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 3

There was, he decided before he slept, only one way to keep both — and it was to be a man under discipline in a house where nobody had asked him to be one.

He came down to breakfast late.

He had meant to come down early. He had meant to be at the sideboard with a plate before either of them was in the room, to have his coffee and the newspaper before Miss Vain came in, to say his good mornings, and to be out in the yard on the pretext of the chestnut’s foreleg before the day proper began. He had meant, in short, to behave, and had told himself so while he shaved.

Then he had come down at what he thought was seven and found the clock on the landing said eight, and the house up two hours, and Nicholas gone out with the steward, and Harriet Vain at the breakfast table in a plain morning gown with a letter and a piece of toast.

There was nothing for it but to walk in.

She looked up. “Your grace. You must forgive the household. Nicholas is with Mr. Carden about a fence at the west boundary. He said not to wait breakfast for him. There is coffee — you must serve yourself. Corbett is with him. If you require tea, I will ring.”

“Coffee is enough.”

He poured it. He sat down at the far end of the small table deliberately, though the small table was small enough that the far end was still opposite her. She went back to her letter. He drank his coffee. Neither of them spoke for perhaps three minutes.

Then she said, without looking up:

“Your grace. You promised my brother something last night.”

He set the cup down. “Yes.”

“He asked me a favour and I said I would do it.”

“He has told me.” She turned the letter over. “He was very pleased with himself. He came into my sitting room at ten minutes past eleven, which is late for Nicholas, and told me that he had his word provided for me. I thanked him and I sent him to bed. I have been thinking about it since.”

She laid the letter down and folded her hands on the edge of the cloth and looked at him.

“Your grace, I want to say a thing plainly at breakfast, if I may. Because I do not know when else I will have you alone in the house, and I do not want it left.”

“Say it, Miss Vain.”

“I am nineteen,” she said. “I am not a child, and I am not, I hope, a fool. I am going to run this house until my brother marries or takes me to town. And I am going at some point to be looked over by suitors. My brother is going to Spain. He is right to go. I have told him so, though he thinks I am brave to say it, and I am not — I only understand him.” She paused. “I understand also what he has asked of you. I honour him for it, and I honour you for saying yes.

“I want you to know I am glad you said yes. My brother has no other friend I would trust in this.”

“Miss Vain.”

“But.” Her voice did not rise. “I want you to know, your grace, that I understand what has been arranged. I am not to be squired about. You are not to appear at my elbow at balls, and I am not to expect it. You are to be at a distance — my brother’s honest eye. That is what he has asked, and that is what I understand you have promised. Is that correct?”

“That is correct.”

“Good.” She nodded once. “Then I want to say one further thing, and then I will say nothing further on the subject for as long as we live under the same roof, however many days that turns out to be.”

She looked at him steadily.

“I do not want to be a duty.”

The fire ticked. Outside, someone crossed the yard with a bucket.

“I have been my mother’s daughter, and I have been my brother’s sister, and now I am a household’s mistress, and I have been each of those things gladly. But I have always been, to somebody, a duty. And it seems to me that a woman who is a duty to a great many people is a person nobody has actually met.”

She said it without any tremor at all, which was somehow worse.

“I have understood this only recently. I understand it because my mother has died, and because Nicholas is going, and because it has occurred to me in the past five weeks that if I am not careful I shall be a duty to a husband next. And I have made up my mind that I will not be. I will not marry a man to whom I am a duty. I would rather not marry at all.”

“Miss Vain —”

“Do you understand me?”

“I understand.”

“Then I want you to promise me, your grace, that whatever else you are to me on my brother’s behalf, you will not — in your own head, in your own private conduct — allow me to be a duty to you. If you write to my brother and I have been foolish, tell him. If you write to my brother and I have been sensible, tell him that. But do not think of me in your own hours as a task on your list. I would rather not exist to you at all than exist to you as that.”

Ashendon looked at her a long moment. He set his coffee cup down very carefully.

“Miss Vain. May I answer you plainly?”

“Please.”

“You have not, on any hour since I came into this house, been a duty to me.” He kept his voice level, because it was the only way he could keep it honest. “I want you to know I am aware of the danger of the arrangement your brother has proposed, and I want you to know that I promise you, on my honour, not to allow you to become one. I will write to your brother truthfully when I have anything to write. I will not write to him inventively. I will not, on his behalf, appear at your elbow at balls. If we meet in London or in the country, I will treat you as a young woman I have the honour to know, and not otherwise.

“Beyond that, Miss Vain, I am — your servant. But at a decent distance, as you have asked. Is that acceptable?”

“It is more than acceptable, your grace. I thank you.”

She picked up her letter. Then, without looking up:

“Your grace, will you eat something? I do not run a household in which a guest sits and drinks black coffee for his breakfast. Toast, at least. Corbett will be offended if you leave the table on coffee alone.”

“Then I will have toast, Miss Vain. Thank you.”

He ate the toast. He rode out at eleven with Nicholas over the home farm.

He stayed at Havering three days in the end, not one. And he did not, in those three days, allow himself an unguarded moment with her — and she, for her part, was perfectly civil and perfectly self-possessed, and did not at any point appear to notice that he was being careful.

This, he thought, riding away on the third morning, was precisely the trouble.

She was not going to make it hard for him. He was going to have to make it hard for himself.

She had asked him not to be a fool. She had not asked him not to be in love. She had assumed, plainly, that a duke of thirty-two could keep an ordinary rein on himself where a friend’s nineteen-year-old sister was concerned.

He was going to have to prove her right.

He rode back to London in a hard steady rain. He was glad of it.