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 4

He did what he had promised.

He wrote to Nicholas honestly. He wrote in the first month from London: he had been well received at Havering, Miss Vain was in good health and running the house sensibly, the fences at the west boundary were being dealt with by Mr. Carden, and Corbett had a low opinion of the new curate.

He wrote in the second month, when he had heard from an acquaintance that Miss Vain had come up briefly to town with her aunt, that he had seen her at a musical evening at Lady Culver’s; that she had been in half mourning at last and had looked well; that she had been introduced to a Mr. Fitten, of whom Ashendon had heard nothing bad, but nothing particularly good either, and Nicholas might wish to write to their aunt about the young man before his interest developed.

Nicholas wrote back that he had, and the aunt had, and Mr. Fitten had turned out to be a fool, but not a dangerous one.

He wrote to Nicholas honestly all that winter, and through the spring, and after Nicholas at last sailed for Spain. And after that he wrote nothing to Nicholas that was not true. He wrote nothing to Nicholas that was not necessary.

He did not write to Nicholas about the fact that he — Ashendon, thirty-two, a duke, a colonel, a man who had commanded troops through bad weather at Salamanca — had discovered in the course of that winter that he was not going to be able to keep his own promise to himself, and was in fact in love with Nicholas Vain’s little sister in the plain, full, grown-up sense of the word, and had known it since a drawing room in October.

He kept the promise to Nicholas anyway.

That was the point of a promise.

He did not appear at her elbow. He did not, in London, find pretexts. He was invited to the same houses she was invited to — the aunt from Bath had come up for the season and taken a house in Curzon Street, and Harriet was in society at last, and the county’s suspicion that she would be looked over proved perfectly correct.

He went sometimes to those houses. He did not seek her out in them. He bowed when they were in the same room. He danced with her twice in the whole of that first season, and both dances were the plain civil dances a friend of the family owed the sister of a friend abroad.

Neither dance was a waltz.

He did not call in Curzon Street. He met the aunt once at a dinner and was thanked by her in a corner of a hall while the cloaks were being fetched, for his kind attention to the family in a hard year. And he said quite plainly that it was Nicholas he had cared for and would go on caring for, and that Miss Vain must not think he had done anything at all beyond what any friend would do.

The aunt, who had lived in Bath and had eyes, looked at him a considering moment.

“You are a good young man, your grace. Good night.”

And went.

He walked home in the mist afterwards and told himself he had been careful. He had been. He knew it. He was miserable about it, and he told himself that misery was not evidence of anything, and that he had been careful, and that this was what careful cost.

He wrote to Nicholas about horses.

He might have kept it up for the whole of Nicholas’s Spanish tour if he had been left in London.

He was not left in London. He was sent, in his own capacity as a duke and a decommissioned colonel, by a foolish letter from a very old aunt of his own, down to a house on the Suffolk coast that his aunt insisted he must inspect on some matter of a disputed tenancy. And while he was on the road he broke his journey, prudently, at an inn on the Sudbury road he had used before. And while he was at supper in the inn’s small parlour, a party came in from the London coach — a lady and her niece and a maid.

It was, of course, Harriet Vain and her aunt, on their way to visit an old friend of the aunt’s who had a place near Bury.

He stood up when they came in. He would not have hidden if he could have, and he could not have, because the aunt saw him at once and cried:

“Your grace. Good God. Of all people.”

And Harriet, behind her aunt, in a plain dark travelling gown with her hair coming down at the temples from the coach, looked up and saw him and went still for one instant.

Then she said, “Your grace. Good evening. Do not stand up on our account.”

“Miss Vain. Mrs. Vain — will you eat with me? It is the only parlour they have. I am halfway through, but there is plenty.”

“We shall,” said the aunt.

Harriet did not quite say anything.

They ate. The aunt talked — pleasantly and mildly, in the way of an aunt from Bath — and told Ashendon about her friend at Bury, and asked after his own aunt, and said she believed she had met the old lady once at Cheltenham some years ago. Ashendon answered her, and Harriet did not speak much, and on the whole it was an ordinary supper at an inn.

Until the aunt said, quite mildly, at the end of the second remove:

“Harriet, my dear, will you ring for the tray to be taken? I find I am tired. I shall go up.” She rose. “Your grace, I hope you will forgive me — I am not the traveller I was. Harriet will sit half an hour by the fire with the maid, and then she will come up. You will not object, your grace, to keeping her company in a public parlour with a maid at the door. You are her brother’s oldest friend, and the arrangement is respectable enough.”

“Aunt —”

“Half an hour, Harriet.”

The aunt went.

Ashendon and Harriet Vain were left in the inn parlour with the maid on a stool by the door and the fire going low. He did not, for a moment, know what to say. He had in six months not been alone with her for as much as two minutes.

She said, without preamble: “Your grace, are you well?”