“A governess?” Celine set her teacup down with enough force to rattle the saucer. “Should I spend my days teaching some merchant’s daughters to paint mediocre landscapes while Lucy and Anne watch their prospects whither? While Papa rots in Marshalsea?”
“Your father’s predicament is of his own making.”
The words hung between them like a blade. It was the first time her mother had ever criticised Papa so plainly, and the shock of it silenced them both.
“Yes,” Celine said at last. “It is. But we will all pay the price regardless.”
Her mother sank into the opposite chair, suddenly looking every one of her forty-eight years. “When I married your father, I thought myself so clever. A baron’s title. A lovely estate in Hampshire. A man who quoted poetry and brought me roses.” She gave a brittle laugh. “I didn’t know about the gambling. Or perhaps I did and thought I might change him. Young women are such fools about what love can accomplish.”
“I’m not in love with His Grace.”
“No,” her mother agreed, studying her daughter with eyes too experienced to hold many illusions. “But you’re curiousabout him. I saw it last night—the way you looked at him. Like a natural philosopher examining a particularly fascinating specimen.”
Heat rose in Celine’s cheeks. “That is absurd.”
“Is it? You have always been drawn to puzzles, my dear. Problems to solve. Codes to break. And what is the Duke of Rothwest but the ultimate enigma? A man no one understands, whom everyone fears, who lives by rules no one else comprehends.”
“You make me sound calculating.”
“I make you sound like yourself.” Her mother reached across the table, taking her hands. “Which is precisely why I am terrified. You think you can manage him, do you not? Navigate his moods, interpret his silences, perhaps even tame the Beast of Berkeley Square. But what if you cannot? What if he is exactly what they say?”
“Then I’ll survive.” Celine squeezed her mother’s fingers. “I am stronger than I look.”
“Strength isn’t always enough. Your grandmother was strong. She endured forty years with a man who never once told her he loved her. She died without ever hearing the words.” Tears filled her mother’s eyes, though she did not allow them to fall. “I do not want that for you.”
“And I don’t want poverty for any of us.” Celine rose and crossed to the window. Below, London pressed on with its morning work—delivery carts, maids scrubbing steps, lifecontinuing heedless of private calamities. “Besides, the Duke offered separate chambers for the first month. Time to adjust. That is more consideration than many wives receive.”
“A month.” Her mother’s voice was flat. “And after that?”
Celine did not answer—because she could not. The marriage bed was a subject discussed only in whispers and euphemisms, though she’d gleaned enough from married friends to understand the basic mechanics. But understanding the act and imagining it with the Duke of Rothwest were two vastly different things.
Would he be gentle? She doubted it. Everything about him suggested control, precision, a man who did nothing by halves.
Would he be cruel? The stories implied as much, yet the man who had stood in their foyer the night before had not seemed cruel—merely… intense.
“I have already decided,” she said finally, her gaze fixed on the street below. “I will sign the papers tonight.”
Behind her, her mother let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob.
“Then pity help you, my dear. Pity help us all.”
***
The day passed with the strange, crystalline stillness of time running out. Celine found herself memorising details she had never before noticed—the way the afternoon light gilded thefaded wallpaper in the music room, the creak of the third stair from the top, the familiar blend of her mother’s lavender water and the beeswax used on the furniture.
Lucy and Anne knew, of course. News travelled quickly in a household with only four servants remaining, and by luncheon, both younger girls were treating Celine with the careful deference usually reserved for the dying.
“You could still refuse,” Anne said over their meal of cold ham and yesterday’s bread. At fifteen, she still believed in fairy tales and happy endings. “Perhaps someone else will offer for you. Someone kind.”
“In the next eight hours?” Lucy asked dryly. “Shall we post a notice in theTimes?‘Desperate family seeks immediate husband for eldest daughter. Must be wealthy, kind, and willing to pay eight thousand pounds in gambling debts. Beast-like temperament not preferred.’”
“Lucy!” their mother admonished, though without heat. They were all far beyond pretending.
“What’s he like?” Anne asked, pushing her food around her plate. “Truly like—not the stories, but the actual man.”
Celine considered. “Tall,” she said at last. “Not unusually so, but he seems taller because of the way he carries himself. Dark hair, grey eyes. There’s a scar near his left temple—very faint. You’d only notice if you looked closely.”
“And were you?” Lucy asked archly. “Looking closely?”
