The Duchess War

“I don’t want to be Queen of England.” Minnie folded her arms around herself.

“No, no.” Caro smiled sadly at her. “All I’m saying is, you should want just enough to make you stretch your arms a little bit. More than that, and you’ll do yourself an injury.”

Minnie stood. “I didn’t refuse Gardley because I wanted too much. It wasn’t that I thought I could do better. It was simply that I couldn’t do worse.”

Caro tried to suppress a sigh, but she didn’t quite manage it.

“Think of this logically,” Minnie said. “Because I should have before. If I marry someone who wants a quiet, dutiful wife, he will put me away if he discovers my past.”

Eliza’s needles came to a standstill.

It was dangerous talk, that, and they all knew it.

Look up. But she wouldn’t. If she were looking up, she’d think of a man standing next to her, the sun glinting off his blond hair while he told her how clever she was.

“You are quiet, Minnie,” Eliza finally said. “I wouldn’t want you to go against your nature.”

Quiet, yes. Her voice wasn’t made to carry. She didn’t like to draw attention to herself. She could never be happy anywhere but at the edges of a gathering. Dutiful, however…

She could almost see Clermont from the corners of her vision, as if he were still standing next to her. He had brilliant blue eyes and a smile that curled up at the corners when he saw her. She thought of his hand, wrapping around her wrist before she could punch the davenport again. Of the rich timbre of his voice as he stood next to her and said…

I want you.

She shook her head. Reach that high, and she’d be burned for certain. All she wanted was a little security.

“Men look for many kinds of wives,” Eliza finally said. “Pretty, vivacious wives. Wealthy, indulgent ones. Highborn, prideful ladies.” She bit her lip. “I don’t want you hurt, Minnie. But it is my duty to make you face the truth. Nobody is looking for a shy, clever girl whose father died halfway through his sentence of hard labor.”

Minnie put her fingers against the bridge of her nose, pressing to try and drive the pain away. It didn’t help. The boundaries of her life pressed in on her like prison walls. Look up? With rough rocks under her feet, to look up was to stumble.

“List the things you are,” Eliza said, “and ask yourself what man would want them.”

I want you. But Clermont didn’t know her, either.

“Your choices are yours,” Eliza intoned. “We won’t steal them from you.”

No. They never stole her choices. They only pointed out—kindly, sweetly, implacably—that she had few to begin with. Minnie’s hands shook. The only thing they had done wrong was to allow her to believe that she had one choice, instead of zero.

Minnie didn’t see any way forward. She couldn’t see a future at all. She felt chokingly blind.

There was really only one thing she could do, and that was to keep on going in the direction she’d started. To avoid ruin for another week, to pray for shelter where there had been none thus far. And that meant she needed to find proof of what Clermont had done. She had to take care of the next step, and hope for the future.

And that meant… “I’m going to London tomorrow,” she announced.

Their eyes widened, blinking. Eliza sat up straight. “But—”

“Have you—”

“Is this about a position?” Her great-aunts spoke atop one another. Their hands had met on the sofa between them.

“Be careful,” Caro said. “I’ve read of those schemes in the newspaper—faithless madams who advertise good jobs at excellent wages, only to—”

“I am not taking a position,” Minnie said. “You’re right. I can’t look up. I can’t dream. I don’t dare to. All I can do is take the next step forward.”

Caro frowned. “And the next step forward is…London?”

“The next step forward,” she said, “is to win the game I’m playing. And that means I must talk to some paper sellers. I’ll be back in three days.”

Her great-aunts exchanged glances—wary glances, ones that tugged at her chest. But she couldn’t explain and she couldn’t back down. And while it was not quite the done thing for a young woman of her age to travel alone on the train, she wasn’t a debutante who would have to account for every waking hour of her day.

“Well,” Caro said finally. “If that’s what you believe you must do. You…you have the means?”

“I do.”

She had her egg money. Even that was a misnomer. When she’d reached her majority, her great-aunts had given her responsibility for the chickens—and allotted her all the income from them. A gift, that, since they could have kept it all. But it hadn’t just been a gift of money they’d given her, but a present of independence. It was one they could ill afford.

They let Minnie go back to her room to get her things ready. But instead of packing, she found herself drawn to the chess set that had been left to molder in the trunk in her room. Twelve years since she’d last looked at it, and still she approached it with a grim wariness. She knelt before the wooden trunk, folded back the cloth that covered it, and undid the buckles. The metal resisted moving; she had to jam her palm against it and shove.

The chess set was at the bottom, hidden under old clothing and a smattering of brittle newspaper clippings. There. The pieces were ebony and ivory, both oddly familiar and curiously strange. Her first memories were of this board—lifting pieces that had seemed large and heavy. Now, she could curl her hands around the pawns and hide them entirely.

She took out the board and removed the pieces from their velvet bag. She set them atop her writing desk. Even after all these years, she didn’t have to think about what went where. Queen, king, and a host of pawns all fell into place. If she were a piece in a chess game, she’d be… No, she wouldn’t even be a pawn. She had become too small even for that.

Setting up the pieces had once given her spirits a lift. The beginning of every game was awash in possibility. Anything could happen. Every choice was open. Today, she felt nothing at all. She stared at the pieces and realized that she wasn’t at the beginning of this game, but near the end. Now there were entire swathes of the board that were unreachable, pieces that had been stolen away, moves she could never make.