Page 61 of A Wallflower for the Disguised Earl

They sat shoulder to shoulder. The silence in the bedroom was dense, suffocating, and entirely different from the comfortable quiet they usually shared.

“I am stupid,” Corinna said.

Her voice did not shake. There was no anger in it, no fiery indignation or tearful betrayal. It was perfectly, terrifyingly hollow, which was infinitely worse than anger. It was the sound of a structural collapse.

Phoebe turned her head slightly but did not interrupt.

“I am incredibly, willfully stupid,” Corinna continued, her eyes fixed on the empty grate of the fireplace. “Every single sign was there from the very beginning. I pride myself on seeing the board, Aunt Phoebe. I pride myself on anticipating the moves. And yet, I sat down at a table where all the pieces were painted the wrong colors, and I simply accepted it.”

“Corinna—”

“The chess game in the drawing room,” Corinna cut in, her voice gaining momentum as she cataloged her own failures. “He played with a master’s method, but he surrendered the center square simply to avoid drawing attention to his king. He played like a man who had everything to lose, not a man who was merely passing the time on a Tuesday.”

She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around her legs, shrinking into the heavy wool of her coat.

“And the garden,” Corinna whispered, the memory of his broad shoulders blocking out the Whitmore ballroom flashing through her mind. “He caught me before I fell into the pond. A secretary does not hold a woman like that. A secretary does not speak with that kind of absolute, dismissive authority. He looked at the ton as though they were beneath him.”

Phoebe let out a slow, ragged breath. “People see what they expect to see, my dear.”

“But I didn’t,” Corinna insisted, turning to look at her aunt, her gray eyes wide. “That is the terrible truth of it. I saw exactly what he was. I saw the way Lady Margaret looked at Julian, at the man playing Julian, and the way her gaze almost settled on him but never quite did. A mother knows her son. She looked at him the way one looks at a stranger wearing a familiar coat.”

Corinna dropped her forehead against her knees, a bitter, dry laugh escaping her throat.

“Even Thomas tried to warn me,” she murmured into the dark wool. “On the last morning at the estate. He looked right at me and told me exactly what I already knew. He said the companion watched me the way a man watches something he is afraid of losing.”

“Thomas is an observant man,” Phoebe noted softly.

“And I am a fool,” Corinna finished. “I chose not to see it. I saw the contradictions, the impossibilities, the sheer absurdity of his position, and I chose to look away because I did not want it to be true. I wanted him to be the quiet companion. I wanted him to be the man who understood the margins of the room just as well as I did. I chose my own version of blindness, and that is the most foolish thing I have ever done. I have no one to blame but myself. He is not a secretary. He never was. I have known it for weeks and let myself pretend otherwise.”

Phoebe did not contradict her. She did not offer empty platitudes or gentle reassurances that Corinna was blameless. The older woman simply looked at her niece with an expression of miserable guilt.

They sat together in that terrible, shared admission. Phoebe reached out and placed her hand over Corinna’s. The older woman’s grip was tight, offering a silent, fierce solidarity in the face of their mutual ruin. Phoebe said nothing further. She simply stayed.

The morning broke with the slate-gray gloom typical of a London spring, the sky heavy and bruised with impending rain.

Corinna sat at the breakfast table, pushing a piece of dry toast around a porcelain plate. She had finally shed her walking coat, replacing it with a simple day dress of dark lavender, but the cold had seeped into her bones, rendering the blazing fire in the hearth entirely useless.

Phoebe sat opposite her, quietly buttering a scone with mechanical precision. The house was unnervingly quiet.

The dining room doors flew open with the force of a sudden gale.

Vivienne marched into the room. She was not wearing her usual pristine morning gown. Her hair was hastily pinned, her wrapper pulled tight, and her face was a mask of absolute, bloodless fury.

She did not say good morning, nor did she complain about the draft.

She marched directly to the table and slammed a folded piece of cheap, coarse paper onto the white linen tablecloth, right between the toast rack and the marmalade.

“Read it,” Vivienne commanded, her voice shaking with a terrifying, suppressed violence.

Corinna stared at the paper. It was a broadsheet pamphlet, the kind printed overnight for pennies and distributed to every drawing room, club, and coffeehouse in Mayfair before the sun even fully rose.

Corinna reached out with trembling fingers. She picked it up.

The black ink was still slightly fresh, smudging faintly against her thumb. The headline was a cruel, mocking poem about stolen coats and borrowed titles, but it was the prose beneath that stole the breath from Corinna’s lungs.

Every detail was there.

The swap. The elaborate masquerade of the Earl of Ravenswood trading places with his Italian secretary to court the unsuspecting daughters of a country baronet. The pamphlet detailed the entire Season, laying the lie completely bare for the ton’s vicious entertainment. It described the elder Ashwell sister preening for a penniless clerk while the earl hid in plain sight, mocking the institution of marriage and the good faith of his father’s oldest friend.