The Duke Fell in Love With His Best Friend’s Little Sister the Moment They Met—Then Promised to Be Nothing More Than Her Friend, Carrying That Secret Beside a Silver Medallion for Two Long Years

PART 2

Supper at Havering was in a small oak-panelled dining room that had plainly been the family’s room in the everyday sense long before it had been the family’s room in the mourning sense.

There were three of them at the table. Nicholas at the head, Harriet at his right, Ashendon at his left, Corbett behind Nicholas’s chair, and a boy of about fifteen in a plain jacket helping. That was all. There was no butler.

Nicholas, seeing Ashendon’s brief soldier’s glance around, said easily, “We have not had a butler since my mother’s illness. She would not have a new one.”

“Kitt was enough,” Harriet said. “Corbett is enough. Aren’t you, Corbett?”

“Yes, sir,” said Corbett, without expression.

“He is the head of this household, Ashendon. Do not be deceived by the coat.”

“I am not deceived, Vain. I saw as I came in.”

“He is a soldier, Corbett,” Nicholas said over his shoulder. “You will get on with him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Corbett again — and Ashendon had the impression, briefly, that Corbett had already taken his own view of the new Duke in the drawing room and would not be greatly moved by his master’s introductions either way.

They ate. Nicholas talked. Nicholas, who had always been the talker of the two of them, had come home from the town full of the business of his mother’s affairs and full of the plain relief of having a friend in the house at last — and he talked as he had used to talk in a tent, about anything that came into his head. A man he had met in the town who had known their father. A horse he had almost bought and had not. A quarrel between two tenants he was going to have to arbitrate. A small ridiculous story about a spaniel.

Ashendon watched her in the small careful way a soldier watches a room he does not know.

He watched, without meaning to, the way she cut her meat into small neat pieces, the way of a woman who had been taught early. The way she set her fork down between mouthfuls — not on the plate, but on the edge of it. And once, when Nicholas said something particularly foolish about a curate in the town, she caught Ashendon’s eye across the table with the smallest, driest, most perfectly held twitch at the corner of her mouth — and looked away again immediately, and did not by any word let her brother know she had done it.

He almost laughed. He did not. He drank his wine and understood he was in for a bad week.

After supper Nicholas would have him to the library.

“Come, Ashendon. Brandy. You cannot go to bed at ten. You are not a country curate.” He looked at his sister. “Harriet, my love, forgive us. We are going to be soldiers for an hour.”

“Be soldiers, then,” she said, standing. She turned to Ashendon. “Your grace. Will I see you at breakfast?”

He hesitated one second. He caught himself hesitating.

“You will, Miss Vain, if I may. I have been persuaded, I think, to stay a day or two.”

“I am glad of it, your grace. Good night.”

She went.

Nicholas poured him a brandy, sat him down in one of the two good old chairs by the fire, and said:

“Marchant. Look. I asked you here for a reason, and I want to say it now, before I lose the will.”

Ashendon looked at him. Nicholas was tired in a way Ashendon knew — the tired that came of being the one left standing in a family. His mother dead five weeks. His father nine years. An aunt somewhere in Bath. A cousin in the north. There was Harriet, and there was Nicholas, and that was the family.

“Say it, Vain.”

“Two things. First.” Nicholas turned the glass in his hand. “I am going back to the regiment. Not this month — I cannot leave Harriet this month. But by the spring. I have written to the colonel. He will have me back on the staff, and I mean to go. I want you to know I mean to go, because I do not want to argue about it and I do not want you to think I brought you here in order to be talked into staying home. I am going. That is settled.”

“Very well. Second?”

Nicholas stopped turning the glass.

“Second — when I go, Ashendon, I am leaving my sister in this house, in this country, in this county, with an aunt who will not stir from Bath and a cousin who is a fool, and nobody else. Nobody whose opinion of a suitor I would trust. Harriet is nineteen. She is running the house because our mother is dead, and there is no one else, and she is doing it well. But she will not always be running a house of mine. She will marry. She will marry within a year or two. She is a plain-spoken, good-looking girl of unimpeachable family and no fortune, and the county is going to be at the door as soon as she is out of black — and I am going to be in Spain.”

He set the brandy down.

“I am going to ask you a favour. It is a large one. You may refuse it.”

Ashendon said, quite carefully, “Ask.”

“I want you to look in on her. Not to squire her about — she would hate that, and I would not ask it. To keep half an eye on her from London. To let me know when you write if there is anything I should hear that she is too proud to write me. To — if it should come to it, if some man should come to her whom I would not want, and I in Spain — to speak to her honestly, as a man she could trust, and to say so. To be, in short, Ashendon, the friend to her that I would be to her if I were in England. That is the favour. I have thought about it for weeks. I have not another man in England I could ask this of. Will you do it?”

Ashendon looked into the fire for a long moment.

He was aware, quite plainly, of what he had thought in the drawing room. He was aware, quite plainly, of what he was being asked. And he was aware, above all, that a man in his position — a man who had, in the space of an afternoon, understood himself to be more than a little struck by the sister of the friend now asking this — had two honest choices.

He could refuse the favour, and give a reason.

Or he could accept it, and hold to it, and behave in the years to come exactly as if the drawing room afternoon had not happened.

He was silent, he realised. Too long.

“Marchant,” Nicholas said at last, “you are frightening me. Refuse me if you must.”

“I will do it, Vain.”

“You will.”

“I will look in on her. I will write to you honestly. I will speak to her as a friend of yours would speak to her, and no otherwise. I promise you that, on my honour.”

“Ashendon. Thank you.” Nicholas got up and shook his hand in the plain rough way he had. “I could not sleep at night in Spain if I did not know somebody honest was in England for her. Truly. Thank you.”

Ashendon shook it back with the same hand that had, an hour before, been across a table from Harriet Vain.

He did not, at the time, think of it as a bargain against himself. He thought of it as a bargain a friend made with a friend.

He would call it a great many other things over the next years.

He lay awake a long while in a good square room on the second floor with a window over the orchard, and he understood that he had said two contradictory things in the space of one evening. He had said silently, in a drawing room: I am going to be in trouble in this house. And he had said aloud, in a library: I will look in on your sister as a friend.

He had said them both in perfect good faith.

He was now going to have to keep both.