She Grabbed a Stranger to Escape Her Ex — Not knowing He’s a Duke!

Chapter 4

The announcement went into the papers on Monday the eleventh of November. Clara read it at breakfast and felt nothing at all, which she supposed was shock. By Wednesday, there were nineteen cards on the hall table. By Friday, there were forty-one, and two of them were from women who had crossed a street in Bath in twenty-six to avoid speaking to her. Clara stood looking at those two for rather a long time, and then put them at the bottom of the pile and did not answer them.

On Saturday, she was taken to Grovener Square to meet Lily.

The Duke’s niece was nine years old and small for her age. Her hair had been scraped back too tight by somebody who did not know how, and she came into the drawing room with her shoulders squared and looked at Clara with the flat, assessing, entirely unfooled stare of a child who has recently lost both parents and is waiting to find out what this one wants.

“Are you going to be my aunt?”

“It’s all right,” Clara said. She sat down so that she was not standing over the girl. “I am going to be engaged to your uncle for six months, and then I am going to break it off, and everyone will be very cross with me and nobody will be cross with him. It is a bargain we made. He is doing it so that a court will let him keep you. I am doing it because I did something foolish at a party, and he was kind about it.”

Behind her, the Duke of Blackwood made a sound she could not interpret.

Lily thought about this for a while.

“Nobody has told me anything true since June,” she said.

“I know. They think it is kinder.”

“It isn’t.”

“No,” Clara agreed. “It isn’t.”

The child came and sat down on the sofa—not next to her, three feet off, which Clara understood perfectly.

“Will you still come after the six months?”

And Clara Ashworth, who had made a bargain in a dark card room with an exit date written into it, opened her mouth to say something sensible and found that she could not.

“Yes,” she said.

The plan was to be boring, and for nine weeks they were extremely good at it. They went to dinners. They went to two concerts and one dreadful evening of amateur theatricals at Lady Basingstoke’s, where Clara sat through four hours with her hands folded and afterwards said one polite thing about the scenery that got repeated approvingly for a fortnight.

They were never alone in a room. Aunt Helena lived in Grovener Square from the fifteenth of November and went everywhere Clara went. The Duke of Blackwood addressed his fiancée as Miss Ashworth in company for six weeks before it began to look strange and he had to be told to stop.

And every third day, Dominic did what Dominic did.

He was heartbroken about her. He said in three separate drawing rooms that he had always feared something of the sort and blamed himself for not seeing it sooner. He said he had heard the news of the engagement with real joy and only hoped His Grace understood what he was taking on. He never once said an unkind word. There was not a syllable in any of it that could be quoted against him.

“He is very good,” the Duke said in the carriage in December.

“He is the best I have ever seen,” said Clara.

What she had not expected was that the boring part would be the part that undid her.

It was not the balls. It was the mornings. The house in Grovener Square at nine o’clock. Lily’s hair. Somebody had been scraping it back too tight since June, and Clara had asked the third time she came whether she might do it instead. Lily had said, If you like, in a voice designed to convey total indifference, and had sat down on the stool before Clara had finished the sentence.

After that, it was every morning she came. By January, it was five mornings a week.

She learned the household by accident, the way she had learned every household she had ever been in. There were three footmen doing the work of five. There was a cook who had been ordering for twelve since the old Duke’s day. There was a governess, Miss Pike, who was excellent and terrified and had been given no authority whatsoever. Clara found her crying in a passage in December because Lily had told her she was not her mother.

“She says it to everyone,” Clara said. “She said it to me in November.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, no, I’m not. And I’m not going to pretend to be. And would you like your hair done?”

Clara gave her the handkerchief.

“Miss Pike, she is nine years old. Everybody in this house is being so careful with her that she cannot find one solid thing to push against. Be less careful. She will like you better for it.”

She told the Duke about it that evening because she thought he ought to know. He heard her out and then sat looking at the fire for a while.

“I have been careful with her for seven months.”

“You have been frightened of her for seven months. It is not the same thing. But it looks identical from the outside.”

“Miss Ashworth,” said the Duke of Blackwood. “Do you know that you are the only person in England who talks to me like that?”

“Yes,” said Clara. “It is because I am leaving in June.”

She meant it as a joke. It came out wrong. It sat in the room, and neither of them picked it up.

He was not what she had built either. She had assumed in November that she was dealing with a cold man doing a decent thing at cost. That lasted about a month. What he actually was, she worked out somewhere around Christmas, was a man who had inherited a title at twenty-eight because his elder brother went into a canal at Ghent, and a nine-year-old at thirty-one because his sister-in-law had died of the same fever eleven months later. He had responded to both by becoming extremely quiet and extremely correct, and never once asking anybody for anything.

He read to Lily at night. Badly. Doing the voices. Clara stood outside the door one evening in January and listened to a duke doing a pirate for four minutes, and had to go and stand at a window.

He said over the estate papers, “I have been thinking about Fen Ditton. Eleven hundred pounds of damage on a house worth four thousand. It would cost nine hundred to put right. It would let for a hundred and twenty a year.”

He did not look up.

“I have the money. You would be independent in eight years.”

“No.”

He looked up then.

“Miss Ashworth—”

“I have been given things by a man before,” Clara said. “And it took me two years to understand what I had paid for them. I am not doing it again. Not even with you. And I know you are not him. And that is precisely why I am not going to let you.”

She put her hand flat on the table.

“Lend it to me. Draw a paper. Interest at four. A term and a schedule. If I default, you take the house.”

“That is an absurd way to treat a friend.”

“It is the only way I know how to be one,” said Clara.

He drew the paper. She signed it on the eleventh. Aunt Helena witnessed it. Clara went upstairs afterwards and was quietly sick and could not have explained to anybody why.