Page 16 of The Duke and His Jilted Bride

“So you do not wish you had rejected me and become a spinster instead?”

Aurelia was sure she did not, but chose to tease him. “Ask me again in a couple of weeks once I have had time to settle into this marriage.”

Evander nodded. His breath hitched and he looked down. “Here comes Margie,” he said, crouching down to stroke the eldest of her aunt’s dogs.

Aurelia fell into a crouch as well and let the dog sniff her hand. “You nicknamed Marguerite? Did you get my aunt’s blessing?”

“She all but begged me to take the dog of my choosing home.” Evander readjusted Marguerite’s collar and stroked her. “But I have more than enough animals already.”

“In Norfolk?” Aurelia asked. “I had no idea. How many, exactly?”

“Two dogs. But the stables there are…” He closed his eyes and laughed, looking genuinely happy. “Well, I should keep some things a surprise for you, or you will be tired of Carrstone and loathe it before we even arrive.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” she replied, a nervous knot forming in her chest at the prospect of the journey, the move, the country. “Not unless Carrstone offends me in some way.”

“It will try its best not to,” Evander said, evidently not talking about his estate any longer. “But only time will tell.”

Six

The coach pulled away from Aunt Violet’s house at five in the morning. London was still dark and the streets smelled of coal smoke. Aurelia had not slept a minute the entire night. She had lain in her childhood bed for the last time with its pink jacquard coverlet, stared at the roses on the ceiling and listened to the wind. Her skin prickled all over and her eyes burned from lack of sleep. She knew wives traditionally spent the first night of marriage with their husbands – but Evander had not wanted to bother her, he had said. It was better if she got a good night’s sleep before the journey in the morning.

At four o'clock, she had given up and dressed herself in her traveling clothes, descending in the parlour until the Sandacre coach arrived.

Evander had been inside it already. She hadn't expected that. She had imagined someone handing her over in some brief exchange on the pavement. But instead the footman opened the door and there he was, in a visibly well-worn brown travelling coat, looking no different in the face than when she had seen him twelve hours before.

“You're early,” he said.

“Am I?”

He smiled. “I didn’t even have a chance to knock on the door.”

“I didn’t want to wake Violet. We said our goodbyes yesterday. She is a very light sleeper.”

“And so are you, by the looks of it. Good. I for one am always early.” He moved a leather satchel from the seat across from him to make room for her. “My mother used to call it the most useful defect of my character.”

Aurelia hid a smile as she sat. The footman closed the door, and the coach shook with the inevitable force of the gesture before pulling gently into a drive.

For the first hour, what she thought was the first hour with no real way to tell the time, she read. Or rather, she held her book open at the same page and looked at the words without absorbing them, comprehensively aware of every small thing Evander did across from her. The unhurried way he turned pages, always at the bottom of the right-hand page, with his thumb stroking the edge. It was a wonder he did not cut himself. She also noticed the way he occasionally shifted his position, one arm resting on the window ledge, and the morning light moving across his face as London disappeared around them. And the way he did not speak much but seemed completely at ease in the silence – unlike her.

Aurelia gulped quietly, pressing her lips together. She was used to salons and recital rooms, being with gentlemen in the presence of other young ladies and their chaperons. Any trip she had taken had been with Violet. She had not been trained for this and did not know where to begin, now that it was just the two of them.

Behind the glass, the city transitioned slowly into the brown edges of the East London countryside. There was suddenly more space between the buildings, less buildings between the flat, tilled fields, until eventually there was nothing but wide stretches of land and brush. She had not been north of London in two years. The world looked different here.

“How large is Carrstone Manor?” she asked. The question had been sitting in her throat for an hour, and it felt like it was time to talk.

Evander looked up. She was still not accustomed to his looks and promptly returned to her– Well, she thought, she would not call it reading. Her observation of the page.

“The estate runs to a little over four thousand acres,” he said. “Quite frankly the house is larger than it needs to be. My great-aunt, duchess in her time, had the east wing extended in 1764 to accommodate a collection she was amassing. She died before it was finished.” He paused. “The wing was completed anyway. It seemed discourteous not to go through with it. Even my father had a hand in its completion, and he hated disturbing the property.”

Aurelia lowered her book slightly. “What sort of collection?”

He looked at her for a moment, and something in his expression changed. “Have patience. You will see.”

She waited for more than what he had given her. But he returned to his book. She looked back at her own page and found herself reading the same paragraph three times without progress.

“Were you close to her?” she tried, not realising the stupidity of her question before she asked it. “The duchess you mentioned.”

Evander arched a brow, and it tugged his mouth into a side-smile. “She died nearly forty years ago. I was not born yet.”