Page 5 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“I have not hired you at all yet,” he said, without rancour. “And yet you speak as though you have accepted.”

“I find that I have.” She did not look towards the reticule. “I merely wished you to understand what you were purchasing, since you were good enough to tell me what I was.”

“You may take some time to consider it.” Wexford rose, and the palm’s shadow slipped from the cloth and climbed the front of his coat. “I do not require an answer today.”

“I require no further consideration. I accept.” She rose as she spoke and took hold of the reticule with both hands. The room remained where it belonged. “I should be a poor sort of anything if I hesitated over the only rope thrown to me in six months.”

“Then it is settled. My carriage is outside. Collect your belongings and come with me now, unless there is someone you must inform.”

“There is no one.”

He did not offer her sympathy for that. He held out his arm. After a moment, Selina rested her gloved hand on it, and they crossed the great assembly room together, past the tables and the rows of chairs and the small hard commerce of the morning.

Heads turned as they went. Selina had expected that and disregarded it. What she had not expected was the other kind of attention, particular and warm, that reached her as they neared the doors and made the back of her neck go cold.

She turned her head without meaning to.

A gentleman stood by the far wall, well apart from the placement tables, dressed a shade too well for a charitable morning. Perhaps five-and-thirty, handsome in the manner of a man who had spent his handsomeness carelessly and had begun to run short of it. He was watching her. Not the Duke. Her. When her eyes met his, he did not look away as a stranger would. He smiled, slowly, and inclined his head the smallest degree, the way one does to a person one has already been introduced to.

She had never seen him before. She was almost certain of it.

“Miss Gray?” The duke had paused at the door, watching her with that attentive stillness of his.

“Forgive me, Your Grace.” Her hand had tightened on his sleeve, and she took it away. “I was collecting my nerve.”

“Keep it in a safer pocket,” he said, and stood aside for her. “You will want it where you are going.”

He handed her into the carriage. The door shut on the grey morning and the horses moved off into the noise of the street, and Selina looked back once through the small window. The gentleman had come out to the assembly-room steps to watch the carriage go, his gloved hands folded in front of him, that same slow smile still on his face.

She faced forward again and put one hand inside the other in her lap, and pressed, and went on pressing until it hurt, and did not stop until the square was behind them.

Chapter Two

There was ink on the third finger of her right hand, worked into the skin at the side of the nail, the sort that soap had given up on some while ago. Nathaniel had been looking at it for three streets.

He had told himself, three times since the carriage pulled away from Harcourt House, that the arrangement was practical. A companion for Georgiana. A spine his sister could not snap. A debt of common decency paid to a woman the world had used badly. A quiet house again by June. He assembled the reasons the way he assembled everything, in order, and set them where he could consult them, and not one of them accounted for the ink.

“You are staring at my hands, Your Grace.” She had not turned her head from the window to say it.

“There is ink on your third finger, and it has been there long enough to resist soap. You write.”

“I write.” She folded her hands into her lap the moment she noticed him looking. “Letters. Accounts. Lists. Apologies I never send.”

“Why do you not send them?”

“Because people would rather condemn me than understand me, and an apology asks them to relinquish the one in favour of the other. They resent being asked. I have ceased to ask.”

“That is a remarkably complete philosophy for a woman of five-and-twenty.”

“Grief is an excellent tutor. Expensive, but thorough.”

He looked out of the window rather than answer. The streets of Mayfair passed in their ordered greyness. His reflection regarded him from the glass: dark and composed, wearing the face he presented to committees and to the occasional woman who imagined she might thaw it.

“You will find my sister difficult,” he said. “I told you as much. But difficult is the whole of it. She is not vicious. She is nineteen and unhappy, and cannot be persuaded that anyone has ever been unhappy before her.”

“Then she is nineteen.” Selina smoothed her gloves over her knuckles, one finger after another. “You need not brief me upon your sister. I have been nineteen and unhappy. I know the country intimately.”

“You keep saying so.”