Page 14 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“You drove alone at night to a house frequented by that man. You entered unmasked and confronted him in a corridor where anyone might hear.” He held his hat between his hands and was slowly damaging its brim. “You placed yourself in danger.”

“Your sister was in immediate danger. I was not without risk, but mine was the lesser.” Selina’s voice was quiet and perfectly level, and it cut through the carriage more cleanly than his own. “As for my reputation, Your Grace, you are scolding me for spending something I lost eight years ago.”

The words entered him and stopped.

He had been preparing to say more about recklessness and reputation, but the rebuke died upon his tongue. He had spoken from the instinctive concern a man felt for a name that could still be damaged. Hers had been destroyed before she was twenty, and she had carried what remained of it through Mrs Ottley’s door because Georgiana still had hers to lose.

The carriage rolled on through the darkness. Georgiana’s weeping softened. Selina continued watching the glass.

“Forgive me,” Nathaniel said, his voice rougher than he intended. “I was afraid. I express fear badly and invariably direct it at the wrong person. I have just directed it at the one person in this carriage who behaved well. It is a failing of mine, one of several, and I shall not insult you by disguising it as a virtue.”

Selina looked at him then, and her mouth softened.

“You are forgiven. You were afraid for her. But you must learn where to aim that fear, Your Grace. One day you will fire it at someone who cannot recognise what lies beneath it, and they will see only the shot.”

From the corner, Georgiana said in a small, tearful voice, “It was my fault, not hers. Miss Gray told me the masquerade was a poor idea, and I gave my word that I would not go. I thought that because the house would be crowded, nothing truly secret could happen.” Her breath caught. “I thought I knew what he intended. Now I am not certain that I know him at all. I do not even know whether I liked him, or merely liked being listened to.”

Selina’s voice was different when she answered the girl: gentler, with none of its usual edge. “There is no shame in wishing to be listened to. Your mistake was believing that attention must signify regard. You broke your word, and tomorrow we shall discuss it. Tonight, it is enough that you recognised your uncertainty and came away.”

The girl gave a hiccupping laugh through her tears and lifted one hand to her face, only to discover that she had lost her glove somewhere in the house. Selina reached across the darkness of the carriage, took the bare hand and held it without another word. Georgiana’s fingers closed tightly around hers and did not release them for the remainder of the drive.

Nathaniel watched their joined hands, the folded domino and Selina’s grey sleeve as the horses carried them onwards. Ahead, the lamps of his own street began to emerge from the darkness, one after another.

He said nothing.

Calvert and Gray. Two names spoken in a single breath, in a hall full of listening ears, with the woman in purple standing beside the mirror.

By morning, the story would have acquired a shape, and that shape would not resemble the truth. A disgraced gentlewoman, the daughter of a hanged murderer, installed under false colours in the Duke of Wexford’s house and discovered at night in a masquerade of the worst reputation beside the Duke’s unmarried sister.

Every fact would be true. Every meaning would be a lie.

Georgiana’s prospects, his own name, and whatever remained of the standing of the woman opposite him, who had already risked it in defence of people who were not hers.

His mind approached the problem as it would a column of figures. It ran swiftly down the particulars twice and arrived at a different answer each time.

Deny the story. A duke who denied a rumour merely confirmed that it had reached him; every drawing room in London would know as much by Friday.

Dismiss her. Send her out of the house tonight, and perhaps the story would be deprived of fresh fuel.

Send her where? To what?

He put that answer aside and did not pick it up again. Something hot and hard turned over in his chest at the knowledge that he had considered it at all.

Buy the silence of the matron in purple. With what, and through whom? She would have repeated the story to three more people before the money was cold.

Rowland. Break Rowland.

He remained with that solution rather longer, taking grim pleasure in the imagined shape of his hands around the man’s collar. Then the carriage struck a rut, and the pleasure vanished, leaving the problem exactly where it had been.

A paid companion discovered at a notorious masquerade with a duke’s unmarried sister could be made into a scandal.

A wife could not be dismissed so easily.

Nathaniel became very still. Across from him, the swinging lamp cast its light over Selina’s hands and withdrew it again.

A wife possessed freedoms that a companion did not. She could enter such a house to retrieve her husband’s ward, travel in his carriage and act beneath the protection of his name. The Duchess of Wexford might be called eccentric, but her presence could not be explained away as the misconduct of a paid dependent. His name would answer the questions before the story had finished asking them.

Then…no. Absurd.