“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night,” the Duke of Orwater said, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured.” He forgot to add one thing: that neither of them would fall in love. He was wrong about that, too.

PART 5 

She did not stay long after that. Taking her leave with every courtesy the occasion required and none of the warmth. And it was only once the sound of her carriage had faded down the long drive that the Duke’s hand, still resting lightly at Avisia’s back, seemed to recall itself and withdraw. He stepped away from her with the same abrupt correctness he had shown mid-dance, as though putting a safe distance between them were a duty he had momentarily, dangerously forgotten.

“That did not feel like performance, your grace.”

“It was performance,” he said, though he did not quite look at her when he said it. “Imogen Fair Haven has spent ten years learning to read a room for the one true thing in it. If she had seen us hesitate, she would have known everything in an instant. I did what the moment required.”

“Of course,” Avisia said.

And told herself she believed him. And found, walking back to the Rose Room alone through the darkening corridors of a house not yet dressed for Christmas, that she did not believe him in the least. And that the not-believing frightened her considerably more than Lady Imogen’s cold, assessing eyes ever could.

The following Sunday, it was Anora who insisted, over Avisia’s quiet protest, that a newly betrothed couple could not possibly fail to appear together at the parish church in Wickmare, where the whole of the county would be watching for the sort of confirmation only a shared pew could properly provide.

“You will ride with him in the ducal carriage,” Anora said, adjusting the collar of Avisia’s best pelisse with the brisk authority of a woman who had dressed a great many young women for a great many trials. “And you will sit beside him in the family pew, which has stood empty of anyone but Peveral and Lucy for two years, and will draw every eye in the church the moment you occupy it. You will smile as though there is nowhere in England you would rather be. And you will let him hand you down from the carriage in full view of the churchyard — because that single gesture will do more to silence gossip before it starts than a hundred pounds of settlement ever could.”

The carriage ride itself passed in a silence that felt to Avisia considerably more fraught than the short distance between Orwater Hall and the little gray church warranted. The Duke sat across from her in his dark Sunday coat, watching the frosted hedgerows slide past the window with an attention she suspected had less to do with the scenery than with avoiding conversation he did not yet know how to have with her outside the safe boundaries of accounts and terms.

“Your grace,” she said at last, because the quiet had grown heavier than she could comfortably bear, “I have kept your ledgers for three winters and never once seen you at a loss for words. Is it my presence that unsettles you, or merely the prospect of the whole parish watching us pretend?”

“Both, in equal measure, I expect,” he admitted. And something in the honesty of it eased the tightness in her chest more than any polished reassurance could have. “I have not sat in that pew beside anyone but Lucy since Edmund’s funeral, Miss Elfenstone. I confess I do not entirely know how to do it without thinking of who ought, by every right of family and expectation, to have been sitting there instead.”

“Then think instead of who is sitting there now,” Avisia said, gentler than she had intended. And let the rest wait for a quieter hour.

He looked at her then with an expression she was coming slowly to recognize — not quite gratitude, not quite surprise, but some new thing assembled out of both. The look of a man discovering that a woman hired to solve one problem had begun, without any apparent effort, to ease a dozen others he had not thought to name in their bargain at all.

The church was exactly as Anora had predicted — full to bursting by the time their carriage drew up outside it. Half the parish, having contrived some excuse or other to arrive early enough to watch the Duke of Orwater hand a plain young woman down from his own carriage in full view of the churchyard gate.

He did it with a correctness that gave away nothing, and a gentleness that, to Avisia’s eye at least, gave away a great deal more. His hand closing firm and warm around hers as she stepped down onto the frosted path. He did not release it at once, holding it a beat longer than the descent required while the assembled parish watched and murmured, and in several cases openly craned their necks for a better view.

It was afterward, in the churchyard, that the true trial of the morning arrived in the person of Mrs. Pru Cathcart, wife of the parish’s largest landholder and, by common consent, the most thoroughgoing gossip between Wickmare and Sethbury. She descended upon them the moment the Duke’s carriage door had closed behind the last of the congregation’s curtsies.

“Your grace,” she said, dipping a curtsy so shallow it barely qualified as one. “And Miss Elfenstone. My dear, how very sudden this all is. Why, I have known you since you were in short skirts, keeping your father’s accounts in that neat little hand of yours. And I confess I had no notion at all that his grace had so much as noticed you existed, let alone —” She paused, savoring the sentence’s unfinished cruelty. “— let alone this.”

“Then you have not been watching closely enough, Mrs. Cathcart.”

The Duke’s voice carried the same flat certainty she had heard him use against Lady Imogen only days before.

“I have watched Miss Elfenstone balance my estate’s accounts to the last farthing for three winters running without a single error. I did not find and correct an error in the quarter’s accounts myself before she found it first. And I have come slowly to understand that a woman capable of such precision and such quiet patience is worth considerably more than the county’s notice — however belatedly I arrived at the understanding myself. I do not consider my own tardiness a failing in her, Mrs. Cathcart. Only in myself.”

Mrs. Cathcart’s mouth opened and closed once, entirely without sound. And she recovered herself only enough to murmur something about wishing them joy before retreating toward her own carriage with the particular haste of a woman whose ammunition had proved unexpectedly damp.