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

Chapter 6

He stood. She stood too. He took her hand, and this time both of them were ungloved — she had not put gloves on for her mending. His fingers were warm. The small white scar on his thumb pressed against her palm.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “if you allow it.”

“Tomorrow.”

He bowed. He left. She did not move from the spot. She heard him in the hall. She heard him say something polite to her aunt. She heard her aunt say something bright and false in return. She heard the front door close.

Then she sat down on the low table, on top of the dish of dried roses, because her legs would not hold her any longer. She put her face in her hands. She did not cry. She had not cried in five years. She did not cry now, but her shoulders shook for a long moment. When she looked up, the bee was back at the window, and the sunlight had moved across the floor, and she understood that she had agreed to something she did not yet know the shape of.

He called the next day. He called the day after that. By the end of the second week, he had called seven times.

The third time he came, he brought a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. He gave it to her in the hall where her aunt could not see, and he asked her not to open it until she was alone. That night in her small back room, she sat on the bed and untied the string. Inside was a single book. Very old. The leather was cracked. The pages were yellow at the edges. She opened it, and on the first page, in a hand she had not seen in five years, was written: Thomas Ashworth, his book, Wiltshire, 1810.

He had brought her one of her father’s books.

She did not know how he had gotten it. She did not ask. She held it against her chest for a long time. The smell of old leather and her father’s library rose up out of it, and she sat in the dark and breathed it in until the candle burned down.

She found out weeks later that he had ridden out to Wiltshire himself, alone, the morning after the ball. He had gone to the cottage where her father’s small estate had been sold. He had spoken to the new owner. He had asked, very politely, whether any of Sir Thomas’s books had been kept. The new owner, embarrassed, admitted that one trunk of books was still in the attic, never opened. The Duke had bought the entire trunk on the spot. Then he had asked the man not to tell anyone he had been there.

She found this out from a footman who was the brother of the man who had driven the carriage. The footman did not know it was secret. He told the story because it was a fine story.

She listened with her hands folded in her lap, and she did not say anything.

That night she went up to her room and read another page from her father’s book by candlelight, and she thought: He did not tell me. He did this and he did not tell me.

That was the night she began to believe him.

Of course, her aunt had not been idle.

It began at a dinner two and a half weeks after the ball. Twenty guests sat around the long table in the dining room. The Duke had been invited as a matter of form — to leave him out now would have been to admit the Whitmores had no claim on him. He had accepted as a matter of form — to refuse would have meant cutting Clara.

He sat opposite her. He did not look at her too often. He was, she had come to understand, a man who guarded what he cared about by not appearing to care about it.

Lydia had been seated beside him. Lydia wore her pearls. Lydia wore a new gown the color of spring violets, and her hair had been done in three new ways before her mother was satisfied. Lydia laughed at everything he said — even the things that were not funny, even the things that were not meant to be heard by her at all.

Lady Beatrice watched from the head of the table.

Halfway through the third course, when the conversation had grown easy and the wine had been refilled twice, Lady Beatrice set down her fork. The small motion drew attention because she had meant it to.

“Your grace,” she said in her brightest dinner voice, the one that carried to the far end of the table. “I had quite forgotten to ask. Have you had the chance to view the little portrait my niece keeps on her dressing table?”

Clara went still.

Across the table, the Duke set down his glass. “I have not had that pleasure.”

“Oh, you must,” said Lady Beatrice warmly. “It is the only thing of her mother’s she has. We have all teased her about it for years, of course — the poor woman was painted in a quite plain dress, and one can hardly see her face. But Clara does so cling to it. She has so little, you see. We have done what we can, but one cannot manufacture a fortune where there was none. Her father, God rest him, was a charming man, but he had no head at all for money. When he died, the house and the land were already mortgaged twice over. Which is why dear Clara came to us without so much as a pearl earring. We took her in, of course. One does what one can for blood. But it has been five long years, has it not, dear?”

The table went very quiet. The kind of quiet that descends when something cruel is happening, and no one is sure whether to laugh politely or look at their plate.

“Aunt,” said Clara. Her voice was quiet, steady. “My father’s debts were paid in full from the sale of the estate. There were no unpaid sums.”

“Oh, child,” said Lady Beatrice sweetly. “We do not discuss such things at table. Hush now.”

“Forgive me, Aunt, but you have raised the matter. I should not wish a guest to think my father died in debt when he did not.”

A footman behind her shifted his feet. Another guest cleared her throat.

Lady Beatrice laughed. It was a small laugh, light, but Clara heard the edge in it.

“How spirited you have become, dear. His grace’s notice has done wonders for your courage. I confess, when she first came to us, she would not say a word for a fortnight. Sat in corners. Cried into her pillow. We thought she might be a little simple.”

It was the cruelest sentence. It landed like a slap.

Clara did not move. Her hand holding her fork did not tremble. She set the fork down very gently beside her plate. She placed her napkin beside it. She looked across the table at the Duke. He was looking at her aunt. His face had gone perfectly still — the way a frozen pond goes still. Smooth. Hard. Dangerous if stepped on.

Clara stood.

“Forgive me,” she said quietly to the room. “I find I am not well. Please continue. Aunt, do not let me spoil the evening.”

She walked the length of the table. She did not look at anyone. She passed Lydia, who had gone red to the ears. She passed her uncle, who was staring at his plate. She passed two of her aunt’s particular friends, who were exchanging glances. She passed the Duke last. She did not stop. She kept walking.

She walked out of the dining room, through the hall, up the wide staircase, and into her own small room at the back of the house. She closed the door. She sat down on the bed. She did not cry. She placed her hand flat against the bedpost and pressed her forehead against her hand. She breathed slowly — the way her father had taught her to breathe when she fell off her pony at ten and had been afraid she had broken her wrist.

Slow, he had said. Slow. Count to ten. The pain will not go away, but it will become a thing you can hold.

She counted to ten. She counted again. She had reached seven when she heard footsteps in the corridor. Quick footsteps, light — a woman’s. Her aunt, she thought, come to drag her back down, or worse, come to lock the door from the outside until the company had gone, as she had done twice before.

The footsteps stopped at her door. A small, soft knock. A voice, very low.

“Miss Ashworth?”

Not her aunt.

She rose. She opened the door a few inches. It was the housekeeper, Mrs. Birch, who had served the Whitmores for thirty years and had served Clara with the same dry courtesy she gave all the others.

Mrs. Birch’s face was carefully calm.

“His grace asks if you will see him for one moment in the small library,” Mrs. Birch said quietly. “He has stepped out from the dinner. I have told the company he is taking the air in the garden.”

“The small library?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Mrs. Birch — did my aunt send you?”

“No, miss.”

“Then thank you.”

She closed the door. She smoothed her hair. She looked at herself in the small glass over the wash table. Her face was very pale, but her eyes were dry and her mouth was set. She thought she looked like her father.

She went down the back stairs.