Something in Megan’s chest moved.
“And yet,” Dorothea continued, “you are precisely right for him. Not because of what you’ve endured, not out of some sentimental notion that suffering ennobles people, because it doesn’t always and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fool, but because of who you are underneath it. The way you think. The way you see things. The way you hold yourself in a room and read it before you enter it and are always three steps ahead of what anyone expects.” She paused. “He needs someone who can do that. Someone with enough interior life to match his own. He’s a complicated man and he’s spent most of his life in rooms full of people who couldn’t follow him and were too polite to say so.”
Megan said nothing. She was not sure there was anything to say to that.
“And you,” Dorothea said, with a precision that suggested she had been saving this, “need someone who will not require you to perform a version of yourself that costs you something to maintain. Oliver has seen you at your worst and your most frightened and your most complicated, and he is not frightenedof any of it. He still loves you because of it. In my experience, that is rarer than rubies and considerably more valuable.”
Somewhere in the house a clock marked the quarter hour.
“I don’t know how to be a duchess,” Megan said. Her voice came out quieter than she’d intended.
“Nobody does.” Dorothea’s tone was matter-of-fact. “You learn it. I learned it. My mother learned it before me and made any number of embarrassing mistakes in the process, which I know because she told me about them and laughed. It is not a natural state. It is a practiced one.”
“There would be questions, about where I came from.”
“There would be, for a while.” Dorothea did not minimize it. Megan was grateful for that too. “And then Oliver will be the Duke of Saxton, and you will be his Duchess, and you will have a position and a household and a history and an identity that belongs entirely to you and that no power on earth can remove from you, because it is built on the one foundation Penharrow never managed to destroy.”
Megan looked at her.
“You,” Dorothea said simply. “What you are. What you chose to remain, all those years, when the easiest thing would have been to stop being yourself entirely. But you still have an open heart. You still have a love of life, and you let my grandson in.”
Megan pressed her lips together.
She had not cried since the bathtub when she's arrived at Saxton Castle. She would not start now, in the blue sitting room, in front of a woman she had known for a few weeks and was somehow already more frightened of disappointing than anyone she had met in her life.
“Think about it this way,” Dorothea said, and her voice had shifted slightly, become something almost conversational. “Penharrow spent fourteen years trying to make you into something. Something that belonged to him. Something that reflected what he wanted and served his purposes and could be containedwithin the walls of his choosing.” She paused. “And you will become the Marchioness of Astor. And one day, the Duchess. You will sit in rooms he cannot enter and move through a world he has no access to and live a life of your own making.” Her expression was composed, but there was something in it that was not entirely composed, a particular quality of satisfaction that an older woman has when she has thought something through very carefully and found the seams of it. “Wouldn’t that be the most complete defeat you could hand him? Not just escaping. Not just surviving. Thriving. Being happy. Being utterly and entirely beyond his reach, not because you ran, but because you built something he cannot touch.”
Megan was quiet for a long time.
“He would know,” she said, slowly. “That he didn’t win.”
“He would know it every day for the rest of his miserable life, which I hope is short if I have my way,” Dorothea said, with a serenity that had iron underneath it. “And he could not touch you. Could not reach you. Could not even approach you without your husband, who is not a small man and who I understand has a considerable talent for violence when properly motivated, standing between you.” She picked up her Voltaire with the air of a woman wrapping up a conversation that had reached its natural conclusion. “That is not nothing, Megan.”
“No.” Megan felt something shift, settle, find its level. “It’s not.”
Dorothea opened her book and appeared to locate her page. Then, without looking up, she said, “You don’t have to decide tonight.”
“No.” Megan smoothed her skirt. “He said he’d ask me again tomorrow.”
“He will. He’s quite serious when he’s decided on something.” A pause. “It’s an occasionally infuriating quality, but one finds it reassuring with time.”
Megan looked at her. The fire. The worn chair. The accumulated evidence of a woman who had lived a very long life and had thoughts about most of it.
“Thank you,” she said. “For—” She paused, because she wasn’t entirely sure how to finish it. For being direct. For not performing patience at her. For saying the thing rather than the comfortable version of the thing. “For accepting me.”
“Mm.” Dorothea turned a page, and Megan understood she was being gently and not unkindly dismissed, which she was beginning to appreciate as one of the Dowager’s particular arts. She rose and moved toward the door.
“Megan.”
She stopped.
Dorothea had not looked up from the Voltaire. “I will need you to be ready to go out tomorrow morning to act as my lady in waiting. We are calling on an acquaintance of mine.”
“Of course. Who is?—”
“My Goddaughter.” Dorothea’s voice was perfectly measured. The kind of measurement that meant the words were true and also entirely insufficient, and she knew it. “The Duchess of Newbury. Her mother and I were presented in the same season, a very long time ago. She has had a—” A pause, careful as everything Dorothea did was careful. “A considerable sorrow in her life. A grief she has carried for many years. I find myself thinking it is past time I called on her.”
Megan stood very still in the doorway.
