She Was Offered to the Highest Bidder to Settle Her Father’s Debt — Then the Ruthless Duke Laid Ten Thousand Pounds on the Table and Did the One Thing No One in That Room Had Imagined

PART 4

She smelled it first. Coffee — which her uncle took only when he had a scheme to sweeten — and under it the wet-ash smell of a fire lit too early in July, because Sir Cassius liked a room warm when he meant to be cold in it.

She found him at the breakfast table with the curtains still half-drawn against the bright washed morning, and a second gentleman with him whom she had not expected and did not want. Mr. Fessender, her uncle’s attorney out of the county town — a narrow grey man with ink at his cuff and a habit of not quite meeting the eye.

“Ah,” said Sir Cassius, pleasant as new milk. The night’s rage had been ironed out of him. That was worse. A furious Cassius she could read. A pleasant one was always mid-plot.

“My niece. Sit. There is chocolate, I believe, if you dislike coffee. Mr. Fessender has written out early to give us the benefit of his opinion on last night’s event.”

“I take coffee,” Sabine said, and took it, and sat, and set the cup down untasted so that her hands would have something to do that was not trembling. “Good morning, Mr. Fessender. You have come about the Duke’s settlement.”

The attorney’s eyes went to Sir Cassius and came back.

“Your uncle was concerned,” he said, “as to its regularity.”

“It was witnessed by seven gentlemen of the county and signed by my uncle’s own hand. I watched him sign it. I have it safe.” She had risen at four and moved it from under the stair to a place neither of them would guess — sewn flat inside the lining of her mother’s workbox — and she was glad of it now. “I cannot imagine what is irregular.”

“The irregularity,” said Sir Cassius, buttering bread with great care, “is that you are a woman of eight and twenty with no husband and no father. And until you take the one, or by some miracle recover the other, you have a guardian. That guardian is myself. And a settlement made upon a ward, my dear, without the guardian’s independent consent to the terms — as opposed to his signature obtained under a duke’s threat, before witnesses, which any court will hear described in exactly those words — is a settlement that may be set aside.”

He smiled at her.

“Mr. Fessender assures me of it.”

Sabine kept her face level. Inside, the floor tilted again.

“You signed of your own free will. You were glad to sign. You were counting the four thousand before the ink was dry.”

“Was I? Mr. Fessender did not see me glad. Mr. Fessender was not in the room.”

The attorney studied his cuff.

“What Mr. Fessender will see, should this come to a hearing, is a distraught guardian coerced by a notorious man into surrendering his ward’s future. For it is not to be borne, Sabine, that a girl of your birth should be tied to Ravensmore’s money and Ravensmore’s name in the mouths of every gossip from here to town.” He set down the knife. “Do you know what they are already saying? They rode home last night, though seven, and by noon it will be all over three parishes that the Duke of Ravensmore bought Miss Carr outright and settled her keeping on her” — he chose the word with relish — “like an arrangement in St. James’s. Your reputation, my dear, is worth precisely nothing this morning. I am the only man who can mend it.”

There it was. She saw the whole shape of it at once, laid out clean as a column of her father’s figures. He would let the county believe the worst, and then he would offer to save her from the ruin he was himself spreading — by voiding the trust, pocketing what he could of it, and marrying her off after all to whichever bidder would still have soiled goods.

“And how,” she said very quietly, “do you propose to mend it?”

“Merik will still take you. I spoke to him this morning by note. He is not proud.” Sir Cassius turned his cup. “The settlement quietly set aside, the debt paid from it first — a court will allow a guardian that much for the estate’s protection — and the remainder to your marriage portion, and Merik’s name over you like a roof. Respectable, dull, safe.” He spread his hands. “Everything a duke’s six thousand can never buy you, which is a place among decent people.”

“You would give me to a man of near sixty and call it saving me.”

“I would give you to a man who does not make you the talk of the assembly rooms.”

“Whereas your duke—”

“He is not my duke.” Sir Cassius went on unbothered. “Your duke, madam, has done you the greatest disservice any man ever did a woman — which is to be generous to her in public. You will learn the difference between a gift and a trap when the world has finished laughing.”

He rose, brushing crumbs from his waistcoat.

“Fessender will draw the papers to contest. You have until the quarter sessions to be reasonable. I do hope you will be. I so dislike the courts. Everyone’s linen aired, and none of it clean.”

He went out. Fessender gathered his hat, murmured something that was not quite an apology and not quite anything, and followed.

Sabine sat alone with the cooling coffee and the half-drawn curtains and the terrible orderly logic of it turning over and over in her mind.

He was not wrong. That was the poison in it. Whatever the Duke had meant — debt of honour, shame, the impulse of a hard man to do one soft thing — the effect, this morning, was that Sabine Carr had money no husband could touch and a name no decent hostess would receive. And her uncle had a lever long enough to prize both away, and a fortnight to do it in.

She had thought last night that the floor had gone out from under her. She understood now that it had only tilted.

This was the going out.

She was still sitting when the noise reached her from the front of the house — wheels on the wet gravel, brisk, and a voice at the door that was not a county voice, clipped and high and used to being obeyed.

She went to the window and drew the curtain a finger’s width.

A travelling chariot stood steaming in the drive, mud to the axles, a crest on the panel she did not know — a raven, wings spread, above a broken tower. And down from it, handed by a footman in dark livery, stepped a woman.

She was perhaps five and thirty, and beautiful the way a well-made blade is beautiful: all clean edge and cold light. Her travelling dress was a deep peacock silk that had never been cut down and turned from anything. Her bonnet cost more than Sabine’s whole quarter’s keep, and she looked up at the front of Car Court with an expression of faint distaste, as though the house had been described to her and had contrived to be even shabbier than the account.

“Puit,” Sabine said without turning. “Whose crest is a raven above a broken tower?”

There was a small silence.

“Ravensmore’s,” said Mrs. Puit. “That’s the Ravensmore arms, my dear. The tower for the old castle that fell.” A pause, and then, drier: “The lady, though, I couldn’t tell you. She’s nobody I ever dressed a mistress for.”

The footman was already at the door. Sabine heard the knocker, and the scuffle of the two big livery boys going to answer it, and then the high clipped voice again, pitched to carry.

“I am Estella, Duchess of Ravensmore. I have come to see the young person my brother-in-law has made such a spectacular fool of himself over. You will tell her so in those words. I find it saves everyone a great deal of time.”

Sabine let the curtain fall.

“Brother-in-law,” she said softly. “Puit. Brother-in-law.”

Mrs. Puit had gone quite still, her knitting forgotten on her arm.

“So she did. The Duke told me last night he was answerable to no husband, no guardian, no court, and no man.” Sabine’s heart had begun its hare’s beat again, high and quick. “He said a great deal of what he was not. He did not say he was unmarried. He did not say there was no duchess.”

“He did not,” Mrs. Puit agreed, very low. “Though a sister-in-law is not a wife, my dear. That title could mean his brother’s widow. Or—” She stopped. “Or a great many things.”

“And I do not know which, because I sat in that room and let him hand me six thousand pounds and half a story and walk into the rain — and I never once asked him the plainest question a woman can ask a man who has just rearranged her life.”

Below, the door had opened. The high voice was in the hall now, remarking on the damp, on the smell of tallow, on the length of the drive. Sabine straightened, and smoothed the amber silk she had not changed out of because she had not slept, and lifted her chin to exactly the level she had held it at all through the auction — because whatever this cold bright woman had come four hours to say, she would not say it to a Carr who flinched.

“Puit,” she murmured as the footsteps neared the door. “If this is his wife, I have taken a married man’s fortune before the whole county, and my uncle will not even need his attorney.”

“And if she’s not his wife,” said Mrs. Puit stoutly, taking up a position at Sabine’s shoulder like a small round sentry, “then she’s come a long way in a temper to tell you so, and that’s a thing worth knowing too.”

The door opened without a knock.