Felix slumped back in his seat, rubbing the line between his eyes. The whiskey had not dulled anything.
David refilled both their glasses and stared at the fire. “You’re doing the right thing, Felix. But you’re also a damned fool if you think your bride will make it easy on you.”
“I’d be disappointed if she did,” Felix replied.
A comfortable silence followed, filled only by the tick of the clock and the crackle of the fire.
David lifted his glass one more time. “To the next Duke and Duchess of Carden. May they find less misery than the last.”
Felix raised his own. “Unlikely.”
But they drank, and in the silence after, Felix imagined, just for a second, what it might be like to have a family that did not require such elaborate defenses.
He let the idea die quickly.
Tomorrow would be soon enough for regret.
Tonight, at least, there was order.
CHAPTER 5
“My lady,” the maid’s voice came after a sharp rap at the door. “Your parents’ carriage has just turned onto the drive.”
“Thank you, Agnes,” she said, turning back to the tall, chill window in the upper corridor.
She pressed her hand against the stone ledge, letting the surface numb her fingers as she studied the long blue veins beneath her skin and the thinness of her hand after so many years in the nunnery.
She glanced at her reflection in the glass. The dress—something the duke had found in an old closet, now pressed and put to new use—hung on her, the bodice gaping at her shoulders and the cuffs drifting over her wrists. She had let her hair down for once, and it fell past her jaw in uncertain waves that framed her face with softness, even as her mouth betrayed none.
A nursemaid passed in the corridor. Lizzie was nestled in the crook of her arm, face pressed to the black wool like a faint thumbprint. The sight of the baby sent a ripple through Rose’s already fraying composure.
She pressed her palm against the wall and whispered, “Just a dinner. You’ve survived worse.”
Then she turned, squared her shoulders, and descended.
Below, the servants arrayed themselves in ceremonial formation, footmen in new livery, maids in their perfectly smocked uniforms, and a butler with the face of a puritan inquisitor. The staff made her uneasy, as if every person were another set of eyes cataloging her as she descended.
At the foot of the staircase, the duke was greeting her parents as if accepting the surrender of a minor country. He bowed with exquisite precision, took her mother’s hand in a manner that left no doubt as to the pecking order, and offered just enough flattery to soothe their egos.
“Lord and Lady Whiteridge,” he said. “A pleasure.”
Her father, a heavy-set man whose face suggested years of dignity, looked Rose over with a cold, appraising stare. It was hard to forget the way he made her feel, but now her body recalled it in droves. She might have escaped the nunnery, but she couldn’t shake the oppressive feelings that bore down on her in her father’s presence. Sweat prickled at her spine.
Her mother, adorned in a peacock blue confection that must have cost more than a year’s coal and candles at St. Clement’s, pinched her lips together as if to restrain the urge to offer grooming advice.
“You look so… altered,” Lady Whiteridge said. “Not ill, precisely, but?—”
“I hope you don’t find her changed for the worse,” the duke inserted, his tone perfectly calibrated to pass for pleasantry while offering a challenge.
Her father grunted. “She was always a willful girl. And now a duke proposes marriage.” He eyed the duke with the same suspicion one might reserve for a buyer promising cash in hand. “Let us not draw things out.”
“If you wish,” the duke replied, and gestured to the footmen. “Dinner will be served.”
They moved as a unit through the gallery to the formal dining room, a cavernous space built to impress. The walls were lined with somber ancestral portraits of men with hawklike features and women with mouths fixed in expressions of permanent disappointment.
Rose felt their gaze as she walked in, as if each canvas were compiling evidence against her.
The footmen drew the chairs back in a choreography of enforced civility. Rose’s place was set to the duke’s right, across from her parents, whose posture became more ramrod as the first course, potted trout with cress, appeared.
