Page 7 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“Hmm.” Julia tilted her head. “I thought I recognized you. I could not place you at first, but now I am quite certain.” She paused. “Were you not the Diamond of the First Water? Two Seasons ago now, was it?”
“I was, yes,” Emily said it the way she said most things about herself, plainly, without performance in either direction.
“You are a beauty to behold,” Lady Birks said, lifting her brows with genuine pleasure. “I remember hearing about you. Everyone did that Season. You were all anyone talked about for weeks.” She smiled. “I was abroad that spring, or I am certain we would have met sooner. My goodness.” She shook her head lightly, still smiling. “The Diamond herself, in my drawing room.”
“You are very kind, Lady Birks.”
“I am simply accurate.” Julia accepted the tea tray from the maid who appeared at the door, and began to pour. “Milk?”
“Please.”
“Are you enjoying this Season, Lady Emily?”
“So far, yes, I have,” Emily said. “I have been making my calls. I was at the Pembourne's the day before yesterday.”
“Dear Yvette.” Julia's face softened. “How is she? I have not seen her since the Harcastle ball.”
“Very well. Very happy.” Emily accepted her cup. “They suit each other beautifully.”
“They do,” Julia agreed. She was quiet for a moment, stirring her tea with the thoughtful air of someone following a thread. “You know, speaking of Pembourne, I could not help but recall...” She looked up. “Forgive me, I do not wish to pry, but was there not some talk, last Season, of you and the Duke of Pembourne? A courtship, perhaps?”
Emily did not stiffen. She had known, from the moment she had decided to come here, that this would likely come up. Julia Birks was a woman who knew everything about everyone, and she had had an entire Season to know it.
“There was,” Emily said, smiling. “We courted briefly, yes. Last Season.”
Julia waited.
“It ended,” Emily continued, setting her cup down with great composure. “Mutually, and on entirely good terms. We parted as friends, and friends we have remained. Yvette is my friend too. His Grace is one of the finest men I know, and I mean that sincerely. Which is perhaps why we were both honest enough with each other to recognize, rather early on, that what was between us was a very good friendship that had briefly tried to be something else and found it did not quite fit.”
Julia looked at her steadily. “That did not distress you?”
“It would have distressed me far more...” Emily said. “...to continue something that was not right simply because stopping it felt inconvenient. That would not have been fair to either of us.” She lifted her cup again. “I would rather have His Grace as a true friend for the rest of my life than a husband who married me out of obligation and a misguided sense of momentum.”
The drawing room was quiet for a moment. The fire crackled softly in the grate. Julia studied her with great attention.
“My dear,” she said at last. “That is a remarkably clear-headed thing for a young woman to say.”
Emily smiled. “It is simply the truth, Lady Birks.”
“Perhaps.” Julia tilted her head. “But truth of that kind requires a certain steadiness of character to arrive at. Most young women your age would have been devastated. Or furious. Or both.” A small pause. “You were neither?”
“I was disappointed,” Emily said honestly. “For a short while. But I was not surprised, I think, which made it easier to accept.” She looked at Julia directly. “I had enough sense to know that disappointment is not the same thing as heartbreak. I was not heartbroken. I simply had to...recalibrate.”
Julia was quiet for a moment longer. Then she set down her own cup, folded her hands, and looked at Emily curiously.
“Are you looking for a husband this Season, Lady Emily?”
The question arrived so smoothly, so pleasantly, wrapped in the same conversational warmth as everything else, that for a moment Emily almost did not register how precisely it had landed.
She set her cup down.
“I am,” she said. “As it happens.”
Julia smiled. It was a slow, warm, deeply satisfied smile. “How wonderful,” she said. “How very wonderful indeed.”
Emily lifted her teacup again and took a calm sip. To anyone watching, she was simply a young woman enjoying a pleasant morning call. Perhaps that was all this was. Perhaps it would amount to nothing, and she would be back in this carriage by noon, no better off than when she had climbed in.
But as she watched Julia Birks smile into her tea, Emily thought perhaps not. She could tell that her plan had worked. That she had made it into Julia’s list without having to outrightly ask.
