The Duchess War Page 7

When Minnie arrived home, her great-aunts met her at the door, all aflutter. The reason for their excitement quickly became apparent when they told her that Walter Gardley was waiting in the front room. Alone.

  Gardley. At this, of all times!

  Minnie set her hand over her abdomen. It felt as if a fire raged inside her, as if she’d gorged herself on all the things the duke had said.

  You’re an intelligent, brilliant woman.

  Look up.

  I want you. God, I want you.

  She couldn’t go to Gardley feeling this way. But she had little enough choice in the matter. If she sent him away, he’d only return. And if he didn’t…

  She smoothed her skirt and went in to see him.

  He stood as she entered the room. “There you are,” he said—precisely as if he had mislaid her, and only now discovered her amidst the dust balls under the divan.

  She tried to tell herself that he wasn’t so bad. He was handsome enough, as these things went. He was only a few years older than she, and didn’t look as if he would lose his hair.

  You’re the one that’s pretending, she could hear the duke whisper behind her back.

  “Mr. Gardley,” she made herself say, with all the warmth she could muster. “How can I help you?”

  He fixed her with a nonchalant look. “Well, Minnie,” he said. “My mother’s pushing me to settle things. I’ve done what’s pretty. I’ll call the banns this Sunday for a December wedding.”

  He was so sure of her that he didn’t even wait for a response. He adjusted his coat and sat down again, before she could take a seat.

  “Middle of the month, I think, would be best for us.”

  Who would you be if you didn’t devote three-quarters of your attention to hiding what you could accomplish?

  It was stupid to compare the ever-possible Walter Gardley to the unattainable Duke of Clermont. Still, Minnie couldn’t help doing it. Gardley paled in every way. There was that hint of a paunch just above his belt, the lazy way he’d thrown himself back in his chair without waiting for Minnie to sit down first. There was what he’d said about her. He thought her a quiet little mouse who would stay where she was put. Who wouldn’t complain about his mistresses.

  And then there were the things he didn’t do.

  He didn’t make her belly flutter. He didn’t make her catch her breath. He’d never even pretended to flirt with her.

  That’s not just a sense of tactics. That sounds like actual tactical training.

  It was her entire future at stake. She couldn’t afford to be irrational. Every woman in her position would have to put up with imperfections in a mate. A bit of a paunch, a few women on the side—these were not things to trouble herself over. He wanted her because he believed she would be pathetically grateful. And he wasn’t wrong. She was grateful. She was pathetic. Wasn’t she?

  “No,” Minnie heard herself say.

  Gardley shrugged. “After Christmas, then—I assume you want to spend the holidays with your great-aunts? I suppose I can allow that much.”

  She had spoken aloud in answer to her own question—No, she wasn’t pathetic. But speaking those words aloud brought clarity to the endeavor. He wanted her because he believed she was pathetic. And if she married him, she would be.

  “You’ll allow me to choose the date of my own wedding?” she muttered. “How permissive of you.”

  His head came up at that. “Permissive? Don’t think that because I grant you this that I will be an easy husband. I won’t, not in the least. If you try any tricks once we’re married, Minnie, I’ll toss you out. And we both know you have nowhere to go.”

  She couldn’t breathe.

  God, she couldn’t breathe.

  Nothing he said came as a surprise. But she’d imagined that marriage—even to a man who made her skin crawl—would bring safety and security. In her own mind, marriage lasted forever. It had never occurred to her that someone else would see it differently.

  If she married him, she would only become more desperate, not less. If the truth about her ever came out, he would turn her out, and never mind the marriage.

  Minnie smoothed her hands on her skirt. “Mr. Gardley, that was a no to your entire proposal, not just to the wedding date. Thank you, but no.”

  He frowned and rubbed his forehead. “Why would you say no?”

  After that little speech of his? “You think I am quiet, meek, and biddable.” Even now, her voice was low, scarcely enough to fill on corner of the room. He moved; his seat creaked loudly. She could feel herself drowning in the noise of him.

  He let out a forced little laugh. “Your womanly character, Miss Pursling, is your highest recommendation.” He leaned in. “Never think yourself weak because you are bendable.”

  “Mr. Gardley, you are not listening to me.”

  “The woman bends like a reed in the storm,” he continued, talking over her. “The man breaks like an oak.” He frowned. “Or is it supposed to be a beech tree? Yes, that’s it. In a strong wind, a man breaks like a beech.” He reached for her hand. “I chose you because you would understand my requirements, and because I believe you have the ability to execute them.”

  Look up? No, the Duke of Clermont had it all wrong. She needed to look down. She’d allowed herself to believe that this man offered her some measure of safety. She suffered from too much optimism, not too little. Gardley had made it perfectly clear that he felt no loyalty to her. Where was the safety in that?

  “That’s ridiculous,” Minnie said. “Women break like beeches, too. Why on earth do you imagine that I am so flexible, when I am refusing to marry you?”

  “You’re…you’re refusing?” He frowned. “You can’t refuse. That was the whole point—” He coughed, grimacing.

  “That was the whole point of telling your mother that you were courting me?” Minnie finished for him. “That you’d pick someone she approved of, someone so desperate she could not say no, even if you never bothered to exert yourself to win me over?”

  He was silent. He wasn’t even man enough to look her in the eye and admit it. Finally, he shrugged sullenly. “What do you want? Should I take you driving a few times?”

  Stevens still suspected her. The threat of exposure was as great as ever. But if she married Gardley, she’d never be safe. That realization terrified her more than ever. For so long, marriage had seemed a talisman. But it wasn’t enough. She wasn’t sure what was enough any longer.

  She reached out and turned Walter Gardley’s face to hers. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes, and since his gaze kept shying away from her scar, it left him staring at the corner of her right cheek.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I will not marry you.”

  He looked utterly flummoxed. “But…but…what will you do?” he asked.

  “BUT WHAT WILL YOU DO?” Aunt Eliza asked, not quite thirty minutes later.

  Minnie sat in the front parlor, her great-aunts seated on the sofa across from her. Eliza’s needles clacked as she carefully darned a stocking. Caro simply watched her with folded arms.

  Always know the path ahead. That had been one of her father’s rules. Why she would cling to those now, after everything he’d done to her, she didn’t know. Maybe because forgetting them would make her childhood not just a result of lies, but false through and through. Still, Minnie shook her head.

  “We want you to be happy,” Caro said. “And I would never tell you to have no ambition. But the trick is to want only an appropriate amount. If I yearned to be Queen of England, you see, I’d never be satisfied.”

  “I don’t want to be Queen of England.” Minnie folded her arms around herself.

  “No, no.” Caro smiled sadly at her. “All I’m saying is, you should want just enough to make you stretch your arms a little bit. More than that, and you’ll do yourself an injury.”

  Minnie stood. “I didn’t refuse Gardley because I wanted too much. It wasn’t that I thought I could do better. It was simply that I couldn’t do worse.�
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  Caro tried to suppress a sigh, but she didn’t quite manage it.

  “Think of this logically,” Minnie said. “Because I should have before. If I marry someone who wants a quiet, dutiful wife, he will put me away if he discovers my past.”

  Eliza’s needles came to a standstill.

  It was dangerous talk, that, and they all knew it.

  Look up. But she wouldn’t. If she were looking up, she’d think of a man standing next to her, the sun glinting off his blond hair while he told her how clever she was.

  “You are quiet, Minnie,” Eliza finally said. “I wouldn’t want you to go against your nature.”

  Quiet, yes. Her voice wasn’t made to carry. She didn’t like to draw attention to herself. She could never be happy anywhere but at the edges of a gathering. Dutiful, however…

  She could almost see Clermont from the corners of her vision, as if he were still standing next to her. He had brilliant blue eyes and a smile that curled up at the corners when he saw her. She thought of his hand, wrapping around her wrist before she could punch the davenport again. Of the rich timbre of his voice as he stood next to her and said…

  I want you.

  She shook her head. Reach that high, and she’d be burned for certain. All she wanted was a little security.

  “Men look for many kinds of wives,” Eliza finally said. “Pretty, vivacious wives. Wealthy, indulgent ones. Highborn, prideful ladies.” She bit her lip. “I don’t want you hurt, Minnie. But it is my duty to make you face the truth. Nobody is looking for a shy, clever girl whose father died halfway through his sentence of hard labor.”

  Minnie put her fingers against the bridge of her nose, pressing to try and drive the pain away. It didn’t help. The boundaries of her life pressed in on her like prison walls. Look up? With rough rocks under her feet, to look up was to stumble.

  “List the things you are,” Eliza said, “and ask yourself what man would want them.”

  I want you. But Clermont didn’t know her, either.

  “Your choices are yours,” Eliza intoned. “We won’t steal them from you.”

  No. They never stole her choices. They only pointed out—kindly, sweetly, implacably—that she had few to begin with. Minnie’s hands shook. The only thing they had done wrong was to allow her to believe that she had one choice, instead of zero.

  Minnie didn’t see any way forward. She couldn’t see a future at all. She felt chokingly blind.

  There was really only one thing she could do, and that was to keep on going in the direction she’d started. To avoid ruin for another week, to pray for shelter where there had been none thus far. And that meant she needed to find proof of what Clermont had done. She had to take care of the next step, and hope for the future.

  And that meant… “I’m going to London tomorrow,” she announced.

  Their eyes widened, blinking. Eliza sat up straight. “But—”

  “Have you—”

  “Is this about a position?” Her great-aunts spoke atop one another. Their hands had met on the sofa between them.

  “Be careful,” Caro said. “I’ve read of those schemes in the newspaper—faithless madams who advertise good jobs at excellent wages, only to—”

  “I am not taking a position,” Minnie said. “You’re right. I can’t look up. I can’t dream. I don’t dare to. All I can do is take the next step forward.”

  Caro frowned. “And the next step forward is…London?”

  “The next step forward,” she said, “is to win the game I’m playing. And that means I must talk to some paper sellers. I’ll be back in three days.”

  Her great-aunts exchanged glances—wary glances, ones that tugged at her chest. But she couldn’t explain and she couldn’t back down. And while it was not quite the done thing for a young woman of her age to travel alone on the train, she wasn’t a debutante who would have to account for every waking hour of her day.

  “Well,” Caro said finally. “If that’s what you believe you must do. You…you have the means?”

  “I do.”

  She had her egg money. Even that was a misnomer. When she’d reached her majority, her great-aunts had given her responsibility for the chickens—and allotted her all the income from them. A gift, that, since they could have kept it all. But it hadn’t just been a gift of money they’d given her, but a present of independence. It was one they could ill afford.

  They let Minnie go back to her room to get her things ready. But instead of packing, she found herself drawn to the chess set that had been left to molder in the trunk in her room. Twelve years since she’d last looked at it, and still she approached it with a grim wariness. She knelt before the wooden trunk, folded back the cloth that covered it, and undid the buckles. The metal resisted moving; she had to jam her palm against it and shove.

  The chess set was at the bottom, hidden under old clothing and a smattering of brittle newspaper clippings. There. The pieces were ebony and ivory, both oddly familiar and curiously strange. Her first memories were of this board—lifting pieces that had seemed large and heavy. Now, she could curl her hands around the pawns and hide them entirely.

  She took out the board and removed the pieces from their velvet bag. She set them atop her writing desk. Even after all these years, she didn’t have to think about what went where. Queen, king, and a host of pawns all fell into place. If she were a piece in a chess game, she’d be… No, she wouldn’t even be a pawn. She had become too small even for that.

  Setting up the pieces had once given her spirits a lift. The beginning of every game was awash in possibility. Anything could happen. Every choice was open. Today, she felt nothing at all. She stared at the pieces and realized that she wasn’t at the beginning of this game, but near the end. Now there were entire swathes of the board that were unreachable, pieces that had been stolen away, moves she could never make.

  There was almost nothing left on her board. Still, she drew out her spectacles, donned them, and studied it.

  “There is a point in almost every game,” her father had once said, “when a win is inevitable. When your every move forces your opponent to react, and by reacting, to dig his own grave.”

  How strange. She could no longer recall what he looked like, but she could see the board precisely as it had been laid out at that moment. She brushed pieces off her board, leaving only the ones that had been there at the time. Her bishop and knight, holding down his rook; her queen arrayed against two pawns that served as his only fragile protection against her offense.

  “Have we reached that point yet?” he asked her. “Plan it out. Always know the path ahead.”

  She’d stared at the board, squinting—and then she’d seen it for the first time. She could force those protecting pawns away. They’d be picked off by knight and queen until her rook swept in and hammered the king against the anvil of her bishop.

  “Yes,” she’d said in wonder. “We’re there.”

  “Then on the next move, when you pick up your piece—give it a kiss. Like that, love.”

  She reached for her bishop. In her memory, the piece was large, her hands chubby. She couldn’t have been much older than six at the time.

  “Why?” she’d asked.

  “Lane family tradition.” Her father smiled. “When you’ve backed the other fellow into a corner, you give him a kiss to show there’s no hard feelings.”

  After that, whenever they’d played—when one of them came close to a checkmate—he’d laughed and said there was a kiss just around the corner. She wanted to remember her father like that—warm and smiling, instructing her in everything he knew. Laughing, saying that she was the center of his existence. She had to remember her father like that, because the alternative was to think of him as he’d been at the end.

  Look up? Her father hadn’t just told her to look up. He’d taught her to fly. And then, when she’d reached the top of the world, he’d ripped her from the sky.