He crossed a ballroom of forty sweating guests to reach the plainest woman in it — and Cassandra Ashwell, twenty-four, three seasons unclaimed, made the error of taking his hand. He was a duke. He was also hiding something with teeth.

PART 3

Cassandra was still standing at the glass when the maid announced her.

“Lady Verina Crane.”

The name meant nothing. The crest on the carriage door meant a great deal. And the Duke of Ravensmore, who had come to this house to discuss a matter with the elder Miss Ashwell, was now standing in the lane with his hat in his hand and his jaw set, saying something short and low to the woman in amber — who answered him without turning her head, without lowering her voice, without the smallest pretense of privacy.

“Gabriel. Do not be tiresome. I shall only be a quarter of an hour.”

“The timing is not accidental.”

“No,” she agreed pleasantly, “it is not.”

And she came up the path.

She did not curtsy. She inclined her head a precise half inch, and let her eyes travel over Cassandra from the crown of her plain brown hair to the hem of the sprigged blue — and Cassandra felt herself weighed, priced, and found to be a curiosity of no great value.

“Forgive the intrusion. I am Lady Verina Crane. I believe you are acquainted with my cousin.”

“I am acquainted with a good many people’s cousins, my lady. You will have to be more particular.”

“Ravensmore.”

The name fell into the little parlor like a stone into a well.

“Gabriel. I understand he danced with you at your sister’s wedding and has since been so good as to call.” A pause, delicate as a fingernail. “Twice, is it? The county cannot quite agree on the number, but they are unanimous as to the fact.”

“Once,” said Cassandra. “The county exaggerates. It has so little else to do in July.”

Lady Verina smiled. It was a lovely smile, and there was nothing whatever behind it. She drew off one amber glove, finger by finger, and looked about the modest room with an air of gentle, devastating pity.

“May we sit? What I have come to say is kindly meant. Whatever you make of it. And I should not like to say it standing, like a tradesman come to collect.”

Cassandra’s mother, hovering in an agony of uncertainty as to whether so grand a personage was an ally or a threat, subsided into a chair.

Aunt Maud did not. Aunt Maud stationed herself by the window with her arms folded and her whole small person radiating the particular stillness of a cat that has seen the fox come over the wall.

“Say it, then,” said Cassandra.

“You are a sensible woman. I can see it is written all over you, and I mean it for a compliment, whatever your face is doing.” Lady Verina settled her skirts with great care. “So I will be plain, because sensible women prefer it. My cousin is in difficulties. You have perhaps gathered as much. The settlement — the wretched condition his father left him bound to. He has told you about the villages.”

“He has.”

“He always tells them about the villages. It is his best card, and he plays it early.”

Her voice was smooth as poured cream and just as cool.

“What he does not tell them is why the marriage must be sudden, and to a stranger, and why not one of the excellent, eligible, well-dowered young women who would have had him this twelvemonth will do. Did you ask him that, I wonder? You have the look of a woman who asks.”

The room had gone very quiet. Cassandra kept her face perfectly still and hated that she could feel her pulse in her throat.

“I asked. He declined to answer.”

“Of course he did.” Something flickered across the lovely face — satisfaction, quickly veiled. “He would. It does not show him to advantage. You see, there is a reason no gentlewoman of standing will marry Gabriel Thorne, Miss Ashwell. And it is not his temper, and it is not his purse. It is a thing he did, and a promise he broke, and a lady who suffered for it — and a scandal his father spent the last strength of his life burying so deep that only the family knows where the ground was turned.”

She leaned forward, and her perfume reached Cassandra, heavy and expensive, jasmine over something colder.

“He does not come to you because you are honest. He comes to you because you are far enough beneath his notice that you will not have heard the story. And by the time you hear it, you will already be his duchess, and it will be too late to mind. That is the whole of his interest in your honesty, my dear. It cannot be shocked by what it does not know.”

“Verina.” Aunt Maud’s voice cut across the parlor like a blade laid flat. “That is a very great deal of concern to have carried ten miles in this heat, for a girl you had never met until this quarter hour. One almost wonders what you stand to gain by it.”

Lady Verina did not so much as glance at her. She rose, drawing her glove back on, finger by finger, her eyes never leaving Cassandra’s.

“I stand to gain a clear conscience,” she said, “which I know is a currency this house may find unfamiliar. My cousin Julian would inherit the northern lands, should Gabriel fail to marry in time — you will have heard that part. It is the other half of the villages. What you will not have heard is that Julian is the only member of this family who ever behaved honorably in the whole sorry business, and that I would a great deal rather see him hold Ravensmore’s people, than watch them handed to a man who has already broken one woman to keep his word to himself.”

She paused at the door.

“Ask him, Miss Ashwell. Ask Gabriel about Miss Onoria Vale, and watch his face when you do. Then decide whether the villages are worth the man.”

She inclined her half inch of head to the room at large.

“Good afternoon. The roses are charming. You should cut them back before they run wild altogether. But I dare say you know that, and simply have not the heart.”

She was gone in a whisper of amber silk and a jingle of matched grays, leaving the little parlor ringing with her perfume and her poison.

And Cassandra stood in the middle of it, with a name she had never heard turning over and over in her chest like a stone dropped down a well that had no bottom she could find.

Onoria.

“Well,” said Aunt Maud into the silence, very quietly, and for once there was no dryness in it at all. “Now we know the shape of the thing. Or half of it. That woman told us a great deal of truth in order to hide the one lie in the middle of it — and I am too old and too hot to sort the one from the other before tea.”

She crossed to Cassandra and took her cold hands in both of hers.

“But she was right about one matter, child, and it grieves me to say it. You must ask him. Before you decide anything — before your mother has the banns read, which she is even now composing in her head — you must put that name to his face and watch what it does to him. Because a man may buy your honesty with three villages. He cannot buy back his own, once you have caught it out.”

Across the room, Mrs. Ashwell had gone the color of whey. “A scandal,” she whispered. “A broken promise. A lady who suffered. Oh, Cassandra — forty thousand a year, and he comes with a broken lady attached to it. What are we to do?”

“We are to do nothing,” said Cassandra.

And she was faintly surprised to hear how steady her own voice was. How cold. How much like her aunt’s.

She drew her hands free and crossed to the window, and looked out at the lane where the dust of two fine carriages still hung golden in the July light.

Nine weeks. A knife at his back. A secret folded small behind slate-gray eyes — and now a name to hang upon it, a name a beautiful woman had ridden ten miles in the heat to plant in her, which meant the name was a weapon, which meant she must not trust the hand that gave it to her any further than the hand that had withheld it.

“We are to do nothing at all,” she said again, “until I have asked the Duke of Ravensmore who Onoria Vale is, and why the whole of his family has spent a year burying her, and why he thought a woman too plain to have heard of her was worth crossing a ballroom to find.”

She turned from the window.

“And God help him, Aunt Maud — because I intend to watch his face when I do it. And I have spent three seasons learning to read the faces of men who would rather I did not.”