One

 

 

“Bess, look beneath the seat again. It has to be beneath the seat.”

The voice reached Lord Sylvester Birchwood across the field before he found the woman it belonged to, a young lady on her knees in the road beside a carriage tilted at the verge with one wheel sunk to the hub. He had spent the afternoon avoiding Morton Farm and three tenants who wanted their roof mended by a carpenter rather than lectured at by a younger son, and he had taken the long road precisely so as not to be useful. Usefulness, in his settled view, was a virtue best admired from a safe distance.

“I have looked twice now, miss.” The maid’s voice came muffled from inside the carriage. “There is nothing under there but your second glove and a quantity of dust.”

“Then look a third time, and mind the dust as you go.”

Sylvester drew his horse to a walk. A second young lady stood at the verge with her arms folded, younger than the kneeling one and a great deal less frantic, watching a grey-haired coachman prod the hedge with a stick. He went at it with the weary patience of long practice, against his own better judgment, and looked prepared to continue until full dark.

“A stopped carriage, two anxious ladies, and a coachman interrogating a hedge as though it owes him money.” Sylvester swung down from the saddle. “I must either offer my services or surrender every claim to being a gentleman, and I am reliably informed the claim is already in poor repair.”

The kneeling lady looked up. She had a smudge of road dust along one cheekbone and the sort of face that arranged itself honestly, every worry showing plainly before she could think to hide it. She was not performing her distress for his benefit. That was an inconvenience. Performed distress a man could flirt with at once, where real distress wanted either decency or a far better imitation of it than most men kept ready to hand.

“You are very kind, sir.” She rose and brushed the grass from her skirts with both hands. “But I am afraid we are past the reach of kindness today. I have lost my reticule somewhere on this road, and with it a thing I would not lose for the world.”

“Then you have caught me at the single task I perform well.” He swept her a bow with rather more flourish than a roadside warranted. “Lord Sylvester Birchwood, of Pecking Hall, which lies three miles east and is at present full of people who would faint dead away to hear me volunteer for labour of any kind.”

She dipped a curtsy that her worry made hurried. “Miss Helena Fairford. My sister, Miss Marianne Fairford.” The younger girl inclined her head without troubling to unfold her arms. “Bess, who serves us both, and Mr Grigg, who has driven us very faithfully into the side of the road.”

“The road moved, my lord,” said Mr Grigg, without turning from the hedge.

“They so often do.” Sylvester stripped off his riding gloves and tucked them into his coat. “Now, Miss Fairford, what am I looking for, so that I may find it with the proper air of competence?”

“A reticule of grey silk, with a drawstring.” Helena’s hand pressed flat to the front of her bodice, where the thing must usually have hung. “It is plain. You would not look at it twice. But there is a coin inside that I value past its weight.”

“You are very eager to help, my lord,” said Marianne.

“A terrible flaw. My family has suffered from it for years.”

“Has it?”

“No. But a man must give his virtues a little history, or no one believes he came by them honestly.”

Helena’s mouth moved towards a smile and lost its nerve before it arrived. Sylvester counted that fair return on the effort and went to the hedge.

He found the reticule a good deal faster than he had any right to, a grey scrap of silk caught on a low blackthorn not ten feet from where Mr Grigg had been conducting his interrogation. He bent for it. As he lifted the purse, the drawstring gaped, and a gold guinea slid from the open mouth of it and rolled a slow half-turn through the dust to rest against the toe of his boot, catching the low sun like a small private coal.

He heard her step come up behind him on the road.

It was not stealing. Theft wanted intention, and he fully intended to return the coin very shortly. Certainly before supper, which by any reasonable reckoning, placed the whole business comfortably short of villainy.

He settled his boot over the guinea and felt the cool press of it through the leather. Then he straightened with the empty reticule held aloft like a flag taken in battle.

“Miss Fairford, I believe I have restored your kingdom to you.”

“Oh, thank goodness.” She crossed the last of the distance and took the reticule from him in both hands, and the relief that broke across her face was so complete that he very nearly told her the truth out of plain astonishment at having caused it. Then she loosened the drawstring and looked inside, and the colour drained out of her cheeks. “It is not here.”

“What is not?”

“The coin. My father’s guinea.” Her voice held steady over the first word and snagged on the second, a small audible catch, as though the word father carried a rough edge that drew blood on the way past. “It has gone.”

“Then it has rolled loose in the grass, and we shall find it between us.” He kept his tone easy and unhurried. “I refuse to be beaten by a single coin. I have been beaten by a great many things in this life, Miss Fairford. I draw the line at currency.”

“You are very determined, my lord, for a man who claims to perform only one task well.”

“Determination is the task. The rest is luck and a good pair of boots, of which I happen to have both today.”

The others searched, on their knees along the verge, while Sylvester searched standing upright, which is to say he kept one boot pressed gently over the prize and directed the operation with the calm of a man who knows precisely where the treasure lies buried.

“It was your father’s, you said.” He watched her part the long grass with careful fingers. “Forgive the question. Is he the sort of father a daughter might apply to for a second guinea, or is this the only one in the world?”

“He died two years ago.” She did not look up. “It is the last thing of his that is mine alone. My mother keeps his watch. Marianne has his books. I have a coin he carried through forty years and two hard winters and never once spent, however near we came to needing it spent.”

A gentleman’s daughter who spoke of coming near to needing a coin had no fortune behind her name, the commonest tragedy in the county and the one least likely to be wept over in public.

“And was it you who managed how near you came?” he asked. “Forgive me again. You have the look of a woman who keeps the household accounts in her head and lets no one see the figures.”

“My sister keeps everything in her own head,” said Marianne. “The accounts, the mending, Mama’s nerves, my temper. She is the reason there is a guinea left to lose.”

“Marianne.”

“It is true. You spent two years making certain we wanted for nothing, and you would not let any of us thank you for it, and now you are on your knees in a ditch over the one thing you kept for yourself.”

Helena’s hand went still in the grass. “That is enough.”

“It is not nearly enough, but I shall stop.” Marianne sat back on her heels and looked at Sylvester with frank assessment. “We are a month with the Allardyces at Combe End. Mama decided the country air would mend Helena’s spirits. Country air being, I have noticed, a great deal cheaper than a season in town.”

“You say a great many things your mother says, and a few I suspect she would rather you did not.”

“She would rather I said none of them. We have agreed to disagree, and I have won, on the grounds that I am the one who does the talking.”

“I ought to be warned by that. Yet I find you rather restful.” Sylvester glanced at the younger girl, who did not look restful in the least, and turned back to the elder. “So. The sensible sister. The one who carries the household and grieves a coin in secret and lets the rest of them sleep at night. I confess I find that a more interesting creature than the marriageable one, though I am told the two are occasionally housed in the same person.”

“You are told a great deal, my lord.”

“I have a wide acquaintance and very little to do. It comes to the same thing.” He moved a careful inch and gestured at the empty road. “Combe End. Then you will be at my brother’s house within the week, I think. There is a card gone out to half the neighbourhood for an evening at the Hall.”

Helena looked up at that, the search forgotten for a breath. “We are invited. I had not understood the family would be yours.” A small wondering settled over her. “I knew the Duke of Pecking kept the great house, of course. Everyone within thirty miles knows the Duke. I did not know he came supplied with a brother who pulls reticules out of hedges.”

“Most people do not. He keeps me in a cupboard and produces me at Christmas, lightly dusted.” He let the line land and then spoilt it, the way he always did when a true thing crept up on him. “It is the natural order of younger brothers. The estate goes to the one born first, the sermons go to the one born second, and the dancing, thank goodness, goes to whoever can be spared. I have made myself very useful at dancing.”

“You speak of being spared as though it grieved you.”

“It does not grieve me in the least. I have arranged my whole life around being spared. It is by far the most comfortable position in any house.” He smiled, and it did not entirely reach the corners of the thing. “Now find me that smile you have been hoarding, Miss Fairford, and I shall go back to looking.”

The smile arrived at last, brief and real, before grief reached up and pulled it back under the surface.

“You will let me warn you about Pecking Hall before you come to it,” he said.

“Warn me?”

“It is imposing, and cold, and hung with portraits of people who all appear to have disapproved of being painted.” He shifted his weight by a careful inch. “You will arrive expecting a house and discover a courtroom with rather better curtains.”

“That sounds very ducal.”

“It is the most ducal house in three counties, and my brother suits it the way a blade suits a scabbard.” He let the affection show, since it cost him nothing to spend. “Rhysand came into the world ten minutes ahead of me and has spent every hour since punishing the world for its lateness. Understand me, he is a good man. I should hate you to mistake my meaning. He is a good man the way a winter is a good winter. Thorough. Bracing. Entirely survivable, provided one has dressed for it.”

Marianne laughed before she could prevent it, then frowned at herself for the lapse.

“And does the good winter dance, my lord?” Helena asked.

“Never. He considers it a frivolity that encourages young people to enjoy themselves, of which he takes a very dim view.” Sylvester watched her colour lift a shade at the word dance and judged the moment ripe. “I, on the other hand, dance with great commitment and very little skill, which the ladies tell me is the more endearing combination of the two.”

“You make him sound a tyrant.”

“I make him sound a duke, which to a stranger amounts to the same thing and to me does not.” He surprised himself with the weight he put on it, and stepped back from the weight at once. “He is no tyrant. He pays his tenants’ physicians and remembers the name of every child on the estate and has never once in his life done a charming thing where a correct one would serve as well. You will dislike him on sight and be ashamed of it within the month. Most people are. It is the most predictable event in the county calendar.”

“That is a strange way to defend a brother.”

“It is the only way I have. I cannot praise him without it sounding like a complaint, and I cannot complain of him without it coming out as praise. We have been confusing the neighbourhood in exactly this fashion since we were six years old.”

“And which of you began it?” Marianne asked.

“He did, by being born first and taking all the gravity for himself. There was none left in the room by the time I arrived. I have had to manufacture my own ever since, and mine is a lighter grade of the stuff.”

Helena laughed, properly this time, the sound startled out of her, and pressed her fingers to her lips as though to catch it and put it back where it had come from.

“You need not put it away again,” he said. “It is only a laugh. They are not rationed at the Hall, whatever else is.”

“I am not in the habit of laughing at strangers in ditches.”

“Then I shall take it as the rarer compliment.” A woman who apologised for her own gladness had learnt the lesson in a lean house, that a light heart was an expense the family could not always meet. He kept the thought to himself and offered his hand instead, to help her over a rut in the verge.

The light had gone amber and long across the field. The air off the hedge smelled of warm dust and bruised grass and the first cool breath of the evening coming up behind it. Helena rose and pressed the back of her wrist briefly to her eyes.

“My lord, we cannot stay here past dark, mended or not, and the coin…” She stopped herself. “The coin is only a coin. I am behaving like a child over a piece of metal.”

“You are behaving like a daughter over the last of her father. The two are easily confused, and only one of them is anything to be ashamed of.” He had not intended to say a true thing, and was mildly put out with himself for the slip. “Grant me one more minute of honest looking. If I should find it, will you grant me something in return?”

“You wish to be rewarded for doing a kindness?”

“I wish to be rewarded for trying, Miss Marianne, which is the only labour most gentlemen are ever paid for, and even then reluctantly.” He turned the whole warmth of his attention on Helena. “A dance. At the Hall. When you come to it.”

“If you find my father’s guinea,” Helena said, and her chin came up steadier than it had been a moment before, “I shall dance with you twice, and gladly, and tell everyone present you are the cleverest man in the county.”

“Twice.” He pretended to weigh the terms as though they cost him dear. “You drive a hard bargain for a woman on her knees in a ditch. Very well. Done, and witnessed.”

“It is a poor sort of bargain,” Marianne said, “that lets a man set the price of a thing he has not yet returned.”

“It is the only sort worth making, Miss Marianne. A man who waits until the goods are safely delivered has no leverage left and must rely on gratitude, which is the least reliable currency I know.”

“You know a great deal about leverage, for a younger son.”

“It is all a younger son has. The elder has the land. I have my timing.” He held her look a beat longer than was comfortable for either of them. “You would have made an excellent younger son yourself. It is a pity they wasted you on being sensible.”

He looked down then, as though the thought had only that instant struck him, and lifted his boot, and there in the print it had pressed into the dust lay the guinea, gold and warm and wholly innocent of how it had come to be lying there.

“Ah.” He bent and took it up between two fingers. “Fortune has elected, at long last, to behave herself.”

He held it out on his open palm. Helena took it and closed her fingers around it so hard the knuckles paled, and when she lifted her eyes to him, they were bright and wet along the rims.

“You have saved me from a very foolish grief, my lord.”

“No grief is foolish that has loved someone.” He said it lightly, and meant about half of it, which for Sylvester was an unusually generous proportion to mean.

Marianne had risen too. She was looking at the patch of road where he had stood, and then at the toe of his boot, and then up into his face, and her expression had gone very still and very thoughtful, with none of a girl of nineteen’s giddiness left anywhere in it.

“It rolled a good distance, for a coin,” she said.

“Coins are restless things. They have nowhere to be and all day to get there.”

“You stood just there the whole while we searched.”

“I find it best to hold a position once I have taken it.” He met her look without a single flicker. “A habit I learnt from my brother, who would assure you it is the one useful thing he has ever managed to teach me.”

She did not answer. She did not need to answer. She had seen enough to suspect and not nearly enough to say, and the two of them understood that distinction precisely, the way two people understand a thing they will never agree to mention aloud.

Mr Grigg and a labourer from a passing farm cart set their shoulders to the wheel, and the carriage came free of the rut with a lurch and a long complaint of strained wood. Bess handed the ladies up. Helena settled the reticule in her lap with one hand laid flat across it, in the manner of a person holding a thing they have only just learnt they are able to lose, and looked back at him once through the small rear glass as the road carried her on towards the beeches.

Marianne did not look back. She had not stopped watching him since the moment the coin appeared in the dust, which came, in the end, to very much the same thing.

Sylvester gathered his reins and set his foot to the stirrup. A wiser man might have ridden home ashamed of himself. He rode home interested instead, turning the afternoon over for its small pleasures, and had decided before the second mile was behind him that he would claim the slower of the two dances first, when the candles had burnt low and the music had gone soft and a girl is most disposed to believe whatever a charming man chooses to tell her.

Shame, he had always found, could be sent for later. It so rarely insisted on coming early.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“You are determined to dislike him before he has so much as bowed to you twice,” Helena said.

“I am determined to do no such thing.” Marianne sat on the end of the bed with her chin in her hand, watching Bess press the last pins into her sister’s hair. “I am waiting for him to deserve liking. It is a different occupation entirely, and you would see the difference at once if you were not so busy hoping.”

“I am not hoping.”

“You have changed your ribbon three times.”

Helena’s hand stilled at her throat. “The first was too bright for a house in half-mourning. I will not walk in looking as though I have come to dance on the old duke’s grave.”

“And the second?”

“Too plain.”

“So we have arrived at the third, which is precisely right, and which you chose because you are thinking of the dance he asked you for on the road.” Marianne let the words lie where they fell. “I only observe. I do not say a thing.”

“You say a great many things. You have merely learnt to call them observations so that no one may scold you for them.”

Bess set the final pin and stepped back, and Helena looked at the woman in the glass, at the grey ribbon and the borrowed pearls and the face that would not stop hoping however firmly she instructed it.

“He will have forgotten me by now,” she said. “A gentleman of that sort meets fifty people in a week.”

“He will remember you.” Marianne rose and shook out her own skirts. “Men of that sort remember whatever profits them, and you promised him two dances. The dances he will have kept, Helena. Depend upon it. A man like that loses nothing he means to use.”

“You make him sound a creditor.”

“I make him sound a charming man, which in my experience comes to the same thing with the bill sent on later.” Marianne caught her sister’s hand at the door. “I am not trying to spoil it. I am trying to stand where I can see the whole of it, which is a thing you have never once managed for a person you wished to like.”

Pecking Hall stood above the village on a rise of dark stone, square and tall and without apology, its long windows lit and its great door set open to a night turned cool against the warmth of the day. Helena had spent the carriage ride bracing for a palace. She found instead a house built to outlast everyone foolish enough to be impressed by it, and was impressed regardless, which annoyed her in a manner she suspected Marianne would have enjoyed.

The evening was smaller than she had feared and a good deal quieter than she had let herself hope. The family had not entertained since the old duke’s death three months past, and the household wore the fact openly, the candles fewer than the sconces would carry, the music kept to a murmur, the company no more than a dozen near neighbours moving between two opened rooms. A little dancing had been allowed at the far end of the long room, and had the look of a thing granted on sufferance.

“You came,” said a voice at her shoulder.

She turned, and there was Lord Sylvester, bright as a struck coin against the grey of the room, and her heart performed the small foolish leap she had ordered it not to perform.

“I promised,” she said.

“Then you are already superior to half my acquaintance, who promise me a great deal and arrive at none of it.” He bowed over her hand and kept it a breath past propriety. “You will forgive the gloom. We are being respectable this season. My mother decreed it, and her decrees carry the force of weather. One does not argue. One dresses warmly and waits for the season to turn.”

“I think the house suits being quiet.”

“The house suits being a mausoleum, which is very near the same thing and was, I believe, the architect’s settled intention.” He drew her hand through his arm. “You owe me two dances, Miss Fairford, and I mean to claim the first before some bishop’s nephew finds you and spoils my whole evening.”

He danced lightly and a little carelessly, and talked the entire way through it.

“You are looking at the door,” he said, turning her. “Three figures in and already plotting your escape. I shall take it very ill.”

“I am looking at the room. I have never stood inside a house like this one.”

“No one has. It was built to be looked at and never enjoyed, a principle my family has since extended to most of its living members.” He tipped his head towards a stout gentleman planted by the fire. “Sir John Crale. He will tell you the history of his low meadow if you give him the smallest opening. Do not give him the opening. Beside him is his wife, who has heard about the low meadow for thirty years and lives yet, and is on that ground the bravest soul in the county.”

Helena laughed before she could prevent it, and pressed her lips together after, as though to catch it back.

“You need not do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Put it away the instant it escapes. You did the same on the road.” He turned her again, and his voice came lower. “I have decided to make it my whole business this summer to spend that laugh for you, since you will not spend it for yourself. Consider it a charity. I am reliably informed I ought to take one up.”

“You should choose a worthier object than my laughing.”

“I never choose worthy objects. They are so rarely any fun, and they always want a building fund by the end of it.” His glance went past her shoulder to the dark figure at the edge of the room, and his manner sharpened and smoothed again in the space of a breath. “My brother is watching us. Do not look at once. He watches the way other men breathe, without noticing he does it, and he disapproves of dancing on a principle.”

“What principle?”

“That a person might enjoy a thing he has not first inspected and approved.”

She looked anyway, because being told to wait is the surest way of making a body look at once, and met for an instant the Duke’s dark, unreadable attention before he moved it elsewhere.

“You looked,” Sylvester said, delighted. “I knew you would. We are going to get on extremely well, you and I. We are both far too curious for our own good, and not nearly sorry enough about it to mend.”

Marianne was waiting at the wall when the dance set Helena free, wearing the particular stillness she kept for occasions when she had been watching and meant to give her report.

“Well,” Helena said. “Say it.”

“He dances beautifully.”

“You say it as though it were a charge read out at the assizes.”

“It is very nearly one. A man who dances that well has practised on a great many women, and a man who has practised on a great many women has disappointed the better part of them.” Marianne kept her eyes on the room rather than her sister. “I do not say he will disappoint you. I say he has had the training for it, and the training does not unlearn itself for one grey ribbon.”

“You have decided the whole of his character from a single country dance.”

“I have decided nothing. I am gathering it a little at a time.” She tipped her chin towards the far wall. “His brother watched the entire dance and never once troubled to pretend he was looking elsewhere. I cannot make that man out at all, which makes him the only interesting thing in the room.”

The Dowager found her a little later and received her with the cool, thorough attention of a woman appraising cloth she had not decided to buy. She was tall and straight-backed, handsome rather than soft, and wore her half-mourning like a sentence she meant to serve with dignity and not a grain more grief than the law required.

“Miss Fairford. You are the Allardyces’ guest.”

“I am, Your Grace. You are very kind to have included me.”

“I am very little kind. I am curious, which wears better and lasts a great deal longer.” The Dowager’s mouth moved by a fraction. “My son tells me he rescued you from a hedge.”

“From a ditch, Your Grace. The hedge was incidental to the business.”

“He improves a story the way other men improve their acres. Constantly, and well past the point of recognising the original ground.” Her eyes had warmed by a degree even so. “And how do you find him, now you have had a second look at him in better light?”

“I find him very kind, Your Grace.”

“Yes.” The Dowager looked across the room at her younger son with a fondness that had tiredness folded inside it. “He is very kind. It is the easiest of the virtues and the one that costs him the least, which is why he has so much of it to hand out. I would not build a house upon it, were I a young woman. But it is pleasant to stand near. I will grant him that much. It has always been pleasant to stand near.”

A neighbour at her elbow, a comfortable woman in puce, leant across. “Such a small party, but it must be, so soon. Though I did hear you are to have Lady Rosamund Harbury before the summer is out. Such a comfort to a house, an old friend at a time like this.”

“Lady Rosamund is an old friend of my younger son’s,” the Dowager said, and gave nothing away with it.

“Lady Rosamund is an old friend of everyone’s.” Sylvester had come back to Helena’s side without her marking the approach. “It is her one true talent, and she has polished it to a high shine. Miss Fairford, you are neglecting your negus, which I take as a personal injury.”

Helena let the name go by without catching on it. She had no reason yet to hold on to it. A glass was pressed into her hand, and the moment closed over and was gone.

“Miss Fairford.”

The voice came from behind her, low and level, and she turned to a man she knew at once for the Duke though no one had named him. He could be no one else. He stood taller than Sylvester and darker, broader through the shoulder, and held himself with the stillness of a man who had learnt that movement invited remark. He bowed, flawless and wholly cold.

“Your Grace,” she said.

“My brother tells me you suffered an inconvenience on the road.”

“He was kind enough to make it a great deal less inconvenient than it might have been.”

“Sylvester has always had a talent for making inconvenience appear charming.” He said it without colour, watching her, and she could not for her life tell whether she had been paid a compliment or handed a warning dressed to resemble one.

“You see?” Sylvester laughed at her side. “He growls even while he is agreeing. It is his only music, and we have all of us learnt the steps to it.”

The Duke did not smile. He held her eyes a moment past comfort, as though weighing a thing he did not mean to share, then bowed again and was gone into the crowd, and the warmth of the room seemed to drop by a degree as he went.

“He does not like me,” Helena said, when Sylvester led her out for the second.

“Rhysand does not like noise, or laughter, or most evidence that the species means to carry on regardless.” He turned her under his arm. “You must not take it for yourself. He dislikes me, and I am the best thing that has ever happened to him. Ask anyone in the room. Ask him, if you have a free hour and a strong constitution.”

“That seems a very lonely way to pass a life.”

“He calls it duty.” For half a bar, the polish went out of his voice. “He has called a great many lonely things duty over the years. It spares him the bother of calling them by their proper names. Our father taught him the trick and was proud of how well he took to it, and I was let off the lesson for being the spare. No one minds what shape a spare grows into.”

“You sound almost sorry for him.”

“I am never sorry for Rhysand. He would return it with interest and attach a short lecture.” The brightness came back up over whatever had briefly shown beneath it.

“And were you ever sorry for yourself? Being let off the lessons.”

“Never for a moment. I had the better end of the bargain by a mile.” He turned her, and the answer came a shade too quickly to be the whole of it. “He took the title and the sermons and the early mornings in the cold. I was given leave to be liked instead, which is far pleasanter work and pays nearly as well. I have always held that I had the best of it. I have only lately begun to wonder whether anyone troubled to ask either of us which we should have chosen.”

“And if they had asked you?”

“Then I should have given a charming answer and meant none of it, which is the one thing I do better than dance.” He smiled the question off. “Now cease asking after my brother while you are dancing with me. It is very bad for my character, and I keep so little of it about me as it is.”

 

***

 

Rhysand had known it the moment Sylvester led her in, and had spent the hour since building reasons it did not signify.

She listened, which was the first thing he noticed and the least convenient of them. She gave whoever spoke the whole of her attention, head tipped, eyes on the speaker’s face, none of the practised half-attention with which young women surveyed a room for better prospects over a partner’s shoulder. She had grieved lately, and grieved still, quietly, in the seams of an evening she had plainly meant to enjoy. And she looked at Sylvester as though he had done a noble thing.

“You frightened the girl,” the Dowager said, arriving at his shoulder with a glass she had no intention of drinking.

“I spoke to her for the length of a minute.”

“You spoke to her for the length of a minute in the voice you keep for tenants behind on their rent. The poor child could not decide whether to curtsy or run.” His mother followed his line of sight to where Sylvester turned Helena beneath his arm. “She is a sweet thing. Better than he deserves, and exactly the sort he spoils without intending to, which is the only sort he ever finds, because the hard ones see him coming a mile off.”

“You have decided a great deal in so short a time.”

“I never decide. I observe, and then suffer the inconvenience of being proved right.” She sipped after all. “I am fond of your brother, Rhysand. It is permitted. He is fond of me in return, which is a good deal more than you trouble to be on most days of the week.”

“I am fond of you, Mother. I merely decline to say so where you can put it to use against me.”

“There.” Her mouth curved. “That was very nearly charming. Practise it. You may have need of it before the summer is out, though I could not yet tell you why I think so.” She drifted off into the candlelight and left the remark sitting where she had set it, exactly where he would trip on it later.

He found Sylvester by the card room when the second dance ended, between a potted palm and a tray of glasses, well pleased with the evening and with himself.

“Do not trifle with Miss Fairford,” Rhysand said.

“You have exchanged ten words with the woman, and already you sound like her guardian.” Sylvester chose a glass without hurry. “It is a remarkable economy of acquaintance, even for you.”

“She seems respectable.”

“How tragic for her. Am I forbidden from admiring respectable women now, or only from being admired by them in return?”

“You are forbidden from damaging them.”

“I have damaged no one.” The ease flickered, there and gone. “I found a lady’s purse in a hedge and earned two dances for my pains. If that is damage, the magistrates have been asleep at their posts for years.”

“You are enjoying this.”

“I am enjoying a glass of indifferent claret and a conversation I never asked for. The two are quite unrelated.” Sylvester set the glass down at last. “You have appointed yourself the lady’s protector on the strength of one bow and a frown. Has it crossed your mind that she might prefer the brother who smiles at her?”

“It has crossed my mind that she does not yet know you well enough to distrust you.”

“No one ever knows enough. That is rather the point of risk, and the only reason anyone dares to take one.” He smiled. “You would have her informed first. A signed schedule of every fault, initialled in advance. It is a wonder you were ever born at all, with Father drawing up the terms.”

“You earned those dances by a means you have not told me. You would have told me otherwise, since you tell me everything that flatters you and nothing that does not, and you have not breathed a word of how the coin came to be found.” Rhysand kept his voice beneath the music. “I am asking you once, as your brother. Do not make sport of her.”

“And if I do?”

“Then I shall think less of you than I do tonight, and I had not believed I had room left in me to do it.”

Sylvester drank, and smiled, and gave him nothing whatever, which was its own plain answer.

Rhysand left him there and crossed back towards the long room, meaning to serve his half-hour among the neighbours and then go up. He did not reach them. Across the floor, Miss Fairford stood at the edge of the dancing with one hand pressed to her collarbone, laughing at something her sister had said, the whole of her face given over to it without guard, the way a person laughs who has not yet learnt to count the cost of spending it.

The sound reached him beneath the low music and the murmur of the tables, and did precisely what he had spent the hour insisting it could not.

She was not for him. The fact would have to be built into a wall, and built quickly, before it was given the chance to become a wound.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“I have brought you the whole of the spring,” Sylvester said, “or as much of it as the Allardyces’ gardener would surrender without sending for help.”

He filled the doorway of the small parlour with an armful of flowers and an air of enormous satisfaction, and Helena rose with her heart performing the precise manoeuvre she had forbidden it.

“My lord, you did not need to bring me anything.”

“I never do a thing because I need to. It is the entire secret of a contented life.” He laid the flowers across her arms, far more than any one vase would take. “I feared you might forget me, now that grander gentlemen have had their chance to bore you at length.”

“I do not forget my rescuers.”

“Then I must arrange to rescue you again very soon, before the memory thins. It is the only hold I have on you, and I mean to keep it in good repair.”

Marianne sat by the window with her needlework and did not look up. “Do you rescue ladies often, my lord?”

“Only when they are worth the mud on my boots, Miss Marianne. I am exceedingly particular about my boots.”

“And how quickly do you generally decide the worth?”

“I am tragically swift in every matter of admiration. It is a failing. I have given up all hope of mending it.”

Helena laughed. Marianne did not, and set another stitch with the air of a woman noting a date she meant to produce in evidence later.

“Your sister does not approve of me,” Sylvester said, not troubling to lower his voice.

“My sister approves of no one until they have survived a winter of her acquaintance.” Helena buried her face a moment in the flowers. “You are barely into your second week. There is a great deal of frost ahead of you yet.”

“A whole winter. I shall have to take rooms in the village and apply myself like a scholar.” He turned the full warmth of his attention back to her. “Tell me one true thing about yourself, Miss Fairford, before your sister has me stitched into a villain. One thing nobody else has thought to ask.”

“I keep my mother’s household, and I keep it better than my father ever did.”

“That is not a confession. That is a reference, and a glowing one.”

“You asked for true, my lord, not for flattering.”

“With you, it appears they are the same article. How very inconvenient for the rest of us, who depend on the difference.”

The maid announced the Duke of Pecking before Helena had found a vase, and the warmth went out of the little room as though a window had been thrown open onto a colder month.

“Sylvester.” Rhysand stood in the doorway with his hat in his hand, taking in the flowers, the laughter, the whole bright scene, and gave none of it back. “The tenants at Morton Farm have been waiting since ten.”

“Then they have had the rare pleasure of anticipation. You are forever telling me it builds the character.”

“Anticipation does not mend a roof.” He inclined his head to Helena the exact distance courtesy required and not a hair beyond it. “Miss Fairford. Forgive the intrusion. I have come to take my brother away before he promises you the moon and leaves me to deliver it on a cart.”

He was gone before she could decide whether to be amused or stung, and took Sylvester with him, and the parlour felt smaller and duller for the loss of both, which Helena resented in two separate and unreconciled directions.

 

***

 

Rhysand had not meant to fetch his brother in person. He kept telling himself so the whole ride out, which was how he knew it for a lie.

The flowers were what stayed with him. An armful, absurd, theatrical, chosen to be carried rather than arranged, and Miss Fairford had stood holding them as though no one had brought her anything in years, which on what he had gathered of the Fairfords’ circumstances was very likely the plain truth. Standing in that doorway, he had caught himself wondering whether she cared more for roses or for violets, and had crushed the thought flat before it finished, and stayed angry the rest of the morning that it had formed at all.

“You might try being civil to her,” Sylvester said, posting along beside him.

“I was civil.”

“You were a draught under a door. The poor girl is convinced you despise her.”

“What she thinks of me is no concern of mine.”

“No?” Sylvester slid him a sideways look. “You rode four miles to collect me from her parlour when a note and a groom would have done it. I begin to suspect the roof at Morton Farm is the least leaky thing about this morning.”

“The roof is real. Your interest in it is not.” Rhysand kept his eyes on the road. “You said the same as a boy, you recall. After you put your elbow through the orangery glass and let the gardener stand for it.”

“I did not let him stand for it. I merely failed to step forward, which is a different crime and a lesser one, whatever you have decided in the long years since.”

“He lost his place over it.”

“And I have felt wretched about it for fifteen years, which is surely a steeper price than one pane of glass ever cost.” Sylvester’s voice did not lose its ease. “You keep a tally of my sins thicker than the parish register, Rhysand. Has it never once tired you to carry it?”

“It tires me past describing. I would set it down tomorrow if you gave me a single year without adding to the bottom of it.”

“A whole year.” Sylvester appeared to weigh the impossible figure. “You ask a great deal of a man of my gifts. I can pledge you a quarter, and even that I shall have to write upon my cuff so as not to mislay it by Thursday.”

 

***

 

Helena came upon him three days later in the churchyard, which she had not expected, and could not afterwards explain to herself why it pleased her as much as it did.

The Duke stood among the leaning stones with the vicar, the two of them bent over a list, and she caught the shape of the talk before the words, the cottages on the low lane, the widow Trent’s chimney, coal laid by before the autumn turned.

“You need not write my name against it, Mr Hollis,” Rhysand was saying. “Enter the money as ordinary parish repair and let the families keep their pride. They will take help they have not been made to beg for.”

“You are too good to them, Your Grace. They will come to expect it of you.”

“They expect remarkably little. That is the chief trouble with them, and the chief shame on the rest of us.”

“A duke earns a great deal of praise,” Helena said, before she had decided to speak at all, “for doing quietly what any decent man ought to do.”

He turned at the sound of her, the list still in his hand. “Then perhaps decent men ought to do it rather more often, and spare me the praise I have done nothing to earn.”

“I shall tell my sister you said so. She collects proofs of good character. She has gathered very little of yours, and would be glad of the addition.”

“My brother will be pleased to learn you approve of the parish.”

“I was speaking of you, Your Grace.”

“Then you were misdirected.” He made to go, then did not. “You do that a great deal, Miss Fairford. Press a kind word on a man as though daring him to refuse it.”

“And you refuse it as though it were a debt you would rather not be seen to owe.”

“Kind words are seldom free. Someone always comes round with the bill in the end.” He set his hat on his head. “I prefer to know the figure before I take the goods. It has saved me a great deal of disappointment, and cost me very nearly everything else.”

He was gone before she could find the answer to that, and she stood among the gravestones with the unfinished sentence in her hands like a thing he had let fall on purpose, to see whether she would pick it up.

The proposal came a week later, after a family luncheon at the Hall that the Dowager had plainly arranged in order to weigh Helena a second time.

“You are very quiet, Miss Fairford,” the Dowager said over the soup.

“I am attending, Your Grace. My sister says I do my best thinking with my mouth shut, and means it as correction rather than praise.”

“A rare gift in a young woman. Guard it. You will have more need of it in company than you can presently imagine.” The Dowager’s eyes moved to her younger son and softened in the tired way Helena was learning to recognise. “Sylvester, do not monopolise her at table. There are other people present, though you appear determined not to notice them.”

“You see how she casts me out,” Sylvester said when the ladies had risen.

Later, when the company had begun to wander into the gardens, he offered Helena his arm. “Walk with me before my mother adopts you outright. She has the look. I have watched her acquire two companions with that exact expression, and neither was ever permitted to escape.”

He led her along the terrace towards the old orangery behind the Hall. Its doors stood open to the evening air, and through the glass could be seen the other guests scattered along the garden walks.

“I have been happy a great many times, Miss Fairford.” He had stopped pretending to study the orange trees and was studying her instead. “I have been admired far more often than is good for any man. But with you, I find myself wanting to deserve the admiration. That is new, and inconvenient, and I do not find that I wish to be cured of it.”

“You already deserve it, my lord.”

“No.” He took her hand, and the brightness in him went very quiet. “I am charming, which is a cheaper article entirely and wears through at the elbows. But with you, I find myself wishing I were better than charming.”

Her fingers stilled in his. “That is a serious thing to say, my lord.”

“I know.” For once, he did not smile his way past it. “That is what alarms me.”

The glasshouse was warm and still, the doors open behind them to the low murmur of voices from the terrace. Helena thought of the flowers, and the coin restored to her palm, and the laughter he drew from her as though grief need not always be carried alone. She thought, too, of how little she truly knew him.

“You should not say such things lightly,” she said.

“I am not saying it lightly.” He bowed over her hand, his lips not quite touching her glove. “If this is an understanding, Miss Fairford, I think it is the first honest one I have ever entered into.”

She should have denied it. A sensible woman would have denied it at once, or at least asked for time to consider. Instead, she let her hand remain in his.

“Then be honest with it,” she said.

He let her go then, and for that one breath, he looked younger than his charm and very nearly afraid.

 

***

 

Rhysand found her in the portrait gallery a week into the engagement, alone at the long window, and made a thorough wreck of the only kind thing he had set out to do.

“Miss Fairford. My brother is easily pleased.”

“That is not a sin, Your Grace.”

“No. But men who are easily pleased are very often as easily diverted.” He heard the words come out too hard and could not gather them back. “Pleasure runs towards whatever is brightest in the room on a given evening. It does not stay merely because one has asked it to stay.”

“Are you warning me against your brother,” she said, turning from the glass with her colour high, “or judging me for having accepted him so readily?”

“I am warning you against mistaking the speed of feeling for proof of its constancy. A man may mean every word he says in one moment and mean something else just as sincerely in the next.”

“You have known him all your life, and you speak of him as though he cannot be trusted with his own feelings.”

“I speak of him as a brother who has never been required to keep anything once the pleasure of winning it has passed.”

“Then a part of the fault is yours, surely.” Her chin came up. “For always cleaning up after him. A man never permitted to mend his own breakages never learns the way of it. You have swept up after him so long he has forgotten he owns a pair of hands.”

It landed where she had aimed it. He had no answer ready, and the lack of one made his voice worse.

“You think I have made him what he is.”

“I think you have made it easier for him to remain so.” She paused. “And I think you are afraid too, Your Grace, though I cannot presume to know of what. You have decided to call the fear duty, so that no one will think to ask its proper name.”

He went very still. For the length of a breath, the gallery held nothing but the two of them and a wall of painted dead who had all, in their day, given their fears braver names.

“I am asking you to be careful. That is the whole of it.”

“And I am warning you, Your Grace, that coldness is not the same thing as wisdom, however many years you have spent confusing the one for the other.” She gathered her shawl from the sill. “Your brother at least troubles himself to be kind to me. You cannot manage even that much, and then you call the failure honesty and expect to be admired for it.”

She left him there in the long gallery with the painted Birchwoods frowning down the wall at him, and he stood and let them, because on the only point that mattered, they were entirely right.

He had meant to spare her a humiliation he could see arriving the way a farmer sees weather. Instead, he had stood there sounding hard, cold, and bitter enough to make even the truth look ungenerous. She had heard the warning and the resentment tangled together beneath it, named what part of it she could, and gone.

 

***

 

Lady Rosamund Harbury arrived in the fifth week, and Helena understood before the first hour was out why the Dowager’s mouth had thinned at the mention of her.

“So this is Miss Fairford.” Rosamund looked her over with a thoroughness that stopped just short of rudeness. “Sylvester, you wretch, you told me she was good. You never said she was pretty. I had braced myself for a saint and a very long evening.”

“She is both, as it happens,” Sylvester said. “I am as astonished as anyone.”

“Both is a dangerous condition. One quality is always trying to murder the other.” Rosamund turned her smile on Helena, warm in shape and cold in substance. “I wish you joy of him, my dear. Sylvester is excellent company, provided one never expects him to remain where one last put him.”

“Then I shall have to learn not to put him anywhere too carefully,” Helena said.

Rosamund laughed, surprised into it, and Sylvester laughed with her in the same instant, in the same key, as though the pair of them had remembered an older conversation and stepped neatly back into it. That was the thing Helena carried home.

“He was strange tonight,” she said to Marianne in the carriage.

“He was not strange. That is what troubles me.” Marianne drew the rug across both their knees. “Helena, listen to me once, and then I shall let it lie. A man who is in earnest should not grow brighter the moment another woman enters the room.”

“He was being polite.”

“He was being himself. There is a difference.”

“The wedding is near. Everyone is unsettled before a wedding.”

“Some people. Some weddings.” Marianne let it go then, which was far worse than if she had pressed.

The night before the wedding, Helena went down for air she did not need and found them in the garden, beneath the limes, where the lamplight thinned almost to nothing.

Sylvester had Rosamund’s hand in his. She was laughing softly, with the ease of an old intimacy, and they drew apart when Helena’s step sounded on the gravel, not guiltily enough to condemn them and not quickly enough to comfort her.

“Lady Rosamund was showing me a ring,” Sylvester said at once. “Her husband’s. She wears it still, which I find rather touching in a woman the county has agreed has no heart.”

“You were holding her hand.”

“For half a moment.” He crossed to Helena and took up her hand in place of the one he had released. “You are not jealous, Helena. Tell me you are not.”

“I am not jealous.”

“Good.” His smile softened, and the whole warm weight of him returned to her. “I should hate to have made you the wrong sort of sentimental on the eve of making you mine.”

The words ought to have comforted her. Perhaps they did. Perhaps she only needed them to.

“And are you sentimental tonight?” she asked.

“Tonight?” He lifted her gloved fingers to his lips. “Tonight I am sentimental about tomorrow, and about nothing in the world that came before it.”

He kissed her hand, and Helena, standing in the garden the night before she was to be married, chose to believe him, because the other choice was one she had already bought a gown against.

From a window above, Rhysand watched the three of them gather and part again in the failing lamplight. He could prove nothing. He understood too much. The helplessness of holding both truths at once made him feel ill.

He could not go to her with a suspicion. A suspicion carried to a woman on the night before her wedding could ruin her as surely as the deed itself, and she would never believe it had come from anywhere but spite.

She would not be wholly wrong.

If Sylvester shamed her tomorrow, Rhysand would not forgive him for as long as he drew breath. And if, alone in the dark of his own room, he allowed himself to name why the dread had teeth in it, he would never again forgive himself.