A KIND MAID HELPED AN OLD WOMAN MOCKED IN A DRESS SALON — UNAWARE SHE WAS THE DUKE’S MOTHER

Chapter 5

The Duke of Stonehurst came forward out of the shadow of the great staircase.

Lydia had seen handsome men before, in the way that one sees fine carriages pass — knowing they belong to another world. But she had never stood close to one. The Duke was tall and dark and grave, and he looked at her with eyes the color of slate before a storm. He wore black, and with a small shock she realized she had seen him at the salon that day, standing in the far doorway, and she had never marked him.

He did not smile. He inclined his head in the smallest courtesy. “Miss Thornton. My mother is not a woman easily moved. You appear to have moved her a great deal. You have my thanks.”

“It was nothing, your grace. Anyone would have —”

“No. They would not. A room full of people did not. That is rather the point.” His voice was dry, almost weary. “My mother has a fondness for tests. I am only glad that this once, someone passed.”

Lydia did not know what to say, so she said the only true thing she had. “I came to thank her grace and to ask after the wages Madame Belmont kept from me. Three weeks’ work. Eighteen shillings. I earned them honestly, and they are mine. That is all I have come for.”

She saw his brows rise slightly. He looked at her then in a different way, as though she had said something that did not fit the shape of the people who usually stood in his hall.

“Eighteen shillings,” he repeated.

“Yes, your grace. I would not take a penny more than I am owed.”

A silence. Then the corner of his grave mouth moved — not quite into a smile, but toward one. “Most people who stand where you are standing ask for rather more than eighteen shillings.”

“Then most people,” said Lydia, before she could stop herself, “have never had to earn eighteen shillings.”

The words were out before she could call them back. She felt the heat rush to her face. But the Dowager Duchess laughed aloud, a clear, delighted sound, and even the Duke’s eyes had warmed just perceptibly.

“You will stay,” Isold declared. “Not as a servant — never that. As my companion. An old woman wants company she can trust. You will have a proper room, proper meals, and proper wages. And you will keep an old woman from dying of the dullness of her own relations.”

“Your grace, I could not —”

“You could. And you shall.”

It was at that moment that the hall doors opened again, and a tall, proud woman in dark silk swept in, drawing off her gloves. The warmth in the room thinned like breath on glass.

This was Lady Lavinia Harby, the Duke’s aunt, who had kept the social affairs of the family in her iron grip for thirty years. She was handsome in the way old marble is handsome — cold and exact. She looked at Lydia, taking in the thin cloak, the worn boots, the work-roughened hands. Her face closed like a fan.

“And who is this?”

“This is Miss Lydia Thornton, who is to be my companion.”

“Your companion.” Lavinia’s voice could have frosted the windows. “A girl off the street — of no family, no fortune, no name — installed in Stonehurst House in the very season the Duke must marry. Have you considered how this will look?”

“I have considered that I am old and rich and tired of being lonely. The talk may go hang.”

“It is not your name the talk will harm.” Lavinia’s eyes flicked coldly to the Duke. “Evander, surely you see —”

“I see a woman who kept my mother from freezing and was thrown into the snow for it. This house owes her a debt. If my mother wishes a companion, my mother shall have one.” His voice did not rise, but something in it ended the discussion like a closed door. “She stays. We will not speak of it again.”

Lavinia’s mouth pressed into a thin white line. She turned and swept up the staircase, her silk hissing against the marble.

Lydia stood in the great hall between a duchess who had defended her and a duke who had just commanded the world to make room for her. She understood only one thing, watching the Duke’s dark eyes before he turned and went back to his study: her quiet, invisible life was over. She had stepped onto a stage far larger and far more dangerous than any she had ever known.

That night, in a room with a fire and clean linen and a window looking out over snow-covered gardens, Lydia Thornton lay awake a long time, and could not have said whether her heart pounded from fear or from something she had no name for yet.