The Duchess War

And then the moment had come. After the affectionate greetings had been given, Oliver had turned. “Mother,” he’d said, “Father, this is—”

But Mrs. Marshall had looked over just as her son did. Her gaze landed on Robert. And as it did, she went very still—so still that it felt as if the whole room came to a stop alongside her. Her eyes grew wide, and all the color washed from her face. She stared at him.

And then, without saying a word, without even lifting a hand in a pretense of a greeting, she straightened to her feet, turned, and left the room.

Robert’s lungs seemed to fill with shards of glass. Every breath he took hurt. He took one halting step after her—only to have Mr. Marshall intervene.

“You must be the Duke of Clermont,” Mr. Marshall said, putting himself in Robert’s way.

He’d been going to say Call me Robert after the introductions. But those words—that request for intimacy—would have only made him look all the more desperate. He managed a firm jerk of his head.

Mr. Marshall’s voice was quiet, but it couldn’t soften the harshness of the blow. “You look like your father. Very like.” He paused. “So much like, I think, that when my wife saw you just now, she saw him.”

He had nodded in a haze of pain.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Marshall said gently, “this is not the best moment to perform introductions.”

“Yes,” he’d said. “Sir.”

And he’d understood that there would never be a moment for introductions. There would be no lazy family summers, no man-to-man talks, no gingerbread on plates for him.

It didn’t matter what he did. He looked like his father; his father had forced himself on Mrs. Marshall.

In a way, everything he’d made of himself stemmed from that moment—that desperation to prove himself to be more than his face.

It was stupid to say that his heart had been broken by a pair of people he’d never met. It was even more idiotic that it was true. But for months after, every time he thought of that moment, he felt a sharp sense of loss. As if they really had been his family, and he’d lost them all at once under tragic circumstances.

He’d mourned the loss of those dreams more than he had the death of his childhood nurse.

“I don’t have to be your conscience,” Oliver said, breaking him out of his memories. His brother leaned into him ever so slightly as they walked, enough to convey a wealth of affection. “You have one of your own. And I trust you, even if you can’t trust yourself.”

He didn’t have much, but what he had, that he would hold on to. And never let go.

He gave his brother a playful nudge, but his throat was tight. “I always knew you were the gullible sort,” he said. “Lucky me.”

Chapter Fourteen

MINNIE DIDN’T SEE THE DUKE AT ALL in the days that followed.

But it was impossible not to think of him. She examined his paper under a borrowed jeweler’s lens, poked at the ink used in his handbills, cataloged the vagaries of the type used to create it. There was a lowercase e that had a hairline crack in the lower stem; she’d seen it on four separate handbills, now. A b that was a bit misshapen.

All of the proof that she’d found added up.

Details, all of that. Now that she had his letter, it was all rendered superfluous.

More importantly, when she imagined herself on the streets of Leicester, she no longer saw herself industriously collecting paper samples, but striding arm in arm with the Duke of Clermont.

Stupid. She was so stupid.

She told herself that all too often, and yet found that she could not make herself stop thinking of him. She remembered the feel of his lips, the look in his eyes. She remembered his hands, warm on her body. She remembered everything he’d told her, and she didn’t feel stupid.

She looked at her reflection in the mirror one afternoon. “You,” she told herself, “are an idiot.”

Her gray eyes looked back at her solemnly.

He had sent over a message. His cousin was delivering a penny reading that evening for the Leicester Mechanical Society and he’d asked her to come.

Minnie suspected that she shouldn’t go. The stupidity of what she wanted was evident just from her own mirror. She wore a plain blue gown, one he’d seen twice already. It was severe and high-necked, the sleeves long but unadorned. There was scarcely a hint of a bustle, and her skirt sported no flounces, no cunning knots. Fabric was dear, ribbons dearer. It was simple logic to dress like this when there was so little extra money. Garbed like this, nobody would look at her. She didn’t want people to look at her.

But she wanted to make him smile.

“Oh, Minnie,” she said in despair. “Really. Him? Could you be any more hopeless?”

He was a duke. She was…

“Look, damn you,” she said. And she forced herself to look in the mirror. Not to focus on the pleasant parts—the curve of her bosom, or her waist—but to really look at who she was. To look at that scar on her cheek. That wasn’t just skin-deep. It was etched on her soul. Wilhelmina Pursling was dried-up, severe, quiet, mousy.

“Miss Pursling,” Minnie enunciated very slowly, “is a nobody. By design.”

But those were still her eyes looking out at her. And no matter what she told herself, no matter how many times she named herself a fool, that wild, untamed want welled up in her.

“You,” she repeated, stabbing her finger at the mirror, “are an idiot.”

Still, if she was going to be an idiot, she might as well be one in style. And so she went downstairs and out into the fallow fields. She tromped up one hill and down another, searching the sheltered south sides until she found what she was looking for—a patch of late yellow pansies, hidden in the cornstalks.

And she harvested them all.

IF ANY STARS SHONE BEHIND THE THICK BLANKET OF FOG AND SMOKE, Robert couldn’t see them. He descended from the carriage and then turned to help Violet out. The streetlamps let out a dull and heavy illumination, enough to show a gathered mass of people waiting on the front steps of New Hall. In the night, all the clothing looked black, and the effect was almost funereal. It would have been, had they not been chanting.

“Ah, good,” Sebastian said at his side. “There’s a crowd.”

“A mob,” Robert said.

Sebastian simply rubbed his hands together in glee. “When I speak, it’s usually the same thing. Are those things goats?”

They were. In the market square outside the hall, someone had set up two temporary enclosures. There were placards tied to both, but he couldn’t read them in the dark. Still, one of those pens was filled with goats—nearly a dozen of the beasts, milling about and bleating.