She Was Invited to Tea, Never Imagining It Was a Blind Date With the Duke—Until She Found Three Cups on the Table, His Mother Missing, and the Most Eligible Man in England Waiting for Her Alone

PART 2 

Twelve yards away, in the West Garden, Constance, Duchess of Alderwick, stood under an elm with rain beginning to spot the shoulders of her pelisse and watched the drawing room windows.

She had been standing there for twenty minutes. She intended to stand there for twenty more.

It was not, she would admit, dignified. Three decades ago, she would not have done it. Constance had spent more than thirty years observing people who behaved beautifully when they knew they were being observed, and somewhere along the way she had grown suspicious of beautiful behaviour. Character, she had come to believe, was revealed in the small moments when no advantage could be gained by displaying it.

Which was how she had found Evelyn Pembroke.

Two weeks earlier, at Mrs. Harborough’s, a girl named Miss Doring had overturned a cup across the front of a new gown. She was nineteen, newly arrived in society, and already painfully conscious of every mistake she made. Several heads turned at the sound of porcelain striking a saucer. One woman gasped. Another looked directly at the stain.

Miss Doring’s face went crimson.

Then Evelyn Pembroke dropped a spoon.

It struck the floor loudly. And when she bent to retrieve it, she somehow caught the edge of a small plate and sent two biscuits rolling beneath a chair — and half the room looked at her instead.

“My apologies,” she had said cheerfully. “Apparently I have declared war upon Mrs. Harborough’s china.”

There had been laughter. The moment had passed.

Ten minutes later Constance found her in the small withdrawing room, dabbing cold water onto the stain on Miss Doring’s gown. When the girl had gone, Constance remained.

“You did that deliberately.”

Evelyn had looked at her. “I dropped a spoon. And nearly a plate.”

“I have always been clumsy.”

“No, you have not.”

And then, after a moment, Evelyn had smiled and said the thing Constance never forgot.

“She was about to cry. That was all.”

No speech about kindness. No attempt to turn a small decency into evidence of extraordinary virtue. Constance had remembered it for a fortnight.

She had also remembered the answer Evelyn gave her later that afternoon, when the conversation turned — as it always turned — to marriage.

“And if he does not appear,” Evelyn had said, “then I hope I shall have enough sense not to marry the incorrect one merely to avoid being unmarried.”

“Many people would call that impractical.”

“My father calls it cheaper than a lifetime of unhappiness.”

Standing in the wet garden now, watching her son’s shoulders shift as he reached, at last, for the teapot, Constance thought of the other thing she had never told him.

Seven months ago, at a London dinner, she had overheard Lady Arabella Vain speaking to a cousin. The cousin had asked whether she truly cared for Theodore. Arabella had answered carelessly, because she believed that no one important was listening.

Care for him? Of course. Alderwick is one of the finest houses in England.

I asked about the man.

So did I.

Constance had never forgotten it, and she had never told her son, because she had not wanted him to reject a woman merely because his mother disliked something she had overheard.

Which left only one question, and she was patient enough to stand in the rain for its answer.

What happens to a man who has spent ten years being valued as an estate, when somebody finally looks at him like a man?