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 4

The Pembroke house was comfortable rather than grand. There was no ballroom in it, and no gallery of ancestors glaring down from gilded frames, but there were books in nearly every room and a garden that Marianne tended badly and enthusiastically and the agreeable disorder of a house in which people actually lived.

Dinner there was not elaborate.

Jonathan disagreed with his wife about whether a particular rose bush was dead. Marianne maintained that it was resting. Evelyn told them both that plants did not take holidays. Jonathan accused his daughter of a shameful want of imagination.

At one point Marianne turned to Theodore and asked whether his mother had truly been in the West Garden during the rain.

Theodore set down his fork.

“Mrs. Pembroke, I believe the answer depends entirely upon whether my mother is present when one asks.”

Marianne laughed. Jonathan raised his glass.

“I like him.”

“Papa —”

“It seems cruel to make the man wait until dessert.”

Theodore smiled. But something in him tightened, unexpectedly, and it stayed with him through the second remove.

At Alderwick Park, dinner had been beautiful when his father was alive. It had rarely been easy. His father had believed affection was best expressed through provision, and Theodore had never once doubted that he was loved — but love, in the Langford household, had always worn formal clothes.

The Pembrokes let theirs sit down at the table with its sleeves rolled up.

After dinner, Jonathan took him into the library.

They spoke of land, politics, a difficult harvest, the price of draining a lower field. And then Jonathan said, examining the decanter as though he had remarked on the weather:

“My daughter likes you.”

“I believe I like her.”

“I know.” Jonathan poured two small glasses. “Is there anything you do not know?”

“Several things. My wife keeps a list.”

He handed Theodore a glass, and his tone did not change.

“I will not ask your intentions. Not yet.” A pause. “But if your intentions become serious, remember something.”

Theodore waited.

“Evelyn has never needed rescuing from her life. She has a home. People who love her. Enough money to live comfortably. She does not need a husband in order to be respectable.”

“I understand.”

“I hope you do.” Jonathan looked at him. “If she ever leaves this house for another, I want it to be because she wants the man waiting there. Not because his house is larger.”

“I would want the same.”

“Good.”

Neither man knew, then, how much that conversation was going to weigh.

Constance watched the friendship with enormous satisfaction and attempted heroically not to interfere.

Her heroism lasted eleven days.

“You are seeing the Pembrokes tomorrow,” she remarked at breakfast.

Theodore looked up. “I am attending a dinner to which the Pembrokes have also been invited.”

“Precisely what I said.”

“No, it was not.”

Constance buttered her toast. “Evelyn is very pretty in blue.”

“I have no idea what she intends to wear.”

“I did not suggest you did.”

Theodore returned to his newspaper. His mother smiled into her tea.

Arabella did not share the satisfaction.

At first she dismissed Evelyn Pembroke entirely. The Duke of Alderwick knew a great many women, and friendship meant very little.

Then Theodore began to seek Evelyn out — never conspicuously; that would have been easier to challenge. He simply seemed to know where she was in every room.

Arabella watched him enter an assembly and look toward Evelyn before greeting anyone else. She watched him bend his head to hear her better. She watched him listen.

That disturbed her most of all.

Theodore had always been courteous to Arabella. He was attentive when she spoke. But with Evelyn he was curious. There was a difference, and Arabella Vain, who had spent nearly a decade being admired in society, knew the difference when she saw it.

So she began, carefully.

At a garden party she asked him to walk her across damp ground because her shoe had come loose. He offered his arm.

At a concert she saved the chair beside her and called to him before he could cross the room toward Evelyn. He sat, because refusing would have embarrassed her.

When her mother was indisposed, she wrote to ask his advice about a troublesome tenant on a small property of her own.

Every request was reasonable. Every response was courteous.

And somehow Evelyn seemed always to arrive at the end of these scenes and never the beginning. One afternoon she came to Langford House just as Theodore was handing Arabella into her carriage. Another evening she walked into a supper room to find Arabella leaning close while Theodore listened with grave attention.

Evelyn was not made of stone. She did not consider jealousy attractive, and she was not immune to it on that account. But she refused to build a tragedy out of fragments.

That did not stop the fragments from hurting.