Page 6 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

Then he smiled and left her with her heart going like a smith’s hammer, not because he had discovered anything, but because he had noticed her.

She had no armour against being noticed.

Then her godmother, with the best will in the world, made everything worse.

“I have set Pettibone on him,” Lady Elise announced in a low voice before breakfast on the fourth morning, with the grim satisfaction of a general committing her reserve. “She is to entertain His Grace. Walk with him, talk at him, sit with him after dinner. The woman can keep up a conversation entirely unassisted for four hours together; I have seen her do it. He cannot lay his little ambushes for you with Pettibone fixed to his arm, and he is too kind to shake her off. It answers perfectly, child. You may breathe.”

It answered as well as setting a candle to guard the curtains.

For Miss Pettibone adored him. She had adored him since his childhood, as she adored strong tea and a good funeral, and an office that required her to sit beside him for hours was to her not duty but jubilee. Worse, being deaf, romantic, and unburdened by the facts, she had decided that His Grace had come to Wales expressly to fall in love with dear Miss Jones, and that Providence had appointed Euphemia Pettibone to assist him.

The wool was the worst of it.

There was a great deal of wool at Plas Eira in December, spun and dyed in the months since the shearing and now waiting to be wound for the knitting of the parish, and Miss Pettibone, ruling the workbasket like a small deaf empress, conscripted them both on the first afternoon of her commission, as the blizzard came down outside again and everyone came to huddle around the fire.

“His Grace shall hold the skeins,” she declared, “for he has the length of arms for it, and Miss Jones shall wind, for she has such deft hands, and I shall read aloud to keep us merry.”

Miss Pettibone read a sermon upon contentment, rendering perhaps every third sentence and supplying the rest from memory and invention. Her serene voice informed them that contentment was a garden, a fortress, and very like a pudding, in ways the original divine had surely never contemplated.

It would have been endurable if the wool had behaved. It did not. The duke held the skeins too slack, then too taut, then contrived, by some talent Ophelia could not account for in a grown man, to bind his own thumbs together. Instead of laughing, because she must not laugh, she sat Friday-faced and unwound a peer of the realm one careful loop at a time. He watched her with such grave penitence that laughter lodged painfully in her throat.

“You have done this before,” he observed meekly.

“Wound wool, Your Grace. Yes.”

“I meant rescued a man from his own incompetence so kindly that he cannot even be ashamed. It is a rarer skill. I wonder where you came by it.”

The question was not safe at all. It was the trap under the kindness again, and the room had gone warm.

Ophelia was saved by Miss Pettibone, who looked up from her sermon, beamed upon their joined hands and the wool between them, and said with ringing satisfaction, “There now. What did the dear rector say? Patience joins what haste has tangled. And I am sure no one was ever so admiring of our Miss Jones as His Grace, for I heard him say to Bronwen only yesterday that Miss Jones had the cleverest hands in the principality.”

“I said no such thing,” the duke told the room at large, admirably composed. “I have never spoken to Bronwen on the subject of Miss Jones’s hands. I should not dream of it.”

“He says he dreams of it,” Miss Pettibone reported comfortably, and turned her page.

Ophelia rose, pleaded the headache, which was by then no lie, and left the room with her ribs aching from the inside. She did not permit the laughter to escape until she was in her bedroom, the door firmly closed. Because Miss Olivia Jones did not laugh like that. One unguarded sound, and he would know the dullness was a made thing.

The handkerchief incident was nobody’s fault, which did not prevent it being a catastrophe.

She had a cold coming on; the whole house had it. On her way into the morning room, fumbling in haste before a sneeze escaped, she pulled out the wrong handkerchief: her mother’s, not the plain hemmed square of a poor relation. Fine white lawn, light as a breath, its border worked in a Bombay silk drawn-thread pattern by hands five years dead, it lived folded at the bottom of her pocket, as the book lived beneath her pillow, to touch and never use.

She did not even feel it fall, as she pressed the plain one to her nose to catch the sneeze.

“Miss Jones.”

He had picked it up before she even realised what had fallen.

She stood very still in the grey light of the passage and watched the Duke of Calder hold the evidence of her hidden life between two fingers. He did not examine it. He was too well-bred, or too clever, to examine it. His eyes passed over it once, the way a banker’s eye goes over a note. Then he folded it corner to corner and gave it back with a small bow.

“You are losing your things. It is this cold; it makes fingers numb and careless.”

“Thank you, Your Grace,” said Ophelia, the words costing her more breath than they should have.

She put her mother’s handkerchief in her pocket and walked away, trying to maintain the unconcerned air of a woman to whom nothing had happened.

Fine lawn and silk embroidery did not belong in the pocket of a charity goddaughter. One more fact for him to set beside everything about her that already did not quite make sense.

She laid the lawn at the bottom of her strongbox with the bangles and bid it goodnight. Then rage caught her, sudden and bright enough to frighten her, at every circumstance of her life that made it necessary.