Megan pressed her fingers to her mouth and felt, to her absolute bewilderment, a smile breaking through.
She was still smiling when the knock came.
“Come in,” she managed.
The maid was young, perhaps sixteen, with a no-nonsense manner that sat oddly on her slight frame and a curtsy so practiced it was clearly a point of personal pride. She carried an ewer of hot water and had a gown draped carefully over one arm of deep russet wool, simple and well-made, that suggested it belonged to a woman of quality without announcing it.
“Good morning, my lady. Mrs. Fenwick thought this might serve better than the robe for breakfast. It belonged to Lady Eliza before she married and went to Bath.” The girl set the ewer on the washstand and laid the dress across the foot of the bed with practiced efficiency. “I’m Annie. I’m to help you dress and show you to the dining room when you’re ready.” Annie saw to the fire as she spoke.
Megan looked at the dress. Then at Annie. Then at the ewer of steaming hot water.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it more than the girl could possibly know.
Annie helped her dress without fuss and without questions,which Megan suspected was a carefully managed virtue. The gown fit tolerably well through the shoulders, a little loose in the waist, and the russet brought a color to her face that the last week of cold and exhaustion had stripped away. When Annie had finished Megan’s hair and stepped back to assess her work, the girl nodded once with the satisfied air of a craftsman inspecting a finished joint.
“The dining room’s two floors down, miss. I’ll take you.”
Saxton Castle revealed itself in corridor after corridor as they descended. Portraits and polished floors and the smell of beeswax and old wood, all speaking of generations of careful maintenance. The kind of house that expected certain things of the people who moved through it and trusted they already knew what those things were.
Megan straightened her spine and followed Annie down the stairs.
She heard the Duke before she saw him.
Not words, just the particular quality of silence that surrounds a person accustomed to commanding rooms, an expectant quiet that preceded his presence the way a change in weather precedes the storm itself. Annie opened the dining room door and curtsied, and Megan walked in.
The room was long and high-ceilinged, with windows overlooking a sweep of frost-silvered grounds. A fire burned at the far end. The table could have seated twenty. The Duke of Saxton sat at its head, alone, a cup of coffee at his right hand and a newspaper he was not reading folded beside his plate.
He looked up.
She had expected coldness. She had not expected assessment quite so open and thorough, the sharp gray eyes moving over her with the frank appraisal of a man who saw no reason to pretend he was not taking her measure.
Megan crossed the room and curtsied, because whatever else was uncertain, basic courtesy cost her nothing.
“Your Grace.”
“Sit down.” He gestured to the chair at his left, close enough for conversation, which she noted was not the choice of a man who intended to ignore her. “Coffee or tea?”
“Tea, please.”
A footman materialized and poured. Megan took the cup and waited, because she had learned long ago that the person who spoke first in a room like this one had already conceded something.
The Duke let the silence run for a moment before he spoke. “Oliver tells me you’ve been Penharrow’s prisoner since you were a child.”
“Yes.”
“He also tells me you intend to testify against him.”
“If it would help, yes.”
“Would help.” The Duke set down his coffee. “And have you given any thought to what that actually means? To stand in front of a magistrate—or worse, face a trial—and speak publicly about what you suffered at Penharrow’s hands? Do you understand what society would make of it? What would they make of you?”
Megan looked at him steadily. “I understand very well what society makes of women who’ve been through what I have, Your Grace. I’ve had considerable time to think about it.”
“Then you’ll understand that your testimony, however truthful, would be of limited use against a man of Penharrow’s standing. His solicitors would dismantle it. His connections would ensure it never reached the right ears, and your history would become public knowledge.” His tone was not unkind, which was, somehow, worse than if it had been. He laid out facts. He had the air of a man who believed he was being helpful. “You would be destroyed by the very process intended to deliver justice.”
“Quite possibly,” Megan said. “I find I’m not as afraid of being destroyed as I once was.”
Something shifted in the Duke’s expression, too brief to name.
