It was proper to proceed without delay, go toward the study, fetch her book and retire to her chambers.
To linger and listen was quite beneath her dignity, and a direct violation of the professional integrity she had so long endeavoured to uphold.
But she heard her name.
Not“Miss Grace.”Her name. Mel, and she stopped, despite herself, in the shadowed corridor outside the drawing room door, which was not quite closed.
“…simply explain to her,” Benedict was saying.
“Tell her what actually happened.”
“I’ve tried. She won’t listen. She called me‘Your Grace’at dinner and looked at me like I was a stranger.” Rhys’s voice was raw in a way she had never heard it.
“She’s put up walls I don’t know how to breach.”
“Perhaps she needs time.”
“Time for what? To convince herself that every terrible thing she believes about me is true? To decide that I’m not worth the trouble of hoping for?”
There was a pause, and Mel pressed herself against the wall, her heart pounding madly, knowing she should leave but unable to move.
“What exactly did she say to you? In the garden, before all this.”
“She said I hide behind my worst self because I’m afraid my best self will fail.” Rhys laughed, though there was no humour in it.
“She was right. The moment I got back to London, I proved her right. Drinking too much, letting Mrs. Hartington drape herself on my arm, acting exactly like the rake the gossip sheets expect me to be.”
“But you didn’t actually do anything. You went home alone.”
“That doesn’t matter. What matters is how it looked. What matters is that she read about it and saw exactly what she expected to see.” Another pause, longer this time. “I can’t enter into matrimony with a governess, Benedict. You know that. The scandal would be… Society would never accept it. My daughters would suffer for my choices.”
Mel stopped breathing.
She had known, of course she had known. She had told herself this exact truth a hundred times since the garden, hadreminded herself of the impossibility of the situation every time her heart tried to hope for something different.
But hearing him say it, hearing the casual dismissal in his voice, the matter-of-fact acknowledgment that she was beneath his consideration for anything permanent, was different from knowing it herself.
“The scandal would be manageable,” Benedict said. “Serena and I would support you. Others would follow.”
“It’s not about scandal. It’s about what’s right for Anna and Viola and Thistle. They’re already illegitimate. They already carry that burden. I cannot add to it by entering into a matrimony so far beneath my station that society would use it as another weapon against them.”
So far beyond what propriety allowed.
The words landed with the particular precision of a knife finding its target. Mel had always known what she was: a woman of no family, no fortune, and no position beyond what she had earned through work. She had never pretended otherwise, never aspired to anything beyond her reach.
But she had thought, foolishly, that he saw her differently. That when he looked at her, he saw something more than her circumstances. That the connection they had built, the conversations and confidences and quiet moments of understanding, had meant something beyond the boundaries of class and station.
She had been wrong.
She turned from the door and walked toward the stairs, her footsteps silent on the carpet, her face composed into the mask she had spent a lifetime perfecting. She did not hear what else was said. She did not need to.
She had heard enough.
In her room, she lit a single candle and stood for a moment, looking at the space that had become her home over the past four months. The narrow bed with its practical coverlet. The small desk where she wrote her lesson plans. The wardrobe that held her few dresses, all of them grey or brown, all of them suitable for a woman who worked for her living.
The shell on the windowsill, gleaming in the candlelight.
She crossed to the window and picked up the shell, turning it over in her hands. Viola had given it to her as a gift. Viola had trusted her, had chosen her over her own father to receive this precious thing.
