Page 23 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Ten feet away, as though summoned, Miss Fairchild walked by with two friends. She did not stop. She looked at Rosaline for exactly as long as it took to be certain that Rosaline had seen her looking, and then she leaned in to her companions and said something behind three fingers, and the three of them moved on in a small ripple of laughter.

Rosaline kept her chin exactly where it was.

“One day,” Beatrice said pleasantly, “there will be a reckoning, and I intend to be holding the ledger.”

Samuel returned before Rosaline could answer, and Beatrice’s fan snapped shut.

“Beatrice.” He did not look at their younger sister. “Lady Pemberton is by the pianoforte, and she has a fondness for girls who can be quiet and ornamental. Go and be both. I want you in front of Hartley before the performance.”

Beatrice went, with one backward glance that promised she was going under protest. And then it was only the two of them at the pillar.

Samuel’s pleasant expression did not change at all as he bent his head a fraction toward Rosaline.

“They are still talking about it,” he said, beneath the noise. “Three people have mentioned it to me tonight. Not to be cruel, you understand, but to be kind. That is the worst of it, Rosaline. They pity us now.”

Rosaline said nothing. There was never anything to say.

“Do you understand what you have cost us?” His voice stayed perfectly level, perfectly quiet, pitched to reach her and no one else. “Beatrice is out this Season. She is standing in that garden at this very moment with her name tied to yours. If your name is a joke, she inherits it. That is how it works. A younger sister cannot outrun an elder sister’s reputation. She is dragged behind it, and every door that ought to open for that girl will be shut before she has raised her hand to knock.” A breath. “She is eighteen. She has done nothing to deserve it. The only thing standing between her and a life of small, mean disappointments is you, and thus far you have been a poor wall.”

Across the room, Beatrice was laughing at something Lady Pemberton had said, her chin up, entirely unaware that her future had just been laid across her sister’s shoulders like a yoke.

“You will not embarrass this family again tonight.” Samuel straightened his cuffs. “Nod if you understand me.”

Rosaline nodded.

Samuel smiled at someone across the room and moved off to be seen.

“You will be pleased to know that I have identified three ladies of excellent family and no discernible scandal, any one of whom would improve your standing simply by being seen beside you.” Leo surveyed the hall over the rim of his glass. “The Ashby girl, who is pretty and dull. Lady Margaret, who is dull and rich. And Miss Carrow, who is neither pretty nor rich, but whose father sits on every committee that matters, so I have every hope you will find her fascinating.”

“Mm,” Magnus murmured.

“You are not listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“What did I just say?”

“Somethin’ dull.”

“That is a lucky guess, and we both know it.” Leo turned to face him properly. “Magnus, listen to me. You have precisely one task in this room tonight, and it is to be so relentlessly pleasant that by Thursday, the story going round is not the Scot who lifted Mowbray off the floor, but the Scot who was rather charming at the Pemberton musicale. That is the whole of the assignment. Smile at a dowager. Compliment a soprano. Avoid scandal for the length of a single evening, which I am given to understand is a thing other men manage without effort.”

“Aye.”

“You are scanning the room.”

“I’m takin’ in the company.”

“You are scanning the room like a hawk over a field looking for a mouse, and I have known you long enough to know the difference.” Leo followed his line of sight with growing suspicion. “Magnus, I have only just fixed the Draycott business, at considerable personal cost and some genuinely creative lying. If you are about to do something that requires another intervention, I would take it as a kindness if you told me now, so that I might drink first.”

Just as Leo finished speaking, Magnus found her. She was standing against a pillar near the far wall, half behind it, doing her best to be part of the plasterwork. Chin down, hands folded. Her brother had gone off somewhere to be admired and left her there like luggage, and the room was doing to her precisely what he had watched it do on that lawn a week ago, in slow motion, one glance at a time.

Rosaline had a whole flock of them whispering at her back, and she had not moved an inch. She would stand there all evening and take it, and no one in the hall would ever know what it cost her.

Magnus’s jaw tightened.

Then she looked up. Across the crush, she looked up and found him at once, as though she had felt him come in.

“Ah,” Leo said. “Never mind. I see we are already past the point of drinking first.”