Page 109 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

Three weeks ago there had always been something waiting beyond the next door: a letter, a threat, a name to protect, a consequence to anticipate before it reached the people he loved. He had spent so long arranging his life around what might go wrong that peace still felt faintly like something he had forgotten to attend to.

But Georgiana’s letters were ash. Giles had put his name beneath the truth and gone. Rowland had lost the means to threaten them. Across the table Selina was already making another note in the margin of her foundation accounts while pretending not to do so.

Nothing required rescuing.

There were only things to be done.

Selina caught him looking at her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That expression generally precedes interference.”

“I was thinking.”

“More dangerous still.”

Georgiana looked between them. “May I have cake while you decide which of you is right?”

“No,” they said together.

Bassett turned away with suspicious promptness.

Selina’s mouth twitched.

Nathaniel reached beneath the edge of the table and found her hand. Her fingers closed around his without hesitation.

Luncheon arrived. Georgiana resumed her campaign for cake. Selina informed Nathaniel that his estimate for coal remained excessive, and Nathaniel informed her that winter would decide the matter.

The house was no longer quiet.

He found he preferred it that way.

Epilogue

One Year Later

“Sit down, and do not perch on the edge of the chair as if you expected to be asked to leave it, because you will not be. Sit properly. Take up the seat. It is yours for as long as this conversation lasts, and the conversation will last exactly as long as you wish it to.”

The young woman on the other side of the desk was perhaps twenty, in a grey gown chosen to make her unremarkable, her hands folded too tightly in her lap and her chin held at the careful angle of a person braced for judgement. Selina had been her, a year and a lifetime ago, in a grey gown of her own, perched on the edge of a chair at Harcourt House, waiting to be inspected like a length of cloth.

The room they sat in was the interview parlour of the Wexford Foundation, which had opened its doors that morning in a good house in a respectable street. Its offices occupied the lower floor; above stairs were clean, simply furnished rooms where a woman might lodge safely while a suitable situation was found.

Selina sat behind the desk not as an inspector but as the thing she had once needed: someone on the far side of the table who was not waiting for her to fail.

“I am told,” the young woman said, “that I am to be examined. As to my character, and my accomplishments, and my suitability. I have a list of my accomplishments. I have written them out. I can play, and I have French, and I sew a very neat hem, and I do not complain. I am told to say that I do not complain. That mistresses value it above the French.”

“Keep the list,” Selina said. “We shall want it when we begin considering situations, because there your accomplishments matter. But they are not the first thing I want to know about you.”

The young woman looked uncertain.

“You will be asked questions here,” Selina continued. “We must understand what work you can do and what sort of household may suit you. But we are not deciding whether you deserve our help. That has already been decided by your having come through the door.”

The girl’s fingers shifted against one another.

“At the placement assemblies and the agencies,” Selina said, “the employer chooses, and you hope to be chosen. Here the choice runs both ways. We shall make inquiries into any household before we recommend it to you, just as the household will make inquiries into you. And you may refuse a situation.”