“I am not flippant. I am tired.”
Her mother let out a breath that trembled with exasperation. “You ought to be more than tired. Why, you ought to be ashamed.”
At that, Frances’ fingers stilled upon the page.
Across the room, her father lowered the newspaper he had been pretending to read and fixed her with the sort of stern, disappointed expression he reserved for moments when she proved most thoroughly herself.
“This was reckless, Frances,” her father said. “Utterly reckless.”
Frances closed the book in her lap. “It was necessary.”
“Necessary?” her mother repeated, as though the word itself offended her. “To attach yourself to a scandal already spreading through every drawing room in London? Necessary for whom?”
“For the truth,” Frances replied.
Her mother gave a short, incredulous laugh. “Truth has very little to do with it now.”
“That,” Frances pointed out, “is precisely the problem.”
Her mother turned away for a moment, then turned back again as though still too agitated to keep still. “I have already had two notes this morning, each written with the most nauseating concern. Lady Pembroke wishes to know whether there is some understanding between you and the Duke of Sinclair. Lady Morton, with all the subtlety of a brick through glass, has asked whether we ought to expect an engagement. By this afternoon,half the ton will have decided that you defended him because you are secretly attached.”
Frances felt heat rise in her cheeks, though not from embarrassment, but rather, from anger.
“How industrious of them.”
“Do not mock this!” her mother cried. “Your name is being passed about like a card at a gaming table.”
Frances stood then, unable to remain seated beneath the force of her mother’s distress. “And what would you have had me do? Sit silent while they destroyed a man’s name, and a woman’s, and a child’s for that matter, simply because they found it diverting?”
Her father’s expression hardened. “I would have had you remember that you are not an anonymous scribbler free to meddle without consequence. You are my daughter.”
The words fell with more weight than his raised voice might have done.
Frances held his gaze. “Yes. I am.”
“And because you are,” he said, rising from his chair, “your actions do not belong to you alone.”
There it was, the heart of it. It was the old family creed dressed in the plain clothes of duty: that a daughter was not herself first, but a piece of a larger thing, valuable only so long as she did not crack the surface.
Her mother pressed a handkerchief between her fingers. “You may not care for your own prospects, Frances, but society cares for them on your behalf.”
Frances gave a small, humorless smile. “Society may save itself the trouble. I do not wish to marry.”
The room went still. It was not the first time she had thought it, nor even the first time she had said it aloud, but never had the words landed so directly in the center of a family quarrel.
Her mother stared at her as though she had uttered something profane.
Her father’s brows drew together at once. “What nonsense is this?”
“It is not nonsense, Father. It is the truth.”
“The truth,” he argued sharply, “is that you are five-and-twenty years old and growing more impossible by the month.”
“Three-and-twenty,” Frances corrected him.
He ignored that. “And if this gossip fixes itself to your name, you may indeed lose what little chance remains of making a respectable match.”
Frances lifted her chin. “Then I shall lose what I never particularly wanted.”
