Collins was waiting in the front hall.
“Your Grace looks well,” Collins said, which was the closest Collins had ever come to expressing an opinion about his employer’s emotional state.
“Your Grace feels terrified, Collins. But thank you.”
He went upstairs, took out the license and read it once. He read it carefully, every word, the formal legal language that reduced a marriage to a series of permissions and requirements, and underneath the formal language was the real thing, the human thing, the decision to bind his life to another person’s life and to do so publicly and permanently.
He read it again. His finger found the blank space where her name would go. Imogen Goodall. Two words. A name he had said aloud once for the wager and felt nothing.
He placed the license on the desk beside the watch and looked at them both, the gold casing and the pale parchment, and thought about the Carlisle ball. He was going to ask her in front of everyone. He was going to stand in the Carlisle ballroom, in front of every person who had spent four seasons ignoring her, and he was going to ask Imogen Goodall to be the Duchess of Ravenhurst. But before all, he was going to tell her the truth, all of it. He was afraid, but it was the price, and he was going to pay it, because a man who carried a lie into a proposal was a man who did not deserve the answer.
He picked up the watch and looked at his mother’s face in the miniature, and he was certain that she would have approved. He thought his mother would have liked a woman who read French novels behind potted palms, who told dukes their company was variable and who knelt in wet grass withoutbeing asked. He thought his mother would have said that a woman who made a Hambridge laugh without warning was a woman worth every risk the Hambridges had ever taken, and the Hambridges, for all their faults, had never been afraid of risk.
Two days. He could manage two days.
But he was not entirely sure that he could manage the truth.
Chapter Twelve
“Lady Heathe, married to Lord Heathe, and Lord Devlin’s sister, presents her compliments and hopes Miss Goodall will attend an intimate dinner at Heathe Hall, Hammersmith, on Friday evening.”
Cassie read the card aloud at breakfast, delighted, because Cassie believed that invitations from earls were evidence of divine favor and could not be persuaded otherwise. The card was heavy cream stock, sealed with the Heathe crest, the handwriting neat and formal, and it mentioned, in the third line, that the Duke of Ravenhurst had expressed a particular wish to see Miss Goodall in less public surroundings.
Imogen held the card and read it twice. The crest was genuine and the wording correct. The mention of Lady Heathe, acting as hostess, made the gathering acceptable for an unmarried woman, and the mention of Ash made the gathering impossible to refuse.
“Aunt Margery cannot attend,” Cassie said, glancing at the doorway where Aunt Margery’s cough was audible from the upstairs bedroom, the mild chill that had been coming on since the carriage ride from Ravenhurst and that had settled into Aunt Margery’s chest with the tenacity of a guest who had no intention of leaving. “But the card says Lady Heathe will be hostess. That is acceptable, is it not?”
It was acceptable. An intimate dinner with a married hostess of good family, in a private residence, with named guests of appropriate rank. Imogen considered everything and came to the conclusion that the invitation had been coordinated between Devlin and the Duke of Ravenhurst. It felt like a step forward, and a step forward was what she wanted, even if she could not yet see where the step was leading.
She wrote to signify her acceptance on the Goodall notepaper, which was thin, slightly yellowed and had been purchased in bulk three years ago, sealed it with the family seal and sent it with the morning post.
***
Friday evening. She dressed in the deep blue silk, pinned her hair more carefully than usual, wore her mother’s small pearl earrings and looked at herself in the glass for longer than she typically allowed herself to look.
Tonight the glass did not disappoint her. She looked, she thought, like a woman who had been chosen, and the choosing sat on her face differently than she had expected, not as confidence exactly, not as beauty, but as something quieter and more private. There was a small certainty that lived behind her eyes, and that had arrived sometime in the cottage and had not left.
She took the hired carriage with her maid, Sarah, a sensible woman of forty who had been with the family since before Imogen’s father died and who fell asleep within ten minutes of departure, because Sarah considered carriage rides an opportunity for rest and was not going to waste one on scenery.
They arrived at Heathe Hall at eight o’clock. The gravel sweep was choked with vehicles, far more than an intimate dinner would require, barouches and curricles and heavy town coaches parked at angles that suggested their owners had arrived in haste. The front hall was too loud for the hour, too bright, too full of people, and the noise that came through the open doors was not the noise of a dinner gathering. It was the noise of something else entirely.
Imogen stepped through the front door and understood.
The drawing room beyond the hall was full. Not with dinner guests. With men deep in their cups, standing and sprawlingand leaning against furniture, their cravats undone, their faces flushed, glasses in hand, their laughter carrying the particular looseness that arrived when gentlemen had been drinking since before dinner and had no intention of stopping before dawn. And with women. Women in dampened muslin so transparent that the color of skin showed through the gauze, their bodies visible beneath the fabric, the dark circles of their nipples, the shadow between their thighs, everything that a modest gown was designed to conceal made deliberately, shamelessly visible. Jewels at throats and wrists that no respectable lady would wear before midnight, diamonds, rubies and heavy gold, and the women wearing them were beautiful and entirely at ease in their transparency. This was their territory, and they understood the rules, but these rules were not the same ones that governed the world Imogen had been raised in.
There was no Lady Heathe. Devlin had no married sister. The crest on the invitation was real, but the hostess was invented. The intimate dinner was a gathering of the wager set and their women, but the women were not wives. The arrangement between them was commercial, temporary and openly acknowledged, and Imogen was standing in the doorway of it in her deep blue silk and her mother’s pearl earrings, as obviously out of place as a hymn book in a gaming hell.
She froze. Her body made the decision before her mind did, her feet rooting to the floor, her hands going still at her sides, her breathing suspending for a count of three while her brain tried to process what her eyes were showing her. The drawing room was warm and loud and smelled of wine, perfume, cigar smoke, and the particular musk of bodies in proximity. The smell was different from a ballroom, more raw, less guarded, the scent of a gathering that had stopped pretending to be polite and had committed to being honest about its appetites.
A swaying footman appeared at her elbow and asked for her cloak; his breath smelled of wine, his eyes were glassy, and the asking was routine, mechanical, the request of a servant who had stopped distinguishing between guests and had begun simply processing arrivals. Someone laughed low and amused across the room, a woman’s laugh, intimate and knowing, and the laugh was directed at something Imogen could not see and did not want to see, but the sound of it made her stomach contract.
She understood, at the same moment, two things. That she had made a terrible mistake and that turning around and leaving would make it worse. Because the hired carriage had already pulled away and the gravel sweep was full of vehicles whose owners would see the Duke of Ravenhurst’s wallflower fleeing from Lord Heathe’s house at eight o’clock on a Friday evening and would draw conclusions, and the conclusions would follow her for the rest of the season and into the next one and possibly for the rest of her life.
She did not turn around. She stood in the doorway with her deep blue silk and her mother’s pearl earrings and every nerve in her body screaming at her to run, but she did not run, because Imogen Goodall had spent four seasons standing in rooms where she did not belong and she was not going to start running now.
Ash saw her from across the room.
The distance between them was perhaps thirty feet, the width of the drawing room, and he was standing near the fireplace with a glass he was not drinking and a group of men he was not listening to. He turned his head, some instinct or accident of timing, and his eyes found her in the doorway, and she watched the recognition arrive on his face, and the color leave it. The blood drained from his cheeks as if someone had opened a tap, a whitening that started at his jaw and spreadupward and left his face the color of paper. The whitening was not performance; it was horror, genuine, unguarded and absolute.
