Page 8 of The Duke’s Hidden Runaway Bride

He already knew, or believed he knew, the name she was hiding. The ledger had shown him something more interesting: what she could do when she forgot to hide herself.

His other source of intelligence was Miss Pettibone, and a more cheerfully catastrophic informant no man had ever possessed.

He understood that she had been assigned to him and that his aunt meant her to be an encumbrance. He submitted good-humouredly, partly because he was fond of the old creature and partly because a man being managed often learned more than one being resisted.

The difficulty lay in the quality of the information divulged.

Miss Pettibone would talk about Miss Jones for hours, requiring no encouragement beyond an attentive face, and everything she knew was wrong in a different direction.

Miss Jones’s father, Adrian learned, had been in shipping, or possibly the Church. He was dead now, poor gentleman, unless he was living retired abroad. Miss Jones had come to Lady Elise a month ago, or perhaps two, or even three, from circumstances into which Miss Pettibone had never enquired, because one did not. They had certainly been very trying. His Grace would have remarked her eyes, in those first days; it had taken quite a few days, or weeks, or even a month or two, at Plas Eira before she began to look a little less haunted.

Miss Jones was four-and-twenty, or nineteen. She had no fortune, which was a great pity, for she had been brought up grand as a bishop’s daughter, which she was, of course. One could always tell by the curtsey. Miss Pettibone’s mother had said a curtsey was a woman’s whole history told in a single motion, and Miss Jones’s was history of the first water.

“I have noticed it,” Adrian said truthfully. He had rarely seen a lady of any age move with the grace Miss Jones showed in every step. She walked like water flowing, frictionless, and though he suspected it was meant to be part of her disguise, part of what made her unnoticed, he found it entirely fascinating.

“There.” Miss Pettibone gave a deeply contented nod over her knitting, the needles never once slowing. “I told Lady Elise how it was. He notices everything, I said. It is quite the most promising thing I ever saw. And she said, ‘That is what I am afraid of, Pettibone,’ which I did not perfectly catch, but I am sure was very right, for dear Lady Elise is always right.”

Out of the harvest of nonsense, Adrian kept two things: that something in Ophelia’s past had been very trying indeed, and that his aunt had said, That is what I am afraid of.

This was not, he thought, the remark of a woman guarding a poor relation from a rake, for his aunt knew perfectly well he would never treat her goddaughter badly. It sounded far more like the remark of a woman who feared what Adrian might uncover merely by paying attention.

Lady Elise had never been particularly fond of cards, but it was apparent that her small household required diversion beyond Miss Pettibone’s catastrophically muddled readings after dinner, and thus, one particularly cold evening, she suggested a game of whist. Adrian was given Miss Pettibone as his partner. Lady Elise, there being no help for it in the arithmetic of her drawing room, took Miss Jones.

Miss Pettibone played enthusiastically, following no system anyone could discern. She revoked twice, serene as a cardinal, and trumped Adrian’s winning king because the knave had, she said, a sly face and wanted taking down.

Adrian watched his hand collapse into ruin in some amusement. His real attention was at his left elbow, where Miss Jones was being dull at cards.

She played a shade too slowly. Twice she hesitated over an obvious discard, and once she asked what were trumps. To anyone else, it was mild incompetence. To a man who was already certain she was playing a part, it was theatre.

Her eyes were too still and her mistakes too carefully placed. She was not failing to play; she was playing down, and the effort cost her something every trick.

He was more fascinated than ever.

Aunt Elise, perhaps recognising too late that the close proximity of the card table was a mistake, declared them done after Miss Pettibone destroyed yet another winning hand of Adrian’s, and called for tea. Miss Jones retreated, plainly relieved, to her usual chair in a shadowed corner near the fire.

Then came the music, and the music finished him.

Miss Pettibone insisted upon it. Dear Miss Jones must play. The instrument was never opened, and Christmas was coming. There could be no denying her.

Miss Jones offered just the right measure of modest reluctance before sitting at his aunt’s pianoforte. She gave them the dullest performance Adrian had ever been privileged to attend: a very quietly sung hymn taken at the pace of a funeral barge, an occasional wrong note on the instrument marring the song, though he noted her voice did not match the error.

Aunt Elise nodded along. Miss Pettibone, who surely could not hear a note, kept gracious time with her knitting needle, twice as fast and in another measure altogether.

In the third verse, for perhaps four bars, Miss Jones forgot herself.

A phrase came through clean and shapely, the inner notes given their weight, a natural authority in the hands, her voice rising clear as a bell. Then her guard returned. The funeral pace resumed, the volume of her voice dipped even lower than it had been previously, and the next wrong note arrived.

Adrian kept his eyes on the fire until the hymn had laboured to its conclusion.

“Most instructive, Miss Jones. I have never heard that piece taken with such restraint.”

He won for his pains the briefest flick of a glance. Something that was not dullness looked out at him, took his measure to the inch, and slammed the door again.

He toasted it privately with his aunt’s dreadful apple brandy, harsh enough to sting his throat.

I saw you, he did not say. Only for four bars, but I saw you.

He would have liked to hear her perform that piece as well as she was truly capable of doing. He suspected he might have enjoyed it as much as he had ever enjoyed anything in his life.