The Plain Sister Was Sent to Apologise for Her Sister’s Scandal — The Duke Married Her Instead

Chapter 5

The letter from her mother arrived the following morning before breakfast.

Four pages. The word reckless underlined twice on the first. It declined in dignity steadily from there. Clara was to send the Duke a formal note of thanks and nothing further. She was to remember her position. She was to understand that a man of his standing did not pursue second daughters of scandal-touched earls for any reason that would reflect well on the second daughter, and that whatever impulse had led her to contradict her mother’s careful instructions — to expose the family’s private knowledge to Julian Warrick in a room full of witnesses — was to be suppressed immediately and permanently.

Clara read it once. She set it on the writing desk. She did not write the note her mother requested.

She was not, she realized, afraid of her mother’s anger anymore. She was not certain precisely when that had changed — perhaps in the dark corridor with the unsealed letter, perhaps at the edge of a ballroom with three hundred witnesses and a duke’s steady hand. But sitting in the thin morning light with the letter in front of her, she felt only a kind of exhausted clarity. The feeling of a woman who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time, and had simply, finally, put it down.

The pearls sat in their case on her dressing table. She had not worn them to bed. She had held them up to the window at dawn and examined them in the gray light, searching for what the Duke had seen. They were fine pearls, expensive pearls, the kind a countess would want on her most beautiful daughter. But there was nothing about them that should have meant anything to a man who had never met her before.

And yet.

A small, faded mark on the clasp. She had noticed it years ago and never thought of it again. A tiny engraved letter — A — worn almost smooth, half hidden beneath the hinge. She had assumed it was the jeweler’s mark.

Standing in the morning light, Clara Ashworth looked at that letter, and the bell in her chest rang so loudly she had to sit down.

The Duke called four days later. He asked to speak with her father. He was in the study for fifty minutes, and when he emerged his expression told Clara nothing at all, which she was beginning to understand meant a great deal.

Her father found her in the sitting room afterward wearing the look of a man confronting something he had not prepared for.

“Alderley has asked permission to call on you,” her father said. “Formally.”

Clara set down her book. “What did you tell him?”

Her father was quiet for a moment — the particular quiet of a man doing arithmetic he did not like the outcome of. “I told him I required time to consider it.” He paused. “He said he would return in two days. He did not appear to consider the matter negotiable.”

“And is it?” Clara asked. “Negotiable?”

Her father looked at her. And for the first time in a very long time, he looked at her — not through her, not past her toward Rosalind, not with the mild, benevolent blankness he had perfected over years of treating her as the household’s sensible furniture. He looked at her as though he was seeing the specific, particular person she actually was, and finding himself surprised by what was there.

“No,” he said finally. “I don’t suppose it is.”

He gave his permission the following morning.

The Duke called twice that week. Both times he found her in the same room, with the same unhurried certainty, and both times he said something that was not a compliment — because he did not deal in compliments, she was learning — but was instead a precise observation that treated her as someone whose mind was worth engaging directly. He asked her opinion on the eastern trade negotiations and listened to her answer without the faint, polite surprise most men produced when a woman said something accurate. He told her about his estate in Shropshire with the matter-of-fact detail of a man who was not performing ownership, but actually thinking about a place he loved. He made her laugh once, unexpectedly, with a dry observation about Lady Fenwick’s new portrait in the society pages, and she saw him register the laugh with a satisfaction he made no effort to conceal.

It was, she was finding, considerably more unsettling than flattery.

The opposition arrived, as she had known it would, in the form of the Dowager Duchess of Alderley.

His mother was a woman who had managed the Mercer family’s — the Alderley family’s — social position through three decades of political turbulence with the focused competence of a general, and who had no intention of watching her son attach himself to a family currently synonymous with public disgrace. She did not come to the Ashworth house. She came to a tea hosted by a mutual acquaintance, engineered her proximity to Clara with the practiced ease of long social experience, and delivered her assessment in the pleasant, unhurried tone of a woman accustomed to being obeyed.

“You are a sensible woman, Miss Ashworth,” the Dowager said, pouring her own tea with the serenity of someone who had never needed to wait for anything. “Sensible enough, I think, to understand that my son’s attachment to your family’s circumstances would not serve him. Or you. The kindest thing you could do for both of you is to allow this to resolve quietly.”

Clara looked at the Dowager Duchess across the tea table. The older woman was formidable in the specific way of those who had wielded power so long they no longer remembered it as power — it had simply become the texture of their daily life.

“With respect, your grace,” Clara said, “your son appears capable of determining what serves him.”

The Dowager’s expression did not change. “Young women who rely on that argument frequently discover it has limits.”

“And mothers who rely on their sons’ obedience,” Clara said, with the careful evenness of a woman selecting each word like a chess piece, “sometimes discover the same.”

The silence that followed was the specific silence of two people who have each registered that the other is not going to yield.

The Dowager set down her cup. Something in her face shifted — not softening, exactly. Recalibrating.

“You are not what I expected either,” she said.

It was impossible to tell entirely whether this was a compliment or a warning. It turned out to be both.

And the thing Clara had not anticipated, the thing no one had warned her about, was already moving through the drawing rooms of London, dressed in a smile, carrying a teacup, wearing her sister’s face.