Page 8 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“You saw it,” she said, before he spoke.

“You saw me see it.” He had stopped a yard short of her and gone no nearer.

“You became very still. You are not still by nature; you are still by discipline, and that discipline slipped for half a moment.” She held the book against her chest, both arms folded over it. “She is receiving letters at the dinner table. You wish to know who sends them.”

“I wish to open her door and take the thing from whatever drawer she has hidden it in.”

“And you must not.”

“She is my sister.” His voice rose, and he mastered it again. “She is my ward. This is my house.”

“And she is nineteen and lonely. If she is corresponding with a man and has learnt to conceal it so well, then he may be patient; and a patient man who encourages secrecy ought to be treated with caution. Tear the letter from her hand tonight, and she will not cease writing to him. She will merely become better at hiding it. You may exchange a letter you have some hope of discovering for a secret you never will.”

“You are telling me to do nothing.”

“I am telling you to wait, and to make yourself someone she may one day choose to tell.” Her chin lowered a fraction. “Shame her and she will retreat into silence, and silence is where she lived before all this began.”

“And meanwhile, the letters continue.” His hand closed around the corner of the shelf beside him.

“Meanwhile, you discover who sends them, which you cannot do if you frighten her into burning every letter unread. If a man is guiding her in this, he may already have taught her to expect precisely the confrontation you intend. What he may not have anticipated is a brother who does not force the door, and a companion whose presence he does not yet know to fear.”

“You would set yourself against him, whoever he may be.”

“I would keep a careful eye upon the matter. The ease with which she slipped that letter into her lap suggests that she has done so before. The precautions may be entirely her own, or someone may have encouraged them; we need not assume the worst, but neither should we ignore the possibility.” Her expression remained composed. “I have known men to make secrecy seem like cleverness.”

She stopped there, and the flatness of the last sentence had a floor under it a long way down. Nathaniel waited for the rest. It did not arrive.

He stood in the cold corridor and intensely disliked the fact that she was right. He had built his authority within this house upon being right, yet here was a woman he had employed only the previous day, correcting him in defiance of his every instinct. Worse still, when he examined that instinct honestly, it sat down beside her judgement and remained there.

“You make it difficult to resent you,” he said. “I wish you to understand that I intend to resent you regardless. Your judgement is sound, but your delivery is insufferable. I have not yet decided which of the two I mind more.”

“The soundness.” She was already turning towards the stairs. “You will have forgiven the delivery by Friday.”

She tucked her book beneath her arm, inclined her head, and left him alone in the corridor with the image of a small white letter disappearing into his sister’s lap.

He went upstairs an hour later. The house had completed its nightly business without him: the shutters closed, the fires banked, the last candles carried away. He ascended the great staircase through the darkness of his own hall as though it belonged to someone else.

On the landing, he stopped outside Georgiana’s door. He stood with one hand not quite touching it, long enough for the wax of his candle to run crookedly down one side. No light showed beneath the door, and no sound came from beyond it. He had given his word downstairs that he would not force his way inside. He had not promised that he would not stand there.

He slept poorly. He told himself it was the letter.

Chapter Three

“Those are not gloves chosen for the drawing room, Lady Georgiana, which means you have no intention of remaining there.”

Georgiana went still upon the second stair from the bottom, one hand resting on the bannister and the other holding a bonnet which she had plainly hoped to carry as far as the side door before anyone remarked upon it. She was three days into their acquaintance and had already discovered that Selina rose early. She had not yet discovered that Selina sometimes did so expressly to forestall trouble.

“I was going to take the air.” She concealed the bonnet behind her skirts.

“Before breakfast, by way of the side door, in outdoor gloves, with a folded note tucked into your left cuff which the fabric does not quite conceal.” Selina came to the foot of the stairs and stopped, placing herself between Georgiana and the side door without appearing to do so. “You intended to take a good deal more than the air. Come. We shall take it together.”

“You said you were not my gaoler,” Georgiana said.

“I am not. A gaoler would wake your brother. I am proposing to walk with you instead, which is a far worse fate, because I intend to be pleasant about it.”

The girl’s face passed through three expressions in as many moments: calculation, fury, and a glimpse of the much younger child beneath them both. At last, it settled into a sullen truce. She descended the final two stairs slowly, making a point of every step.

Selina took her plain shawl from the hook beside the side door, and the two of them went out into the early morning together. The gravel lay damp beneath their feet, while the whole garden dripped around them, green, flattened by the night’s rain, and rich with the scent of turned earth.