Page 12 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“Very well. If I give you my word that I shall not attend, will that satisfy you?”

Nathaniel hesitated, plainly expecting another attack. “Yes.”

“Then you have it.” She looked at Selina. “Both of you.”

She inclined her head and left the study, closing the door quietly behind her.

Selina continued watching the door. “That was too easy.”

“I thought you wished me to trust her.”

“I do. It is the silence in which she gave you her word that I find hard to trust.”

***

The note lay upon the footman’s tray, folded twice into a small square. The man’s face wore the peculiar stiffness of a servant who had been made party to a private affair above their station.

“Miss Gray left it not a quarter of an hour ago, Your Grace.” He held the tray level and kept his gaze fixed upon its centre. “She took the town carriage and instructed me to give it to you the moment you returned, and to no one else.”

Nathaniel took the note without breaking stride and read it in the hall, his gloves still upon his hands.

Your sister has gone to Mrs Ottley’s. She left by way of the mews an hour after you rode out. I am going after her. Do not arrive in anger, Your Grace. Come in a good coat with your temper well concealed, for that house feeds upon scenes, and I would rather not provide its supper.

S.G.

He was inside the carriage before he had finished reading it a second time.

The drive took eleven minutes and cost him a year of them. He gave the coachman the direction twice, the second time more loudly, though the man had understood him perfectly the first. Nathaniel had built his life upon the principle that a well-governed house did not surprise its master. That principle now lay in pieces upon the seat beside him, with his sister’s name written through it.

Selina Gray had lived beneath his roof for four days. In that time, she had uncovered a secret correspondent and was now travelling alone through the London darkness to retrieve the sister Nathaniel had not known how to reach.

Mrs Ottley’s house blazed at every window. It stood in a newer square, built with money that had not yet learnt to be quiet about itself, and the noise of the masquerade spilt into the street in a manner no house of the older sort would have permitted.

Three carriages waited at the kerb, their lamps burning and their coachmen asleep. One of them was his own. The sight of his horses standing outside that particular door stirred something in Nathaniel which he did not care to examine upon the pavement.

He gave his name and was admitted at once. His rank was sufficient invitation here, as it was almost everywhere.

A footman offered him a mask from a tray beside the door. Nathaniel waved it away. He had not come to be concealed. He intended to be recognised immediately and unmistakably, because the surest protection Georgiana could possess in such a house was the uncovered face of her brother in its corridors.

He found the supper rooms by walking towards the part of the house where the music grew faint. The passage beyond the ballroom was hot, poorly lit and crowded with people who had no intention of dancing. A girl in a scarlet mask passed him laughing, her hair coming loose about her shoulders.

He heard Selina before he saw her.

“And you are?”

The answering voice belonged to a man, smooth and amused. Nathaniel rounded the corner in time to take in the scene all at once, in a single ugly frame he would spend a long while failing to forget.

A masked man in dark green stood with one hand at the small of Georgiana’s back, guiding her towards the half-open door of a private room. His sister, flushed and uncertain beneath a domino she had plainly borrowed, had turned at the sound of Selina’s voice. Between the pair of them and the doorway stood Selina, unmasked and dressed in grey, her chin held at the precise angle Nathaniel had begun to recognise.

“The inconvenience standing between you and a scandal, sir,” Selina said.

The man in green laughed. “You misunderstand the evening, madam. There is no scandal here. There is only supper, and a young lady who has expressed a desire for quieter company than the ballroom affords.”

“I doubt that the young lady expressed a desire to be taken into a private room.” Selina did not move from the doorway. “Step away from her, Mr Rowland. You may preserve your dignity or your evening’s design. You cannot preserve both.”

The use of his name struck him like a dropped glass. The green mask turned fully towards Selina. Above it, his eyes sharpened, and his amusement thinned into something colder and considerably more interested.

“Have we met, madam?” He tilted his head slightly, as a man might before a portrait he could not place. “I confess that I am generally better with faces.”