The Dowager Ordered Her to Leave Ashborne Hall After She Made the Duke Laugh—But When She Whispered, “You Mustn’t Look at Me Like That,” He Growled, “I’ll Do Far More Than Look.”

PART 7

By the end of May, Lady Cassandra knew, and had decided not to be discreet about it.

“You have gone and done it.”

“My lady?”

“Bewitched my nephew.” Lady Cassandra said it with enormous satisfaction. “I have not seen him this insufferable in years. Pacing his study. Forgetting his correspondence. Asking after your health with the subtlety of a man announcing a fire in a crowded theatre.”

“I have done nothing of the kind. I am his aunt’s companion. Nothing more.”

“Tell that to Mrs. Fenwick,” Lady Cassandra said, “who informs me he has taken to dining in the small parlour of an evening rather than the great hall, for no reason she can determine except that it is the room nearest the library, where a certain companion is known to read.”

Iris said nothing, because there was nothing honest she could say.

“My dear,” Lady Cassandra said, more gently, “do not mistake me. I am not warning you. I am seventy-three years old and I have watched this house hold its breath for four years, and I have never in my life been so glad to see it exhale.”

The trouble came from London at the beginning of June.

It arrived in three carriages, with six trunks, two maids, Lady Sophia’s own companion, and the Dowager Duchess of Ashborne — who had not visited Ashborne Hall in three years and had not announced that she was coming at all.

And it brought, in the second carriage, Lady Sophia Wentworth.

Iris understood the arithmetic before she had finished descending the stairs. Everyone in the hall understood it. Lady Sophia was the daughter of an earl. Her dowry was said to be sufficient to purchase a small country. She had a face that had occasioned a great deal of very bad poetry in London, and she was here, in June, with the Duke’s mother, for exactly one reason, and everyone in the house knew it, including the grooms.

At dinner that first night, the Dowager did not waste time.

“You will recall, Gabriel, that we discussed the necessity of an heir some years past, and that Lady Sophia was at the time considered a most suitable match.”

“I recall the conversation, mother. I do not recall agreeing to it.”

“You will not mourn Margaret forever.” The Dowager said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse — the flat certainty of a woman who had decided that grief had a statute of limitations and had quietly consulted her calendar. “It has been four years. This house needs a duchess. Ashborne needs an heir. And I will not live forever to see either arranged.”

Iris sat at the far end of the table, in the position a companion occupies — neither family nor servant, that strange unclassified middle — and kept her eyes on her plate.

It was not her place to have an opinion. It was certainly not her place to feel the small, sharp tightening under her ribs at the practised, easy smile of Lady Sophia Wentworth, or the purposeful satisfaction of the Dowager, or the deliberately empty face of Gabriel Rothwell, which gave away nothing whatsoever about what he thought.

She excused herself early.

She did not see him watch her go. She did not see his jaw set, or his hands close into fists beneath the table where his mother could not see them.

The days that followed were a quiet siege.

The house split into two camps, neither of which admitted to existing. There were long, strained afternoons in the drawing room, during which the Dowager steered every conversation toward Lady Sophia’s accomplishments with the tireless precision of a woman who had spent forty years winning arguments by declining to notice that she had lost them. There were small, load-bearing silences at dinner, when Gabriel answered his mother with a restraint so complete it was almost a form of violence, and his eyes found Iris’s exactly once across the candles, and then returned to his plate.

Iris took refuge with Lady Cassandra, who received her with a dry look and a gesture at the chair by the fire.

“You needn’t hide yourself away on my account. Though I understand the impulse. This house has never been especially forgiving of women who want things they have not been given permission to want.”

“I am not hiding. I am being sensible.”

“Sensible.” Lady Cassandra’s mouth curved, dry and knowing. “My dear girl. I have watched my nephew fall in love exactly once before — with a woman his parents chose for him and approved of entirely — and I watched him bury her four years later, with a grief so complete it nearly buried him alongside her.”

She set down her needle.

“I have no particular faith in sensible matches, whatever the Dowager may tell you. I have rather more faith in the kind of love that makes a man forget, for the length of an evening, every careful rule he was raised inside of.”

She reached over and patted Iris’s hand — briskly, and with real affection.

“Whatever happens, child. Do not let sensible be the reason you walk away from something rare. Rare things do not, in my experience, come round twice.”

The next morning, Lady Sophia Wentworth came to find her in the rose garden.

She sat down on the stone bench beside Iris without being invited, arranged her skirts, and looked out at the roses.

“You needn’t look so wary. I have not come to quarrel with you. I haven’t the energy for it, and besides, I rather suspect I should lose.”

Iris waited.

“I have spent three days in this house,” Lady Sophia said, “watching the Duke of Ashborne look at you the way every mother in London prays some man will one day look at her daughter. And never once look at me that way. Though I have tried rather harder than was dignified to earn it.”

“Lady Sophia—”

“I do not begrudge it, if that is what you are bracing for.” She said it evenly. “I begrudge my own vanity for having hoped a duke’s fortune might be worth the absence of his heart. It would not have been, in the end.”

Iris looked at her for a moment.

“I am sorry all the same. For whatever hope I have cost you.”

“Don’t be.” Lady Sophia stood, and shook out her skirts, and looked down at her with something that was very nearly kindness. “I shall marry a viscount, I expect. I shall be entirely comfortable. I shall never once lie awake wondering whether he might have loved someone else more.” She paused. “There are worse fates than comfort, Miss Hartley. But I begin to suspect, watching the two of you, that there are better ones, too. I hope, for your sake, that you are brave enough to take it.”

She walked back up the path, and Iris sat alone in the rose garden for a long time, with the bees working the hedges and the whole of her careful architecture creaking under the strain.