Page 53 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

“Of course.” Lady Ashton’s voice dropped to the register Alice recognized from Harcourt Hall, calibrated to sound confidential while carrying to every ear within range. “Though it is curious that Lady Rachel was considered the Diamond of the Season, and yet it was her younger sister who secured the Duke, is it not? People talk, Your Grace. They cannot help themselves.”

“What people say is seldom my concern.”

“Perhaps it should be.” Miss Catherine spoke for the first time. Her voice was softer than her sister’s, almost gentle, and the gentleness made what followed land harder. “The consensus is that Lady Rachel was the accomplished one. The beautiful one. The ton had scarcely heard of you before the wedding. And now you are a duchess, your sister has vanished, and people wonder how a woman who spent three Seasons without a single dance managed to attract a duke who could have had his pick of any eligible lady in England.”

The words moved through Alice like cold water poured down her spine. She held very still.

Behind her, Freddie’s voice rose from the oak tree, and the sound reached her as though from a great distance.

“You must forgive Catherine.” Miss Amelia’s smile broadened, showing teeth. “She is young. She speaks plainly. But you must admit, Your Grace, that the situation invites speculation. A woman of your… proportions landing a man like His Grace.” Her gaze traveled down Alice’s figure and back up. “It defies the natural order. Unless, of course, the rumors about your involvement in Lady Rachel’s disappearance carry truth.”

Alice looked at each face in turn: Lady Ashton’s cool appraisal, Miss Amelia’s practiced sweetness, Miss Catherine’s soft-edged cruelty. She had stood before women arranged in exactly this formation a hundred times. In ballrooms where no one asked her to dance. In drawing rooms where the chairs were spaced to exclude her. In her father’s parlor, where Rachel’s portrait hung in gilt and her absence from the walls was its own verdict.

She had survived all of it.

She would survive this.

“Ladies.” Her voice did not waver. “I appreciate your candor. You must excuse me.”

She turned and walked away. She kept her pace slow, her spine straight, her hands folded against her skirts so that no one could see them trembling. She crossed the lawn toward the far side of the garden, past the string quartet and the refreshment tent and the clusters of guests who turned to watch her.

A gap in the hedge opened onto a narrow path bordered by yew. She followed it without choosing to, letting the green walls close around her until the path widened into a clearing hidden from the main garden by a screen of espaliered pear trees. A wrought-iron bench sat beneath them, half-covered in trailing ivy.

Alice sat down. The iron was cold through her dress. The sounds of the party reached her muffled and stripped of detail, the string quartet reduced to a thin vibration, the voices flattened into a hum that carried no individual words.

She pressed her fingers to her closed eyes.

“… a woman of your proportions… It defies the natural order.”

She had believed Bearmoor would change her. She had believed that a title and a castle and a husband who stood between her and cruelty at dinner tables would be enough to rewrite the story she had carried since girlhood: the overlooked one, the too-plump disappointment, the sister who filled space and returned nothing of value.

But London remembered. London always remembered. And no amount of ducal authority could silence the voices that had measured her against Rachel since birth and found her lacking in every category that mattered.

She pressed her fingers harder against her closed eyes and waited for the pressure to displace the thought, but it did not.

Suddenly, a voice came through the entrance of the clearing.

“Why are you hiding, wife?”

Chapter Seventeen

“Iam resting.” Alice opened her eyes and kept them on the espaliered pear trees, on the flat geometry of trained branches against the old stone wall. “The party is warm.”

“It is not warm.”

“Relative to the company, I find it quite stifling.”

He moved then. She heard the crunch of gravel, deliberate and measured. And then he was beside the bench, close enough that the shadow he cast fell across her lap. She still did not look at him.

“Alice.”

“I am perfectly well, Your Grace. You needn’t have come to find me.”

“Jonathan is watching the boys.” He said it as though it answered a question she had not asked. “Freddie has climbed to the third branch. He will not fall. Charlie is directing operations from below with a stick.”

She smiled despite herself. The smile made her throat ache.

“You should go back,” she said. “I will follow in a few minutes. No one needs to know I was…” she trailed off.