Chapter One

 

 

The fan stopped moving first.

Lady Bracken had been working it in short strokes for the better part of a minute while she inspected Selina like a length of cloth of uncertain weave, turning her a little towards the light, and it was the stillness of the fan rather than the question that told Selina the interview had already gone wrong.

“Can you keep silent when corrected?” The fan lay shut across the lady’s knuckles.

“That would depend entirely upon whether the correction is accurate, madam.” Selina kept both hands on the reticule in her lap and did not move them.

The assembly room at Harcourt House had been arranged for exactly this. Chairs in rows for the impoverished gentlewomen, small tables for the ladies who came to inspect them.

“I beg your pardon?” The fan had not moved again.

“You asked whether I can keep silent when corrected, and I answered honestly. A false correction deserves a reply and a true one deserves attention. I am capable of both. I confess I cannot promise the first without knowing which sort you intend to offer.”

A silence spread across the little table, brief and total. Behind Selina, a chair scraped, and a matron laughed at a joke that had nothing to do with her.

“You are insolent,” Lady Bracken said.

“I am accurate.” Selina met the look and held it. “The two are frequently mistaken for one another by people who prefer to be agreed with.”

“My last companion never once contradicted me in eleven months.” The fan came open again and went faster than before.

“Then I imagine you were wrong at least once in that time and never had the benefit of hearing so, madam.” Selina let a moment pass. “I mention it only because you asked.”

Lady Bracken drew herself up, and the two feathers in her turban trembled with a wrath the rest of her was too well-bred to show. “You may go, Miss Gray. I require a companion, not a debating society.”

Selina rose from the low chair without hurry, inclined her head at precisely the correct depth, and gathered the plain reticule that held everything she still owned worth carrying. Rising made the room tilt a little at its edges. She waited for it to right itself and did not touch the back of the chair.

“Then I wish you a companion who keeps silent, madam.” She was already turning as she said it.

She walked away before Lady Bracken could summon a reply. The grey gown she wore had been chosen for its power to make her unremarkable, wool the colour of a rainy afternoon, and six months of wearing it had taught her to cross a room without troubling it. Most days she managed. Today her tongue had betrayed her twice before noon.

She found a place against the far wall where a tall window let in the thin light of a London morning, and pretended to study the street below. Carriages passed. At the corner, a crossing-sweeper worked with his head bowed, clearing a path through the wet muck for pedestrians who never came.

She counted her money in her head, a habit she despised and could not break. Two more weeks of the lodging house. Bread at six that morning, the end of the loaf, and coffee behind her now on a charity table with little iced cakes ranged around the urn, and the smell of it reached her at the window and closed a hand around the back of her throat. She kept her face to the glass. After that, a decision she had been refusing to name for a fortnight and would have to name by Tuesday.

“You did not want the position.”

The voice came from her left, low and dry. A gentleman stood perhaps three feet away with his hands clasped behind his back, tall, dark-haired, dressed with a restraint that had cost more than display would have. His face was not kind. It was attentive, which was rarer.

“I wanted the salary, sir.” She turned only as far as she had to. “The position was merely attached to it.”

“And yet you spoke yourself out of both inside a quarter hour,” he said.

“A mistress who cannot bear an honest answer at the interview will bear one still less across a year of employment.” Selina drew her glove smooth at the wrist. “It seemed economical to disappoint her now rather than by degrees.”

The corner of his mouth moved in a way that was not quite a smile. “You are either very foolish or very tired.”

“Must it be only one?”

He looked at her a moment longer, and Selina held his gaze. Around them, the assembly murmured on, and the urn hissed, and a spoon rang against a saucer.

“You watched all that,” she said. “From over there, beside the pillar, with your hands clasped behind your back and your judgement already formed. I do not care to serve as an entertainment, sir.”

“You were not an entertainment.” He appeared to consider whether to continue, but ventured no further than, “You were the only person in the room worth watching.”

“And now you have come to inspect the specimen more closely.” Her chin had risen, and she made no effort to lower it.

“I have come to offer you employment.” He paused, and when he continued, his tone held something very like a warning. “I would not spend the next several minutes insulting the only person here who has approached you with kindness.”

She inclined her head, conceding the point. “Then you have the advantage of me, sir, which I imagine is a condition you find agreeable.”

“I am Wexford.”

The name arrived with weight. Everyone had heard it; the Duke of Wexford who kept to his estates and his committees and was said to have buried whatever softness he owned in the same year he buried his father. She had not expected him to be so young. Four-and-thirty at the outside, and looking at a dismissed companion as if her answers were worth collecting.

“Then I am fortunate that you overheard my disgrace,” she said, “since a duke can have no possible use for a debating society either.”

“On the contrary. I have a sister who is sorely in need of one, and a house that has grown too quiet to argue with itself.” He turned slightly towards the window. “Will you sit?”

He indicated a small table set apart from the others, half concealed by a potted palm which some optimist had placed there in the hope of lending the room the air of a conservatory. Selina hesitated.

“You do not know my name, Your Grace.” She made no move towards the chair.

“You gave it as Gray.”

“I did.”

“Then let us begin there.”

He sat and waited for her to do the same. Selina took the chair opposite him. The palm cast its ragged shadow across the cloth in long, divided fingers. She folded her hands in her lap, beneath the table where he could not see them, and prepared to lie.

“How long have you been seeking a position?” he asked.

“Six months.” She had the answer prepared, yet it still cost her something to give it.

“And in that time?”

“Three offers, two of them withdrawn. Ladies find me unobjectionable until they discover that I read, at which point they conclude I must be concealing an opinion, which I generally am.”

“And the third?”

“It came from a gentleman whose intentions proved not to be secretarial. I declined in language he found memorable.”

His expression did not change. The set of his shoulders did.

“And before those six months?”

Selina straightened the cuff of her glove, though it required no attention. It had been darned twice at the wrist. The work was neat, but she covered it with her other hand nonetheless. “A situation in the country. Suffolk.”

“Doing what?”

“Acting as companion to an elderly lady who neither went out nor received visitors. I read to her. I answered such letters as came, which were few, and wound the clocks, of which there were a great many.”

“For how long?”

“Three years.”

“And the situation ended?”

“She died.” Selina allowed the two words to rest between them for precisely as long as they were worth. “Her family had no further use for me. They were very civil about it. A character, a fortnight’s wages, and a place on the carrier’s cart as far as the Norwich road. The gate had shut behind me before the horse had even turned.”

He waited, but she did not fill the silence. Three years stood behind that account, and none of them belonged to him. She had no intention of handing them across the table while the salary remained unnamed.

“You do not care to speak of Suffolk,” he said.

“There is nothing in Suffolk to speak of. That is rather the point of Suffolk, Your Grace.”

He let the matter rest, which surprised her, and therefore made her distrust him.

“Where were you raised?”

“In the country.” She turned her hands over in her lap. “In a modest establishment. My father held some land.”

“Held?”

“He is no longer in a position to hold anything.” The words emerged flatly, and she left them where they fell.

The duke turned his untouched glass of claret a quarter turn upon the table. The movement was so slight and deliberate that it could only have been intended to grant her a moment. Selina watched the wine settle. She had not eaten since six o’clock, and the sight of it left her light-headed, so she shifted her gaze to his hand instead.

“You have his eyes.”

“I could not say.” She resisted the impulse to touch her face. “I have never seen the resemblance myself.”

“The Earl of Merrow had grey eyes and a way of holding his chin that suggested the room had been arranged for his convenience.” He did not raise his voice for it, or lower it. “His daughter, I am told, inherited both.”

The window light seemed to grow colder. Selina kept her hands still in her lap, one thumb pressed hard into the opposite palm under the table, and did not permit her face to move.

“You were Lady Selina Calvert.”

“I was.”

“And now?”

“Now I am a woman in need of employment.”

For a long moment he said nothing. The assembly went on behind them, the small commerce of ruined gentlewomen and the ladies who purchased their attendance, and Selina waited for the thing she had waited for at every interview for six months, the tightening, the swift retreat.

It did not come. That was worse.

“Your father was convicted of murder,” Wexford said, in the tone another man might have used to remark upon the weather. “He was tried before his peers and hanged. Your family name was struck from every list that matters, and a good many that do not. You have lived under a false one ever since because the true one closes every door in England.”

“You have summarised eight years with admirable economy.” Selina placed both hands upon the edge of the table, where he could see them.

“Eight years.”

“I was seventeen when they took him. I am five-and-twenty now. Nothing that occurred between those two points would interest you.”

“I dislike wasting words,” he said.

“So I observe. Most people prefer to arrive at cruelty by a more scenic route.”

“Was that cruelty?”

“No,” she admitted, and the admission surprised her more than the question. “It was accurate. I object less to accuracy than to pity. Pity requires me to be grateful, and I have very little gratitude left in stock.”

This time, he did smile, faintly. It altered his whole difficult face, and Selina turned her attention to the palm’s shadow upon the cloth until she had finished noticing the change.

“Tell me how you came to be here,” he said. “The particulars, not the account you have prepared for interviews.”

“You would know the difference?”

“I would.”

She considered him. She had told the arranged version forty times, and it had never once earned her a place. Perhaps the truth would fail differently.

“When my father was taken, our house was sold to pay what he owed and a good deal that he did not,” she said. “My mother died within the year. Grief, the physician called it, and I have never found a better word for a heart asked to carry more than it was given. There were no relations who would own us. There was one who might have, and did not. I sold what I could and took the name Gray, because my own is a sentence rather than a name. That is the whole of it, Your Grace. It does not improve with ornament.”

The Duke was quiet. Behind them a woman was being told, in the bright false voice of charity, that she would suit very well, and the woman was thanking her benefactress like somebody hauled out of a river.

“I have a sister,” Wexford said at last. “Georgiana. She is nineteen, clever, and convinced that the world was arranged for the express purpose of boring her. She has driven away four companions in the past year. The last departed in tears and took with her a clock of which she had grown particularly fond.” He paused. “I do not want a woman whom my sister can frighten.”

“You wish to hire my rudeness.” Selina considered the notion and found that it did not offend her.

“Your spine,” he said. “The rudeness I shall deduct from your wages.”

The offer lay between them, absurd and enormous, while the practical part of her mind was already weighing the salary against the fortnight’s lodging that was all that stood between her and the street.

“You would take the daughter of a convicted murderer into your house,” she said. “And place her near your sister.”

“I would take a woman of sense into a house that has none to spare.” He said it without ceremony, as another man might state a sum.

“And if your household discovers who I am?” Her hands had drawn together again upon the table.

“Then they will regret it.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one I can give without lying.” His hand settled flat upon the cloth and remained there. “I cannot promise that you will never be recognised. I can promise that, in my house, it will cost whoever recognises you more than it costs you. That is what I have to offer.”

“You are very certain of your household.”

“I have never had cause to be otherwise.”

“Then you have been fortunate and mistaken it for management.” She smoothed her glove over her knuckles once more. “I hope you are never taught the difference.”

He regarded her with a look that held equal parts interest and warning. “You think me arrogant.”

“I think you have not yet encountered the thing that would teach you not to be.” She did not look away. “I hope, for both our sakes, that I am not it.”

The salary he named a moment later sent her gaze to the window and held it there, for it meant the difference between a room of her own and one shared with three strangers; between a future and the absence of one. Long ago, she had promised herself that she would not weep before those who held her fate in their hands. She kept that promise now by the narrowest of margins, fixing her attention upon a chimney across the street.

“You have not asked whether I did it,” she said, once she could trust her voice. “The theft, I mean. The one your sister’s former companions will be whispering about within the week. Whether a murderer’s daughter can be trusted near the plate.”

“I do not require an answer. If you steal from me, I shall dismiss you, and you will have squandered your one good reference.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “You are too intelligent to be a thief. A thief must believe the day will go well.”

“And what am I?” Her hands had grown still upon the edge of the table.

He did not answer at once. He turned the glass another quarter turn, frowned at it, then pushed it an inch away across the cloth. The frown remained.

“A thing that lasts,” he said. He appeared dissatisfied with the answer, but made no attempt to improve upon it.

A brief, unwilling laugh escaped her and startled them both. She pressed her lips together at once.

“Tell me about your sister,” she said, recovering herself. “If I am to keep her from frightening me, I should like to know what form the frightening takes.”

“She is not cruel. She is nineteen and lonely, and has decided that boldness is a cure for both. She reads novels her governess did not select. She receives letters she does not show me. She speaks of officers and masquerades with a fondness I find alarming.” He moved one shoulder again, though the gesture did not suit him. “Four companions have attempted to manage her through disapproval.”

“Then four companions were fools. Disapproval is a kind of company, and a lonely girl will accept the company and preserve the fault.”

He looked at her sharply. “You have met my sister.”

“I have met myself at nineteen, which is very nearly the same and considerably cheaper to consult.” She rested one finger upon the edge of the table. “Was she given her freedom too late or too early?”

“Too late.” He addressed the answer to his glass. “I kept her close after our father died. I believed it a kindness.”

“It was a cage. She has spent a year testing the bars, and now you are surprised to find them worn.” Selina heard herself half a beat after the words had escaped and withdrew her hand into her lap. “Forgive me. You have not hired me to correct you before I have earned my first quarter’s wages.”

“I have not hired you at all yet,” he said, without rancour. “And yet you speak as though you have accepted.”

“I find that I have.” She did not look towards the reticule. “I merely wished you to understand what you were purchasing, since you were good enough to tell me what I was.”

“You may take some time to consider it.” Wexford rose, and the palm’s shadow slipped from the cloth and climbed the front of his coat. “I do not require an answer today.”

“I require no further consideration. I accept.” She rose as she spoke and took hold of the reticule with both hands. The room remained where it belonged. “I should be a poor sort of anything if I hesitated over the only rope thrown to me in six months.”

“Then it is settled. My carriage is outside. Collect your belongings and come with me now, unless there is someone you must inform.”

“There is no one.”

He did not offer her sympathy for that. He held out his arm. After a moment, Selina rested her gloved hand on it, and they crossed the great assembly room together, past the tables and the rows of chairs and the small hard commerce of the morning.

Heads turned as they went. Selina had expected that and disregarded it. What she had not expected was the other kind of attention, particular and warm, that reached her as they neared the doors and made the back of her neck go cold.

She turned her head without meaning to.

A gentleman stood by the far wall, well apart from the placement tables, dressed a shade too well for a charitable morning. Perhaps five-and-thirty, handsome in the manner of a man who had spent his handsomeness carelessly and had begun to run short of it. He was watching her. Not the Duke. Her. When her eyes met his, he did not look away as a stranger would. He smiled, slowly, and inclined his head the smallest degree, the way one does to a person one has already been introduced to.

She had never seen him before. She was almost certain of it.

“Miss Gray?” The duke had paused at the door, watching her with that attentive stillness of his.

“Forgive me, Your Grace.” Her hand had tightened on his sleeve, and she took it away. “I was collecting my nerve.”

“Keep it in a safer pocket,” he said, and stood aside for her. “You will want it where you are going.”

He handed her into the carriage. The door shut on the grey morning and the horses moved off into the noise of the street, and Selina looked back once through the small window. The gentleman had come out to the assembly-room steps to watch the carriage go, his gloved hands folded in front of him, that same slow smile still on his face.

She faced forward again and put one hand inside the other in her lap, and pressed, and went on pressing until it hurt, and did not stop until the square was behind them.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

There was ink on the third finger of her right hand, worked into the skin at the side of the nail, the sort that soap had given up on some while ago. Nathaniel had been looking at it for three streets.

He had told himself, three times since the carriage pulled away from Harcourt House, that the arrangement was practical. A companion for Georgiana. A spine his sister could not snap. A debt of common decency paid to a woman the world had used badly. A quiet house again by June. He assembled the reasons the way he assembled everything, in order, and set them where he could consult them, and not one of them accounted for the ink.

“You are staring at my hands, Your Grace.” She had not turned her head from the window to say it.

“There is ink on your third finger, and it has been there long enough to resist soap. You write.”

“I write.” She folded her hands into her lap the moment she noticed him looking. “Letters. Accounts. Lists. Apologies I never send.”

“Why do you not send them?”

“Because people would rather condemn me than understand me, and an apology asks them to relinquish the one in favour of the other. They resent being asked. I have ceased to ask.”

“That is a remarkably complete philosophy for a woman of five-and-twenty.”

“Grief is an excellent tutor. Expensive, but thorough.”

He looked out of the window rather than answer. The streets of Mayfair passed in their ordered greyness. His reflection regarded him from the glass: dark and composed, wearing the face he presented to committees and to the occasional woman who imagined she might thaw it.

“You will find my sister difficult,” he said. “I told you as much. But difficult is the whole of it. She is not vicious. She is nineteen and unhappy, and cannot be persuaded that anyone has ever been unhappy before her.”

“Then she is nineteen.” Selina smoothed her gloves over her knuckles, one finger after another. “You need not brief me upon your sister. I have been nineteen and unhappy. I know the country intimately.”

“You keep saying so.”

“You keep needing to hear it.”

He allowed a silence to follow; the sort he employed in committee rooms to make a man reconsider what he had just said. It had no effect upon her. She remained with her hands folded and her attention fixed upon the passing street, declining the silence as one might decline a dish offered for the second time.

“You are not curious,” he said at last. “Most people in your position would be. A duke’s house, a duke’s sister, a salary that alters their entire future… They would ask questions throughout the drive. You ask nothing.”

“Because you are answering them already, and the answers a man offers unprompted are generally the better ones.” She did not turn from the window. “You have told me that your sister is not vicious, which means someone has recently suggested that she is. You have explained at considerable length why you require a companion for her, which means you are not entirely certain that hiring me was wise.”

Nathaniel turned and looked at her fully for the first time since the carriage door had closed. She met his gaze without flinching. There was nothing insolent in her expression, only a steady and unwelcome accuracy; the look of someone who had read a document he had believed was his alone to possess.

“You are going to be trouble,” he said.

“You hired me to make trouble for your sister.” She turned back to the window. “You specified no limit, and I agreed to none.”

The carriage turned in at the gates of Wexford House, and the conversation ended as conversations with her seemed to end, with him half a step behind and disinclined to admit it.

The house received them in its usual manner, which was to say coldly and correctly, footmen at the door and the great staircase rising into shadow. Nathaniel handed Miss Gray down himself, which he had not planned to do.

She stood for a moment upon the gravel, her single small box beside her, and looked up the full height of the house, from the front door to the roof. Then she drew a breath and seized the box before any of the footmen could reach it.

Nathaniel was still composing a suitable remark upon this when they entered the hall and the drawing-room doors flew open. His sister came through them at speed.

“Another one,” Georgiana said. “You have brought me another keeper. I counted the wheels upon the gravel and knew it was you, and I said to Hannah, ‘That will be Nathaniel with a fresh gaoler.’ And here you are, and here she is, and she is dressed in grey, which I suppose is intended to assure me that she possesses no imagination.”

“Georgiana.”

“Do not ‘Georgiana’ me in that voice.” She stood upon the bottom stair to gain a little height, her hands clasped behind her back like a child before a tutor. “I am nineteen, not nine, and I will not be handed a companion like a parcel with the direction written upon it.”

“You will be civil to Miss Gray,” Nathaniel said. “She has done nothing to earn your temper except arrive.”

“I am always civil. I am so civil that I could scream, and screaming would at least be… well, it would be a change.” Georgiana turned the full force of her youth upon Miss Gray. “Well? Are you going to tell me that I shall grow to like the arrangement? The last one told me that. She remained six weeks and left with my clock.”

Nathaniel drew breath to intervene. This was the point at which the previous four had wilted, and he had grown weary of apologising to departing gentlewomen in his own hall.

Miss Gray spoke first.

“I have no intention of telling you that you will like it,” she said. She had not moved from where the footman had left her, nor did she step nearer now. “You will very probably dislike it for some time, and you are entitled to do so. Being managed is disagreeable, and being managed by a stranger whom your brother selected without consulting you is worse. If it offers any comfort, I was not consulted either. He decided that I would suit before I had finished insulting a baronet’s wife, and I agreed to let the matter be decided for me because I require the wages. In that sense, we are both parcels. I merely intend to be a parcel who reads the same books you do and does not report their contents to your brother.”

Georgiana’s mouth opened and closed. She glanced at her brother to determine whether the speech had been arranged between them, only to find him standing in his own hall, his gloves still in his hand and no more notion of what was coming than she had possessed. Her fury found nowhere to go.

“You will not report to him?” Georgiana had stepped down from the stair without appearing to notice it.

“I will keep you from harm, and I will keep your confidence in every matter that does not place you in harm’s way. You may test me upon that point whenever you please. You will find that it holds.”

“That is not what companions say.” Georgiana watched her sideways now, as a horse might watch an unfamiliar gate.

“I am aware. I have met several.” Selina set her reticule upon the hall table at last, as though the matter had been settled and they might all cease standing. “They said a great many gentle things and meant most of them, yet they were dismissed regardless. I intend to be useful instead.”

Georgiana stared at her for another moment. Then her shoulders lowered half an inch; the first sign of a truce Nathaniel had spent a year failing to broker.

“You may stay for dinner,” Georgiana pronounced. She gave the bell-pull an unnecessarily violent tug and swept back through the doors she had flung open.

Nathaniel found Miss Gray watching him with an expression that was almost amused and entirely without triumph.

“You accomplished that in less than two minutes,” he said.

“I accomplished it because I am not afraid of her, and everyone she has encountered this past twelvemonth has been afraid of either her temper or your displeasure.” She retrieved her reticule. “A frightened woman will tell her whatever is required to preserve the peace. She has been lied to by people who love her, and she has perceived it. That is why she is reckless, but no worse.”

He had no answer to that either. It was becoming a habit.

She was conducted upstairs, the door of her room closed behind her, and the house resumed the silence it had maintained for a year. Nathaniel remained in the hall rather longer than his business there required.

 

***

 

The following evening, the household sat down to dinner as a household rather than a collision, and Nathaniel briefly permitted himself to believe that he had solved a problem.

He ought to have known better. Georgiana had spent the day rehearsing.

“I have decided,” his sister announced over the soup, “that I shall attend Mrs Ottley’s masquerade after all. Everyone is going, or very nearly everyone, and Colonel Aldous will be there with half his regiment. Mrs Ottley admits absolutely anyone, which is precisely why it will be worth attending, because dull houses admit only dull people. It is a law. I have observed it in operation.”

“You will not attend Mrs Ottley’s,” Nathaniel said.

“Because you say so?”

“Because Mrs Ottley collects scandal as other women collect fans, and she selects her guests to supply it.” He set down his spoon. “Her invitations are issued for her benefit, not yours.”

“You see danger in a set of quadrilles.” Georgiana put down her spoon sharply enough for it to ring against the bowl. “You see danger in everything. If I so much as speak to an officer, you behave as though I had fled to Gretna Green in my shift.”

“Georgiana.”

“There it is again. That voice.” Georgiana appealed to Miss Gray across the table. “My brother claims to have one tone for managing horses and another for managing me, but I assure you they are precisely alike. You are here to advise me, so advise me.”

The trap had been laid with some skill. Nathaniel had walked into it before, and the encounter always ended in the same fashion: he delivered a final word, Georgiana answered with a wounded one, and the two of them did not speak for three days. He prepared to be final.

“Colonel Aldous,” Miss Gray said pleasantly, before he could begin. “Is he the tall one, or the one who laughs before he has finished telling his own jokes?”

Georgiana blinked. “The tall one. You know him?”

“I know the type.” Selina set down her spoon and gave the girl her undivided attention, more than anyone at that table had managed in a year. “A man who is charming to every young woman at a masquerade is not being charming to you. He is merely being charming in your vicinity. It costs him nothing, while you are expected to pay full price for it, and you strike me as someone who dislikes being cheated.”

“I never said I wished to marry the man.” Georgiana had coloured to the tips of her ears. “I said only that he would be there.”

“Then you wish to be in an interesting house, wearing a fine gown and receiving the admiration of people whose approval costs you nothing to collect. There is no harm in that at nineteen. The danger lies in the house itself. Mrs Ottley neither can nor cares to distinguish between a girl who wishes to be admired and one who wishes to be ruined, because another young woman’s ruin will fill her rooms the following Season. Your intentions may be perfectly innocent, but the company would not be.”

Georgiana looked from her brother to her new companion and back again, then set down her wine untasted.

“You are supposed to take my side,” she said. “You said that you were not his spy.”

“I am not. I have told him nothing that you did not say aloud at this table.” Selina turned her glass a little by the stem, then left it untouched. “I am telling you to your face that the masquerade is a poor idea. That is my own opinion. If you choose to go regardless, I shall accompany you, stand between you and Mrs Ottley’s more profitable guests, behave in an exceedingly tiresome fashion, and spoil your evening thoroughly. You will detest me and remain perfectly safe. That is the arrangement I recommend.”

“You would truly come and spoil it?” Georgiana had forgotten to be angry and had not yet noticed.

“Thoroughly. I have a gift for it. I can render any room dull merely by standing in it with a disapproving posture. Colonel Aldous would find you guarded by a grey woman who answered every gallantry with an enquiry after his mother. He would retreat within a quarter of an hour. They always do.”

“That is a horrid thing to offer a girl,” Georgiana said.

“It is what I have to offer: a tiresome chaperone, and your name still your own at the end of the evening. No one else this Season will offer you anything half so dull.”

A short silence held the table. Then Georgiana laughed, unwillingly, exactly as Nathaniel had laughed unwillingly in the carriage, and the sound sat oddly in a dining room that had not heard much of it in a year. At the sideboard the footman looked hard at the wall and went on looking at it.

It was as his sister reached for her wine, still laughing, that Nathaniel saw the letter.

It had been folded small and tucked under the rim of her plate, half hidden by the linen, and when the footman moved to change the course, Georgiana’s hand went out and drew it under the edge of the cloth into her lap with a smoothness that no innocent errand ever wore. She did it without breaking the rhythm of her laughter. She did it the way a practised hand does a thing it has done before.

He said nothing. Speaking would have turned the whole table, and the letter would have vanished, and he would have gained a quarrel and lost the knowledge. He watched the small white corner disappear into the folds of her gown, and let the dinner proceed, and did not taste the rest of it.

 

***

 

He found Miss Gray afterwards in the corridor outside the library, where she had gone to fetch a book with an ease that suggested she had already claimed the room in her mind. The corridor was cold. She had a single candle and had set it on the sill behind her, so that her face was the darkest thing in it.

“You saw it,” she said, before he spoke.

“You saw me see it.” He had stopped a yard short of her and gone no nearer.

“You became very still. You are not still by nature; you are still by discipline, and that discipline slipped for half a moment.” She held the book against her chest, both arms folded over it. “She is receiving letters at the dinner table. You wish to know who sends them.”

“I wish to open her door and take the thing from whatever drawer she has hidden it in.”

“And you must not.”

“She is my sister.” His voice rose, and he mastered it again. “She is my ward. This is my house.”

“And she is nineteen and lonely. If she is corresponding with a man and has learnt to conceal it so well, then he may be patient; and a patient man who encourages secrecy ought to be treated with caution. Tear the letter from her hand tonight, and she will not cease writing to him. She will merely become better at hiding it. You may exchange a letter you have some hope of discovering for a secret you never will.”

“You are telling me to do nothing.”

“I am telling you to wait, and to make yourself someone she may one day choose to tell.” Her chin lowered a fraction. “Shame her and she will retreat into silence, and silence is where she lived before all this began.”

“And meanwhile, the letters continue.” His hand closed around the corner of the shelf beside him.

“Meanwhile, you discover who sends them, which you cannot do if you frighten her into burning every letter unread. If a man is guiding her in this, he may already have taught her to expect precisely the confrontation you intend. What he may not have anticipated is a brother who does not force the door, and a companion whose presence he does not yet know to fear.”

“You would set yourself against him, whoever he may be.”

“I would keep a careful eye upon the matter. The ease with which she slipped that letter into her lap suggests that she has done so before. The precautions may be entirely her own, or someone may have encouraged them; we need not assume the worst, but neither should we ignore the possibility.” Her expression remained composed. “I have known men to make secrecy seem like cleverness.”

She stopped there, and the flatness of the last sentence had a floor under it a long way down. Nathaniel waited for the rest. It did not arrive.

He stood in the cold corridor and intensely disliked the fact that she was right. He had built his authority within this house upon being right, yet here was a woman he had employed only the previous day, correcting him in defiance of his every instinct. Worse still, when he examined that instinct honestly, it sat down beside her judgement and remained there.

“You make it difficult to resent you,” he said. “I wish you to understand that I intend to resent you regardless. Your judgement is sound, but your delivery is insufferable. I have not yet decided which of the two I mind more.”

“The soundness.” She was already turning towards the stairs. “You will have forgiven the delivery by Friday.”

She tucked her book beneath her arm, inclined her head, and left him alone in the corridor with the image of a small white letter disappearing into his sister’s lap.

He went upstairs an hour later. The house had completed its nightly business without him: the shutters closed, the fires banked, the last candles carried away. He ascended the great staircase through the darkness of his own hall as though it belonged to someone else.

On the landing, he stopped outside Georgiana’s door. He stood with one hand not quite touching it, long enough for the wax of his candle to run crookedly down one side. No light showed beneath the door, and no sound came from beyond it. He had given his word downstairs that he would not force his way inside. He had not promised that he would not stand there.

He slept poorly. He told himself it was the letter.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“Those are not gloves chosen for the drawing room, Lady Georgiana, which means you have no intention of remaining there.”

Georgiana went still upon the second stair from the bottom, one hand resting on the bannister and the other holding a bonnet which she had plainly hoped to carry as far as the side door before anyone remarked upon it. She was three days into their acquaintance and had already discovered that Selina rose early. She had not yet discovered that Selina sometimes did so expressly to forestall trouble.

“I was going to take the air.” She concealed the bonnet behind her skirts.

“Before breakfast, by way of the side door, in outdoor gloves, with a folded note tucked into your left cuff which the fabric does not quite conceal.” Selina came to the foot of the stairs and stopped, placing herself between Georgiana and the side door without appearing to do so. “You intended to take a good deal more than the air. Come. We shall take it together.”

“You said you were not my gaoler,” Georgiana said.

“I am not. A gaoler would wake your brother. I am proposing to walk with you instead, which is a far worse fate, because I intend to be pleasant about it.”

The girl’s face passed through three expressions in as many moments: calculation, fury, and a glimpse of the much younger child beneath them both. At last, it settled into a sullen truce. She descended the final two stairs slowly, making a point of every step.

Selina took her plain shawl from the hook beside the side door, and the two of them went out into the early morning together. The gravel lay damp beneath their feet, while the whole garden dripped around them, green, flattened by the night’s rain, and rich with the scent of turned earth.

They had walked as far as the yew hedge before Georgiana spoke.

“You are not going to ask where I was going?” She addressed the question to the hedge rather than to Selina.

“I do not need to ask. There is a gate in the far wall which the gardeners use. It opens onto the mews, and anyone waiting there at this hour is waiting for a girl who cannot be seen leaving by the front entrance.” Selina maintained an even pace and did not turn. “I wish to know only whether you intended to return before you were missed, or whether you contemplated a greater foolishness than one morning could contain.”

“I always come back.” Georgiana stopped walking as soon as she heard her own admission.

“Then this was not the first time. Thank you for telling me. You were not obliged to do so, and I shall remember that you did.” Selina stopped beside the sundial, which kept no useful time beneath such a sky, and turned to face her. “Who is he?”

Georgiana lifted her chin in precisely the manner her brother did; a family resemblance which both siblings would have been furious to have pointed out.

“You said you would not report to my brother.”

“I said I would keep your confidence in every matter that did not place you in harm’s way. This may do so. I cannot yet tell, because you have not given me his name, and without it I am walking in darkness beside a girl who has learnt to conceal letters at the dinner table.” She extended one hand, palm upwards, and held it between them. “Give me the name.”

For a long moment, the garden seemed to hold its breath. Then Georgiana looked towards the rain-beaten roses and said, very softly, “Mr Rowland. Mr Felix Rowland.”

The name struck Selina with unexpected force. Her hand closed around the fringe of her shawl, and she made herself release it one finger at a time.

She kept her expression composed. A still face was the one accomplishment poverty had not been able to sell. The name Rowland belonged to another life: to a house long since sold and to men who had sat at her father’s table, arriving to borrow and remaining to flatter. No particular face returned to her, only the shape and weight of the name, and the peculiar oiliness of the men who had worn it well. The gentleman upon the assembly steps had possessed something of that same quality, folded and patien, and the slow smile he had directed across the hall three days ago might well have belonged to a man who recognised her.

“And how did you come to know Mr Rowland?” she asked, pleased that her voice remained level.

“He was introduced to me at the Fenwicks’ rout in March. He is not like the others. He does not speak to me as though I were a child or a horse being displayed at a fair. He listens.” Georgiana began walking again, quickly, and Selina lengthened her stride to remain beside her. “On the very first evening, he said he could tell that no one in that house had ever asked me a question and then waited for the answer. He was right. No one ever had. Nineteen years of it, and my own brother is the worst offender of them all. Mr Rowland asks me questions, and he waits. Nathaniel has never done either in his life.”

“And he asks you to write to him in secret, conceal his letters, and slip through the gardeners’ gate before the household wakes.”

“Because Nathaniel would forbid it.” Georgiana flung the answer over her shoulder. “Nathaniel forbids everything. There is nothing sinister in keeping a matter secret when the alternative is my brother’s disapproval falling upon it like a roof.”

Selina walked several paces in silence, granting herself time to choose her words. The wrong ones would drive the girl directly towards a man whose intentions Selina did not yet trust.

“I am going to say one thing, and I ask only that you do not defend him while I say it. Hear me now, and consider it later, when I am no longer standing here to be argued with.”

“You will say that he is after my dowry.” Georgiana folded her arms.

“I will say that he is teaching you which doors in this house open quietly.” Selina stopped. “He asks for secrets and calls it trust. The two are not the same. He is discovering what you will conceal and how well you will conceal it, and a man does not require that of a young woman whom he intends to court openly.”

“He is not measuring me,” Georgiana said, cutting across her too quickly. Her hands opened and closed around the bonnet ribbons. “You have not met him. You have not so much as seen him, yet you stand in a wet garden and tell me what he is.”

“No, I have not met him.”

“Then you cannot know.” The words emerged upon the verge of breaking.

“I cannot. But neither can you, and that is the whole of my objection.” Selina allowed a moment to pass until the girl’s breathing eased. “Perhaps he is precisely what you believe him to be. I have been mistaken before, and I should be glad to be mistaken now. So I shall offer you a bargain. You will not slip away to meet him again without telling me first. I am not asking you never to see him; only never to meet him in secret. If he is the man you believe him to be, he will not object to meeting you in daylight with a companion present. If he does object, you will have learnt something of his character, and the lesson will not have cost you your reputation. That is all I ask.”

“And if I refuse?” She had begun twisting the bonnet ribbons between her fingers.

“Then I shall keep watch beside this hedge every morning at six. I have very little else to occupy me, and I am extremely patient. You will find that your gardeners’ gate has acquired a chaperone.” Selina’s voice softened. “I would rather have your word than stand guard over you, Lady Georgiana. But I shall stand guard if I must.”

“You are not at all what I expected.” Georgiana began tearing a leaf carefully down its spine.

“What did you expect?”

“A woman who wept, recited improving maxims, told my brother everything, and called it care.” She dropped the ruined leaf upon the path.

“I do not weep while on duty, and I have already promised not to carry his name to your brother. As for improving maxims, I have read too widely to place much faith in them. Three disappointments out of three. You may apply to your former governess if you find that you miss them.”

Georgiana’s mouth twitched despite herself. “Nathaniel will hate that you know something he does not.”

“Your brother hates a great many things that are good for him. I have made a study of them over the past three days. The list is long and continues to grow.”

The girl remained quiet for some time. A blackbird worked at the wet lawn, hauled up a worm, then appeared to think better of it. In the house, one shutter opened and then another. Beyond the stable arch, a housemaid began beating a rug from an upper window, and the day commenced without them.

“You truly will not tell Nathaniel?” Georgiana moved round to stand directly before Selina, blocking the path.

“I shall tell your brother that you have a correspondent of whom he would not approve and that I am managing the matter. I shall not give him the gentleman’s name.” Selina drew the shawl more closely about her shoulders. “If I do, he will take precisely the wrong course. You will run directly to Mr Rowland merely to defy him, and I shall have lost your trust for the sake of proving a point. I have no interest in points. I am interested in keeping you out of the mews.”

The tension which had held Georgiana rigid since the second stair finally eased. She did not thank Selina. Instead, she slipped her arm through hers as they walked back towards the house. Neither of them remarked upon it, and neither withdrew.

 

***

 

Selina found the Duke in his study an hour later. He rose when she entered, though he need not have done so for a companion, and made no remark upon the courtesy. Several letters lay open upon the desk before him. He turned two of them face down without appearing conscious of the movement.

“Your sister,” Selina began, “has a correspondent for whom I do not care. I am managing the matter. I wished you to know of it so that you would not be taken by surprise, and I wished to tell you plainly that I shall not give you his name.”

Stillness descended over him at once; the same disciplined stillness she had observed before. “You will give me his name.”

“I shall not. If I do, you will confront her. She will defend him, and every doubt I planted this morning will be torn up by the roots the moment you make him a martyr. She is already half persuaded that your disapproval is the strongest evidence of his merit. Do not provide her with further proof.”

“Has she been meeting this man in secret?” The Duke’s hand flattened upon the desk between them.

“She has given me her word that she will not meet him again without telling me first. I believe her because I did not shame her into making that promise; I secured it through a bargain. A promise extracted through shame would have been quicker to obtain and unlikely to last a week.”

“You place a great deal of faith in a girl who has lied to me all season,” he said.

“She lied because you left her no honest means of making herself heard.” Selina remained on the far side of the desk, her hands quiet at her sides. “She gave me his name in the garden this morning when she had every reason to withhold it. She did so because I asked without pressing her and allowed her the silence in which to answer. You have never allowed her that silence.”

He crossed to the window and stood with his back to her, his shoulders set in the rigid line of a man mastering an instinct at considerable cost. When he turned, the anger had been folded away; not extinguished, but contained.

“Three days,” he said. “You have been in my house for three days, and twice you have told me that the thing I most wish to do is precisely what I must not do. Twice, you have been right. I do not enjoy being managed in my own study by a woman whom I employ to manage my sister.”

“Then dismiss me, Your Grace. Confront her yourself and observe how the Season ends.” Selina made no move towards the door. “You may even give me a character, or I can draft it for you. I write an excellent hand.”

He was silent for a moment. “Is that a threat?”

“It is an offer to resign. You are not accustomed to trusting another person’s judgement, but you must learn to trust mine in this. Otherwise, you will drive your sister further into the confidence of the very man you wish to remove from it. I did not create those alternatives. I merely refuse to pretend that a third exists.”

A muscle shifted in his jaw. Then, stiffly, in the voice of a man to whom the words came with difficulty, he said, “I apologise.”

He stopped and began again.

“You are protecting her better than my temper would. I dislike your method.” Another pause followed, this one longer. “I trust the result.”

“That is nearer to an apology than most men manage in an entire day.” Selina allowed her hands to relax. “I accept it.”

He fell silent once more. When he spoke again, his voice had changed; it had laid down its armour somewhere along the way.

“You have taken a book from the library every night since your arrival. Bassett tells me that you return each one before breakfast, in perfect order, with the markers removed and its spine aligned precisely with the others.”

Selina said nothing. Any answer she might have made would have cost more than she was willing to spend.

“Which did you take last night?”

“The Cowper, Your Grace. The volume with the water stain upon the frontispiece. It appears not to have been opened since the stain was made.”

“I did not know that I owned a Cowper.”

“You own a great many things of which you are unaware.” She smoothed the darned wrist of her glove with two fingers. “I have been arranging your library in my head each night, which is a liberty. I return the books early so that no one may accuse the murderer’s daughter of pocketing the volumes along with her salary.”

She delivered the last lightly because the alternative was to deliver it with all its weight.

“The library is at your disposal,” Nathaniel said. “Not merely to borrow from. To use as you please.”

He addressed the words to the window rather than to her.

“I shall have a chair placed beside the south window. The light lasts longest there. It is otherwise a poor room: cold, full of consequence, and wasted upon me. Consider it an asset put to better use.”

He did not say the rest, nor did he turn. He had wrapped the entire kindness in the language of a ledger so that she would not be obliged to feel grateful for it. Selina stood in the middle of his study with her hands at her sides and found, for a moment, that none of her usual replies would come.

“Thank you, Your Grace,” she said, and left it there because he had made it possible for her to do so.

 

***

 

The invitation arrived that afternoon upon thick cream paper, perfumed with hothouse flowers and addressed to Lady Georgiana Sinclair in a bold, fashionable hand. Selina found it upon the salver in the hall and read the name without compunction, having been forced to abandon such delicacies over matters of greater consequence.

Mrs Ottley requested the pleasure of Lady Georgiana’s company at a masquerade.

Selina turned the card between her fingers. Mrs Ottley presided over the sort of household that sent scented invitations to nineteen-year-old girls without extending the courtesy to those responsible for accompanying them. Hers was a house of new money and considerable ambition, its mistress purchasing admission to greater circles by providing what more respectable hostesses would not: rooms open to anyone whose presence might make them interesting. A Mr Felix Rowland might be welcomed there without inconvenient questions about the company he kept or the young women he encouraged towards the private supper rooms.

Selina stood in the cold hall, the invitation in her hand and the name Rowland turning once more within her chest.

The pieces had begun to gather into an ugly picture, though too many of them were still missing. A hostess of new money who traded propriety for interesting company. A man named Rowland, whose name belonged to her father’s former circle and whose face she might have seen across the charitable hall. A girl of nineteen meeting him in secret and calling the secrecy romance.

Perhaps the invitation was no more than an invitation. Perhaps Mrs Ottley’s failure to include Georgiana’s brother was merely discourteous. Yet Selina could not dismiss the possibility that someone had drawn a line from the Fenwicks’ rout in March to this salver in May, and that the line passed through Georgiana towards the protection, influence and fortune of the Duke of Wexford.

Selina did not return the invitation to the salver. She slipped it into her own cuff, where Georgiana had concealed the note that morning, and walked down the hall to the study. There she stopped with one hand raised, the card stiff against her wrist, considering how much she ought to tell Nathaniel and how much she had promised to keep.

The hall clock measured most of a minute before she knocked.