Page 18 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“Samuel, let me come with her at least, so she is not—” Beatrice started forward.

“You will come with me.” Samuel caught her by the wrist and turned her firmly the other way, toward the marquee. “You have done enough talking for one afternoon.”

Rosaline was left alone, propelled across an open stretch of lawn toward a knot of strangers, with nowhere to go but forward.

She made herself approach them, though every step cost her. The men turned as one to look at her, their conversation trailing off into a silence she was expected to fill.

“Good afternoon.” Her voice came out thinner than she meant to. “It is a… a very fine afternoon for it. The garden, I mean. The roses. They are very… erm… fine.”

A beat passed.

One of the men, fair and languid, exchanged a look with the man beside him. “They are roses,” he agreed. “Notoriously fine roses.”

Soft laughter rippled through the group, and Rosaline felt her face heat up. She reached for a cleverer thing to say, only to find her mind swept perfectly bare.

She had said a hundred clever things in the maze. She had said them in the corridor. Here, in the bright and the noise with all those eyes on her, there was nothing at all, only the roar in her ears and the sense of the ground gently tilting away.

“Do forgive her.” A young woman at the edge of the group, all ringlets and cool blue eyes, smiled sweetly. Rosaline quickly recognized Miss Fairchild, for she had never bothered to hide her opinion of anyone. “Lady Rosaline finds conversation rather taxing. It is well known. One learns not to expect much.”

“I only meant—” Rosaline stepped back, suddenly wanting to be gone, to be anywhere the eyes were not.

She did not see the foot. It came out neat and quick beneath the hem of Miss Fairchild’s gown, and Rosaline’s slipper caught against it. She went down hard, one gloved hand plunging past the edge of the clipped grass into the soft watered earth of the rose bed, and her whole side with it into mud, cold and black.

The silence lasted half a breath. Then laughter broke over her, bright and delighted, and behind it the whispers, spreading outward like a stain across the party.

“Oh, how dreadful,” Miss Fairchild gasped, one hand pressed to her mouth over a smile that did not reach her eyes. “How terribly clumsy. Someone help her, please.”

No one helped her.

Rosaline pushed herself up. She did not know how. Her palm was black to the wrist, her skirt ruined down one side, wet earth clinging in a great dark smear from hip to knee, and her face was on fire.

Her eyes burned as forty people watched her stand caked in mud in the middle of a summer garden.

She gathered the wreck of her skirt in both filthy hands and hurried away from the laughter, toward the house, toward any door that would take her out of the light.

She had almost reached the terrace when Samuel intercepted her. He took one look at the mud on her dress, at her face, and something in him seemed to go cold and quiet.

“Look at you,” he said very softly. “Just look at you. The whole party is looking at you.” He did not offer her a hand, his coat, or a single kind word. “Tell me, Rosaline. Who do you imagine will court Beatrice this Season, with a sister who has made herself the laughingstock of the ton by rolling in the flowerbeds like a farm animal? Have you thought of that? Have you spared them a single thought, or is it only your own comfort that⁠—”

“Please.” Her voice cracked clean in half. “Please, Samuel. Not now.”

For once, he let her go. Perhaps even he could see there was nothing left to press.

She fled up the terrace steps and through the first door she found, into the blessed dimness of an empty morning room, and pushed it half shut behind her. She stood there shaking.

There was a washstand in the corner. She went to it, wet a cloth, and started removing the mud with hands that would not stay steady, scrubbing at the ruined silk as though she might scrub the whole afternoon out of existence if she only worked hard enough. Her breath came in short, broken bursts.

She would not cry. She would not give them that, even here, even alone.

“Are ye all right?”

She recognized the voice before she turned. She knew the roll of it, low in the quiet room, and her whole body went rigid over the washstand.

“Please.” She did not turn around. “Leave me alone. Whatever you have come to see, there is nothing here worth the trouble. Go away.”

“Nay.” A slow footstep came no closer than the center of the room. “I daenae think I will.”

Something in her, worn through to the last thread, simply snapped.