Page 7 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

She was conducted upstairs, the door of her room closed behind her, and the house resumed the silence it had maintained for a year. Nathaniel remained in the hall rather longer than his business there required.

***

The following evening, the household sat down to dinner as a household rather than a collision, and Nathaniel briefly permitted himself to believe that he had solved a problem.

He ought to have known better. Georgiana had spent the day rehearsing.

“I have decided,” his sister announced over the soup, “that I shall attend Mrs Ottley’s masquerade after all. Everyone is going, or very nearly everyone, and Colonel Aldous will be there with half his regiment. Mrs Ottley admits absolutely anyone, which is precisely why it will be worth attending, because dull houses admit only dull people. It is a law. I have observed it in operation.”

“You will not attend Mrs Ottley’s,” Nathaniel said.

“Because you say so?”

“Because Mrs Ottley collects scandal as other women collect fans, and she selects her guests to supply it.” He set down his spoon. “Her invitations are issued for her benefit, not yours.”

“You see danger in a set of quadrilles.” Georgiana put down her spoon sharply enough for it to ring against the bowl. “You see danger in everything. If I so much as speak to an officer, you behave as though I had fled to Gretna Green in my shift.”

“Georgiana.”

“There it is again. That voice.” Georgiana appealed to Miss Gray across the table. “My brother claims to have one tone for managing horses and another for managing me, but I assure you they are precisely alike. You are here to advise me, so advise me.”

The trap had been laid with some skill. Nathaniel had walked into it before, and the encounter always ended in the same fashion: he delivered a final word, Georgiana answered with a wounded one, and the two of them did not speak for three days. He prepared to be final.

“Colonel Aldous,” Miss Gray said pleasantly, before he could begin. “Is he the tall one, or the one who laughs before he has finished telling his own jokes?”

Georgiana blinked. “The tall one. You know him?”

“I know the type.” Selina set down her spoon and gave the girl her undivided attention, more than anyone at that table had managed in a year. “A man who is charming to every young woman at a masquerade is not being charming to you. He is merely being charming in your vicinity. It costs him nothing, while you are expected to pay full price for it, and you strike me as someone who dislikes being cheated.”

“I never said I wished to marry the man.” Georgiana had coloured to the tips of her ears. “I said only that he would be there.”

“Then you wish to be in an interesting house, wearing a fine gown and receiving the admiration of people whose approval costs you nothing to collect. There is no harm in that at nineteen. The danger lies in the house itself. Mrs Ottley neither can nor cares to distinguish between a girl who wishes to be admired and one who wishes to be ruined, because another young woman’s ruin will fill her rooms the following Season. Your intentions may be perfectly innocent, but the company would not be.”

Georgiana looked from her brother to her new companion and back again, then set down her wine untasted.

“You are supposed to take my side,” she said. “You said that you were not his spy.”

“I am not. I have told him nothing that you did not say aloud at this table.” Selina turned her glass a little by the stem, then left it untouched. “I am telling you to your face that the masquerade is a poor idea. That is my own opinion. If you choose to go regardless, I shall accompany you, stand between you and Mrs Ottley’s more profitable guests, behave in an exceedingly tiresome fashion, and spoil your evening thoroughly. You will detest me and remain perfectly safe. That is the arrangement I recommend.”

“You would truly come and spoil it?” Georgiana had forgotten to be angry and had not yet noticed.

“Thoroughly. I have a gift for it. I can render any room dull merely by standing in it with a disapproving posture. Colonel Aldous would find you guarded by a grey woman who answered every gallantry with an enquiry after his mother. He would retreat within a quarter of an hour. They always do.”

“That is a horrid thing to offer a girl,” Georgiana said.

“It is what I have to offer: a tiresome chaperone, and your name still your own at the end of the evening. No one else this Season will offer you anything half so dull.”

A short silence held the table. Then Georgiana laughed, unwillingly, exactly as Nathaniel had laughed unwillingly in the carriage, and the sound sat oddly in a dining room that had not heard much of it in a year. At the sideboard the footman looked hard at the wall and went on looking at it.

It was as his sister reached for her wine, still laughing, that Nathaniel saw the letter.

It had been folded small and tucked under the rim of her plate, half hidden by the linen, and when the footman moved to change the course, Georgiana’s hand went out and drew it under the edge of the cloth into her lap with a smoothness that no innocent errand ever wore. She did it without breaking the rhythm of her laughter. She did it the way a practised hand does a thing it has done before.

He said nothing. Speaking would have turned the whole table, and the letter would have vanished, and he would have gained a quarrel and lost the knowledge. He watched the small white corner disappear into the folds of her gown, and let the dinner proceed, and did not taste the rest of it.

***

He found Miss Gray afterwards in the corridor outside the library, where she had gone to fetch a book with an ease that suggested she had already claimed the room in her mind. The corridor was cold. She had a single candle and had set it on the sill behind her, so that her face was the darkest thing in it.