SHE WORE NO JEWELS TO THE BALL—UNAWARE EVERY NOBLEMAN THERE HAD COME FOR HER

Chapter 5

The drawing room of Whitmore House was the grandest room in it. The walls were papered in pale green with small gold flowers. The mantel was white marble. The fire was lit, though it was not cold.

He was standing at the window with his back to her when she entered, looking out into the small walled garden where the lilacs were just beginning to bloom. He turned when he heard her step. He did not smile. He bowed.

“Miss Ashworth.”

“Your grace.”

Her aunt swept in behind her, ignoring everything she had just promised, and arranged herself on the long sofa near the fire.

“Your grace,” Lady Beatrice said warmly. “We are so honored.”

“Lady Whitmore,” he said. His voice was perfectly polite. “Forgive me. I asked the butler to show me up alone. I wish to speak to your niece in private, with your permission, of course.” He inclined his head a small degree. “I will not keep her long. The door will remain open. Your housekeeper may stand in the hall if it pleases you.”

Clara watched her aunt’s face go through several small storms in the space of one breath. Refusal. Calculation. Acceptance.

“Of course, your grace,” Lady Beatrice said at last, rising with a stiff smile. “Of course.”

She left. The door did not quite close. Clara heard the rustle of her aunt’s skirts settling somewhere just out of sight in the hall, where she could not be seen but could perhaps be heard.

The Duke heard it too. He glanced at the door, and one corner of his mouth moved just a fraction.

“Will you sit?” he asked.

She sat in the chair nearest the fire. He took the chair across from her. Between them was a small low table with a porcelain dish of dried rose petals. The petals smelled faintly sweet, dusty, old. Outside, a bee was bumping against the window glass, trying to find its way to the lilacs.

“You said you would tell me the truth,” she said quietly.

“I will.”

“Then please do, before my aunt finds a reason to come back.”

He almost smiled. “Very well.”

He looked down at his hands, then up at her again. His eyes were steady.

“I knew your father, as I told you. We met when I was twenty and he was perhaps thirty-five. I had ridden out alone on my first trip away from my own father’s house, and my horse threw a shoe in a village near Salisbury. Your father was the man who took me in.”

She did not speak. She could not.

“I did not tell him who I was. I gave him another name. He did not ask too many questions. He fed me. He gave me a bed. He spoke to me as though I were a young man with sense — which I was not. When I left three days later, he refused payment. He said, ‘A roof is not a thing to be sold to a traveler.’ I have remembered that sentence for fifteen years.”

Clara’s hand found the arm of her chair and held it.

“I learned later who he was. By then my own life had become busy, and I had not the time or the courage to write to him as a man of my station and remind him of a young fool he had once fed. I told myself I would do it in time. I did not. He died. I read of his death in the paper. I went to the funeral.”

He paused. His voice dropped lower.

“You will not remember me. I stood at the back. You were thirteen. You wore a black ribbon in your hair, and you did not cry, though everyone around you did. I watched you. I thought: that is the daughter of a good man. And then I went home.”

Clara put her hand over her mouth. She had not known. No one had told her.

“I came to London this season for the first time in five years,” he went on. “I had matters of business. I attended a ball last week, and a dinner two nights before that, and another ball before that. The same mothers brought the same daughters. They all wore the same pearls and the same smiles. And last evening I came to Whitmore House because someone said it would be a fine party, and because I thought I might find a wife there. I am eight and thirty. My father has been dead two years. The house wants a mistress.”

He stopped. He looked at the fire. He looked back at her.

“I did not expect to find you.”

The room was very quiet. The bee had given up on the window and gone. The fire popped softly in the grate.

“I saw you the moment I came in. You were counting the windows. You did not see me. I watched you finish your count and begin again. And finish and begin. I asked our host who you were. He told me you were a poor relation kept by the Whitmores out of family duty. He said your name. Ashworth. And I knew.”

“You knew what?” she whispered.

“That you were his daughter. That you wore no jewels because there were none to wear. That every man and woman in that room had walked past you for years without seeing you. And that I had owed your father a debt for fifteen years that I had never paid.”

He leaned forward slightly.

“So I crossed the room. I asked you to dance. I have not been able to think of anything else since.”

“Your grace — Marcus,” she said, because she could not yet say the other word. “I have to ask you something, and I would like you to answer me plainly. Did you come here today because you owe my father a debt? Or did you come here today because you wish to see me again?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“Both,” he said at last. “I came because I owe your father. But I would have come if I owed him nothing. I would have come if I had never met him. I came because last night I sat in my library until three in the morning thinking about a woman who counts windows when she is bored. I have not done such a thing for any woman before in my life, and I find I cannot pretend it did not happen.”

She did not know where to look. She looked at the dish of dried roses.

“I do not believe in love at first sight,” he said quietly. “I do not believe a man can know a woman by watching her cross a room. I believe in time, and in proof, and in the slow work of finding out whether the person you thought you saw is really there. I am not here to propose marriage to you, Miss Ashworth. I am here to ask you for time.”

“Time?”

“Permission to call. Permission to ride out with you — with a maid, for the sake of propriety. Permission to know you. Permission to learn whether the woman I think I saw in that ballroom is the woman who actually exists. And permission for you to learn whether I am the man you think you saw. I am not always easy. I am not always kind. I have moods that last for days. I have been told my silences are heavy.”

He paused.

“Your father would have liked that I told you all of this. I think.”

Clara pressed her hand flat against her knee to stop it shaking.

“He would have,” she said. “Yes. He would have liked that.”

“Then may I call again?”

“Yes,” she said. “You may.”