Page 17 of The Duke and His Jilted Bride

“Ah, yes. Of course. I meant… were you familiar with the idea of her? People are, sometimes, close to relations they never met.”

He considered this seriously, and Aurelia felt her cheeks grow hot. He was too kind. She was making a fool of herself.

“I know her through her collection and the occasional portrait. She sat for local artists often,” he said finally. “And then I know of her through what the older tenants say about her, which is generally more reliable than family accounts. She was, by all available evidence, stubborn and greedy. But we are all a bit like that – another defect, as Mother would have said." A pause. "Did that answer your question?”

Aurelia looked back at him and nodded. He had already gone back to his book.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

He turned the cover toward her without looking up. It seemed to be a volume on travel from a writer she had never heard of, which she found simultaneously unpredictable and endearing.

“And is it good?”

“Good enough to keep a man occupied,” he said, sighing lightly. “Not good enough to make me want to travel to Kolkata though.”

She settled back against the bench. Outside the window, a village passed. There was a church town, the central green, geese who were unconcerned by the coach as it passed.

“You might try,” he said, without looking up, “reading the page you are on, unless you want to exchange books with me.”

“What?” she asked.

“I assumed that was why you were interrogating me.”

“I was not–” She cut herself off. He was grinning, playing with her. “It was not an interrogation. I was reading my book, thank you. But I was bored of it. And even if that were not true, I read slowly anyway.” Aurelia titled her head to the side. “There. That can be the first thing you learn about me now that we are married.”

“I assure you,” he said quietly, “that I have learned a lot about you already.”

She felt herself blush. “Oh?”

“Things I will not tell you while there is a risk of offending you and many hours of our journey left.” He tugged at his cravat. “But in what concerns your book,” he turned a page, "the heroine survives. I won't tell you how, but you will want to find out. That should convince you to keep reading for a little while at least."

Aurelia stared at him. “You have read this novel?”

“Good Lord, no. But I know someone who…” He paused, his eyes darting briefly before returning to his book. “I knew someone who liked that type of literature, in which everything is not what he appears to be and at the same time painstakingly obvious.”

“Ah…” Aurelia replied, hands tightening around the novel.

She did not have to ask to know who this mysterious reader had been. This was a novel for women, and there was only one woman who shared a devilishly similar taste to Aurelia.

Aurelia kept the realisation to herself, abandoning the book altogether after another thirty minutes. Her lack of sleep soon caught up with her. When she opened her eyes again, it was noon and they were at a coaching inn. There was another stop a few hours later, and by the time the light began to change – that low amber of a Norfolk afternoon that she would come to associate with home in time, flatter and wider than London light – her anxiety had mostly settled about runaway brides.

But not about her new husband.

He felt it before he saw it. It was a vain, romantic thing for him to think. But that was the truth. It was the only way Evander could have explained it, if anyone had asked.

The air and the smell of it. The thickness of the sunlight on the horizon. And something else altogether he had read about. A way people felt sometimes about places that made no sense. It happened in his chest every time the coach crossed into Norfolk, something blooming and changing.

He sat forward slightly, waking Aurelia from a daydream. “There,” he said almost breathlessly, and pointed through her window.

Aurelia followed the line of his finger. It was a row of pines on the edge of a ridge, nothing remarkable to her, he wagered. But the way they stood against the evening sky, that dark and jagged silhouette, meant everything to him.

He lowered his hand. Aurelia was still looking at the trees. Then she looked at him, and whatever was in her pale-from-sleep face gave him pause.

“We are getting closer,” he said, leaning back now.

“Yes,” she said, smiling sleepily. “I can tell.”

A quarter of an hour later, Carrstone Manor came into view. It was the gatehouse first, then the long avenue of beeches his grandfather had planted, now intertwined. Then there was the house at the end of it, appearing gradually, different shades of bricks side by side – a true red, maroon, a light beige. Stones from different eras with different dukes as they made their own adjustments to the manor.