Page 3 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

He let the matter rest, which surprised her, and therefore made her distrust him.

“Where were you raised?”

“In the country.” She turned her hands over in her lap. “In a modest establishment. My father held some land.”

“Held?”

“He is no longer in a position to hold anything.” The words emerged flatly, and she left them where they fell.

The duke turned his untouched glass of claret a quarter turn upon the table. The movement was so slight and deliberate that it could only have been intended to grant her a moment. Selina watched the wine settle. She had not eaten since six o’clock, and the sight of it left her light-headed, so she shifted her gaze to his hand instead.

“You have his eyes.”

“I could not say.” She resisted the impulse to touch her face. “I have never seen the resemblance myself.”

“The Earl of Merrow had grey eyes and a way of holding his chin that suggested the room had been arranged for his convenience.” He did not raise his voice for it, or lower it. “His daughter, I am told, inherited both.”

The window light seemed to grow colder. Selina kept her hands still in her lap, one thumb pressed hard into the opposite palm under the table, and did not permit her face to move.

“You were Lady Selina Calvert.”

“I was.”

“And now?”

“Now I am a woman in need of employment.”

For a long moment he said nothing. The assembly went on behind them, the small commerce of ruined gentlewomen and the ladies who purchased their attendance, and Selina waited for the thing she had waited for at every interview for six months, the tightening, the swift retreat.

It did not come. That was worse.

“Your father was convicted of murder,” Wexford said, in the tone another man might have used to remark upon the weather. “He was tried before his peers and hanged. Your family name was struck from every list that matters, and a good many that do not. You have lived under a false one ever since because the true one closes every door in England.”

“You have summarised eight years with admirable economy.” Selina placed both hands upon the edge of the table, where he could see them.

“Eight years.”

“I was seventeen when they took him. I am five-and-twenty now. Nothing that occurred between those two points would interest you.”

“I dislike wasting words,” he said.

“So I observe. Most people prefer to arrive at cruelty by a more scenic route.”

“Was that cruelty?”

“No,” she admitted, and the admission surprised her more than the question. “It was accurate. I object less to accuracy than to pity. Pity requires me to be grateful, and I have very little gratitude left in stock.”

This time, he did smile, faintly. It altered his whole difficult face, and Selina turned her attention to the palm’s shadow upon the cloth until she had finished noticing the change.

“Tell me how you came to be here,” he said. “The particulars, not the account you have prepared for interviews.”

“You would know the difference?”

“I would.”

She considered him. She had told the arranged version forty times, and it had never once earned her a place. Perhaps the truth would fail differently.

“When my father was taken, our house was sold to pay what he owed and a good deal that he did not,” she said. “My mother died within the year. Grief, the physician called it, and I have never found a better word for a heart asked to carry more than it was given. There were no relations who would own us. There was one who might have, and did not. I sold what I could and took the name Gray, because my own is a sentence rather than a name. That is the whole of it, Your Grace. It does not improve with ornament.”