Page 17 of Her Passionate Duke

“Only the Duchess? If I didn’t know any better, I would think that you were trying to impress someone else.”

If Lady Caroline had made this suggestion a week earlier Linnet might have been offended, but by now she had come to accept that she liked the Duke of Grantsham, rather more than liked, actually. She found herself inserting his name into conversations even when it wasn’t necessary and wondering whether other young ladies felt about him the way that she did. There were things about him which she felt she could appreciate better than anyone else did - the way he dressed, so elegant and classically plain, his courtesy and kindness whenever he spoke to her, even when she became so overcome by his presence that talking was difficult, and his passion to fix what was wrong in the world. Especially that last aspect of his character.

“I wish more men were like him,” she said to Lady Caroline. “But at the same time, I like the fact that there’s only one of him. It makes him feel like a wonderful secret that only he and I share.”

“And how does he feel about you?”

Linnet didn’t honestly know the answer to that question.

She had been daydreaming about their being together for so long that she had almost forgotten that it was only a dream. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might not feel the same way – or rather, it had, and the idea was so heartbreakingly terrible that she refused to contemplate it.

“I don’t know… I’m going to feel horribly disillusioned in a day or two when he announces his engagement to some other woman, I suppose.”

“It’s a race to see which of us will get our hearts broken first, then.”

“Have you given up on Monsieur Fournier? Do you expect him to break your heart?”

“No, but he’s been strangely quiet lately. Even when he comes to call on me, he hardly talks to me, and spends much of the time muttering in French about people I’ve never heard of. I know enough French to have a vague idea of what he says, but it makes no sense at all.”

“I’m sure it’s part of his role as an ambassador,” said Linnet. “Does Lord Brandon know that another man has been calling on you?”

Lady Caroline shook her head.

“If he wanted to know what goes on here, he should have been here long ago. He’s been in Italy for more than a year now, and shows no willingness to name a date when he might return to England.”

She threw herself into her needlework with renewed energy, and for a few minutes there was no noise in the room, save her sighs.

***

Monsieur Fournier persisted in almost ignoring Lady Caroline during the fundraising dinner, being seated near her, but barely speaking to her, and then hovering near the back of the room with a couple of men whom Linnet didn’t recognise. The Duke of Grantsham, meanwhile, was so preoccupied with ensuring that everything ran as it should, that he hardly had time to talk to her, although she often looked up to find his eyes upon her. Occasionally she would glimpse him consulting with the housekeeper or the butler in the hall, and she wondered at just how much seemed to be involved in the organisation of the evening.

Not that she would have approached him, even if she could have. The rashes, and sneezing, and irritation that she had been suffering ever since Lord Theodore’s last visit had been growing steadily worse, and had reached a peak overnight, to the point where she could barely hold her head up in public. Even though Emily had cleaned the room three times, and washed and brushed every article of her clothing, there was still fur – it seemed to have infused the house in some way. She spent much of the meal hiding her face behind a handkerchief, trying not to sneeze into her turtle soup, pleading for Lady Caroline’s assistance with watery eyes.

“I don’t think I can give this speech,” she whispered as they waited for dessert. “But how am I supposed to tell the Duchess of Grantsham, knowing that from now on, whenever she looks at me, she’ll be glowering in disappointment?”

“I think all she would have to do is look at you to see that you’re telling the truth,” said Lady Caroline, encouraging as ever. “If you like, I could probably give it for you. I’ve heard it enough times now that I’m sure I could recite it from memory.”

“No, I need to give it,” said Linnet, looking somehow determined and helpless at once.

Slowly she rose from the table when the time came, ignoring the chills, the exhaustion, and the soreness in her bones, and strode to the dais at the front of the room. The best thing that could be said about the speech was that it ended quickly. Linnet gave a rambling prelude in which she explained how she had visited St. Agnes’ Home the week before and met Mrs. Trellick, omitting only the parts where the young man had made his affections known. She told stories of some of the children she had met in the orphanage — Fanny, a girl who had been abandoned at the age of seven or eight, taken by a man who hoped to sell her to a brothel, and had barely escaped his clutches in time. Of Solomon, a boy who had been a pickpocket – trained by a gang to do so, whilst he was small and agile enough to succeed, and only fed if he came back with money. Of George, who had been orphaned and left to care for his little sister, when he was barely ten himself, and had worked as an errand boy, running miles across London every day, no matter the weather. They had all been destined for short lives of drudgery and desperation until they met Mrs. Trellick, and their lives were changed in an instant.

Then, sensing that she was losing the attention of her audience, and remembering the argument she’d had with Lord Charles the week before, she spoke in a firm tone.

“There’s a common misperception that we don’t have to care for the poor because they deserve to be poor. If they weren’t so lazy, we tell ourselves, they wouldn’t be poor. If their parents had taken better care of them, they wouldn’t suffer. Thus, we absolve ourselves of our sacred responsibilities. But none of those excuses hold if you’ve ever looked, even for a second, into the face of a starving child. Thank you.”

She hurried back to her seat, red-faced, conscious of the eyes of the other dinner guests on her, conscious that they were whispering about her and that no one — with the exception of Lady Caroline — was applauding.

“How was it?” she whispered.

“You said what you needed to say,” said Lady Caroline. “And you managed to not sneeze all over everyone, so I’d say it was a triumph.”

Linnet pushed an escaped strand of hair back under a pin, resisting the urge to scratch at her scalp as she did so. The speech had exhausted her and she wanted, badly, to simply lay her head down on the table and go to sleep right there. But she still had another hour, or more, of the event to get through, and she hadn’t even spoken to the Duke yet. And she wanted to – even if he had heard, and hated her speech – she needed to know, needed to see his kind green eyes regarding her directly, so that she could go home and sleep, knowing that she had done her best.

Her symptoms seemed to be getting worse now, as if heightened by her anxiety and the embarrassment of having given the speech. The Duke smiled wanly at her from across the room, so he couldn’t have detested her speech too much, and the Duchess also smiled encouragingly - but the rest of the guests bristled with annoyance and ignored her for the rest of the meal.

Her one consolation, if it could even be called that, was that Lady Caroline seemed to be feeling just as miserable. Although she and Monsieur Fournier were seated close to each other, they had barely spoken that night. Instead he was conferring in whispers with the man next to him, whilst Lady Caroline glared at him under lowered lashes, with an injured look.

“Anyway,” Lady Caroline said to Linnet, “that’s probably the first time in your life that you’ve spoken out in defence of something you cared about, knowing that it was likely to make you unpopular.”