The Duke Fell in Love With His Best Friend’s Little Sister the Moment They Met—Then Promised to Be Nothing More Than Her Friend, Carrying That Secret Beside a Silver Medallion for Two Long Years

PART 1

He had meant to stay a night at most, and he had said so twice on the road — once to his valet at the last posting inn, and once, in his head, to the chestnut he did not like and had bought only because his own bay had gone lame in Kent.

He went to Havering because Nicholas Vain had asked him to, and because a man with any memory of the Peninsula in him did not refuse Nicholas Vain a request in the first month after the death of Nicholas Vain’s mother. He would go. He would stay a night. He would say the plain proper things to the family, and he would ride out in the morning.

That was the plan.

He came up the drive in a soft grey October light with rooks going over the elms, and he saw at once, the way one soldier reads the state of another soldier’s kit, that the house had been kept well in spite of the year the family had had. The gravel was raked. The ivy on the gatehouse cut back. A small lamp already lit in the porter’s lodge, though the day was not yet gone.

Somebody in that house, he thought, was running things well.

He gave the chestnut to a boy in the yard and his hat and gloves to a manservant in the hall, and he said his name — the Duke of Ashendon, which was his name now, though it had been Colonel Marchant for the better part of ten years and would be that in his own head, he suspected, until the day he died.

He was told that Captain Vain was still in the town on the business of his mother’s estate, but was expected before dark; that Miss Vain was in the drawing room already; and that Miss Vain had been told he would come.

“Miss Vain,” he said.

“Miss Harriet Vain,” said the servant, whose name was Corbett and who had been at Havering forty-two years, though Ashendon did not know that yet. “Miss Vain is running the house until the captain marries. This way, your grace.”

He went along a passage, and found that he was adjusting his coat as he went — a small vain habit he had not caught himself in since he had left London — and he was thinking, with a soldier’s practicality, that Nicholas had in six years of shared tents said a great many things about a Harriet at Havering, but that all of it had been said when the Harriet in question was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. Nicholas had come home when his mother took ill fifteen months back. Ashendon had not, in the past year, had very much of Nicholas at all, and no news whatever of a Harriet who had plainly passed through the last part of being a girl and become something else while he was busy dying by degrees in a marching camp at the border.

He was not prepared for a young woman. He was prepared for the fifteen-year-old girl of Nicholas’s tent talk.

That was his own foolishness. He must remember she would be a stranger.

Corbett opened the door. “Miss Vain. His grace, the Duke of Ashendon.”

She had been at the window. She turned.

He would remember afterwards, with a soldier’s exactness, the first thing he saw of her. He would remember it on his deathbed, and would say so aloud — but that was very far in the future and he did not know it yet. He saw a young woman of perhaps nineteen, not more, possibly less, in a plain black gown of good stuff, standing by the window with her hand resting on the back of a chair.

Her hair was a warm brown, the colour of good tea. Her eyes were the same grey as her brother’s, only quieter. And he saw that at being announced as Miss Vain by an old servant in her own drawing room she had straightened her shoulders by the small deliberate half inch that he knew, from a great many rooms in a great many countries, to be the sign of a person who had privately decided some while back to be equal to whatever came in through the door.

She did not move to him.

“Your grace,” she said. Her voice was low and even. “You are extremely welcome at Havering. My brother is in the town but is expected shortly. Please come in. Corbett — will you send tea. His grace has been on the road.”

“Yes, Miss Vain.”

Corbett went. She came a step forward at last — not toward him, only into the room proper.

“You must forgive us a household still in some disorder. My mother has been dead five weeks. We are only beginning to find our feet.” A pause. “My brother wrote me some days ago to say you had accepted his invitation, and I have been looking forward to it. He has told me a great deal of you.”

“He has told me nothing of you,” Ashendon said, before he could stop himself.

He heard it a half second after it left him and almost winced, and covered it with the small stiff bow of a soldier who had spent too little of his life in drawing rooms.

“That is — I meant only, Miss Vain — he has told me a great deal of a sister of his called Harriet who is fifteen years old, and I see standing in this room that he has been remiss in his correspondence for a great while. Forgive me. I did not intend to be uncivil.”

She looked at him a long, steady moment. Then she smiled — small and surprised, and real, with no drawing room polish on it at all.

“Your grace, you are not uncivil. You are honest. My brother is a hopeless correspondent about his family.” She came to the tea tray as Corbett returned with it. “He has been telling his regiment about the Harriet who fell out of the apple tree the summer she was eleven. He has not, so far as I can discover, noticed that she has in the last four years acquired the ability to run a household and speak to gentlemen without giggling and choose her own gowns. He will notice eventually. In the meantime, we must forgive him.”

She poured. “Please sit down. You must be tired. Have you come from town?”

“From Kent. My mare went lame.”

“Then you must be more than tired.” She handed him the cup. “If you would like to change before Nicholas comes in, Corbett will show you your room. If you would rather sit a little first, sit. I am not going to entertain you, your grace, if you would rather not be entertained. I know from Nicholas that you have not much taste for polite conversation, and I decided when he wrote to me that I should give you as little of it in this house as I could politely contrive.”

He sat down.

“Miss Vain,” he said at last, “your brother has been slandering me.”

“He has told me the truth about you, your grace, which was quite different from what I had been told in London last spring — and which I liked considerably better. Drink your tea. Corbett will be offended if you let it go cold.”

He drank two cups. He talked, or listened, or did half of each, for perhaps forty minutes, and could not afterwards have said accurately what they had talked about.

He remembered that she had asked him whether he had seen her brother’s horse, the grey Nicholas had brought home from Spain. He remembered that she had asked whether the road from Kent had been bad, and that he had said the road had been indifferent, and that she had said quite gravely: “That is a soldier’s word, your grace. Indifferent. It means the road was appalling and you did not wish to complain.”

He remembered laughing at that. He remembered thinking, distantly, that he had not laughed with a woman in a drawing room for a great many years, and that it was in fact a thing he could still do, and that this was inconvenient.

He remembered, above all, because he had not been able to stop himself thinking it in the middle of a perfectly ordinary sentence about a horse: This is my friend’s little sister, and I have understood in the first ten minutes of meeting her that if I stay in this house more than three days, I am going to be in a great deal of trouble.

Nicholas Vain came in from the town at the end of those forty minutes with his coat over his arm and his hair in his eyes.

“Marchant. Ashendon. Good God, you are here. I did not think you would come till Thursday.”

He clapped Ashendon on the shoulder in a way that would have offended half the dukes in England. Ashendon stood and gripped his friend’s arm — and understood, in that moment, that he was not going to be able to ride out in the morning at all.

He would be pressed to stay. He would say yes, because he could not honestly say no.

And watching Harriet Vain cross the room to kiss her brother on the cheek and say, in her low even voice, “You are in your muddy boots again, Nicholas. Go up and change,” he understood that he had, in the space of an afternoon, made himself a bargain he was going to have great difficulty keeping.

He was going to keep it anyway. He had kept harder ones in worse country.

He put his hand, unconsciously, to the small inner pocket of his waistcoat, where a small silver medallion Nicholas had given him one bad evening outside Salamanca had lived ever since against his ribs.

The man who gave you this is going to be in this house for you, in a different sort of war. Behave accordingly.