Page 9 of Duke of Moonstone
“I... yes.” There was very little to be gained by denying it.
“In my house.”
“Yes.”
“In front of two hundred guests.”
“I am aware of that.”
His jaw tightened. He opened his mouth to say something that Frances suspected was going to be thorough and unpleasant, but before the words could move past his lips, a gasp came.
Followed by, “Good heavens! What do we have here?”
This was the moment when Frances became aware of the light and the chance in the air.
She turned. At the top of the garden steps, spilling out from the open terrace doors, were the shapes of several people, guests who had drifted outside or been drawn by the sound of running.
They were standing in a loose cluster, looking down into the garden, and the light from the ballroom behind them was enough to illuminate the Duke of Whitestone standing in the dark with a young woman in a disordered dress, her mask gone, his hand still raised from where he had pulled it away.
Frances felt the blood leave her face.
Oh no.The full shape of it arrived all at once, not just what had happened but what it looked like.Oh, this is very bad.
The Duke did not look at her. Of course, he would not. He looked past her and up at the steps, his eyes narrowing and jaw hardening. “A misunderstanding,” he said to no one in particular and to everyone. “The lady was taken ill.”
“Oh, she does look it,” someone murmured.
Frances hesitated before moving toward the stairs because there was nothing else to do, and her legs still felt unsteady. She focused intensely on not letting any of her feelings show on her face when she heard her name.
“Frances.”
Frances closed her eyes for half a second, then turned.
The Countess of Montfort, her maternal aunt, was descending the garden steps with composure. She was a tall woman, handsome in the manner of someone who had once been beautiful and had decided that dignity was a more reliable asset in the long run. She moved through the cluster of guests at the top of the steps with the ease of a ship through smaller vessels. The guests parted for her. They generally did.
“Come,” she said when she reached her. She took Frances’ arm and turned her toward the steps without looking at the Duke at all, which was either magnificent composure or a calculated slight, and with Lady Montfort, it was generally both.
Frances went with her because she could not think of a single alternative. She could feel the eyes of the people on the terrace as they climbed the steps, but she kept her chin up, her gaze forward, and thought very firmly about not crying.
At the top of the steps, Lady Montfort paused.
She turned slowly and looked back at the Duke of Whitestone, who had not moved from where he stood in the garden below. “Your Grace,” Lady Montfort said, “I trust you understand what the proper course of action is, following what everyone here has witnessed tonight.”
She did not wait for a response. She steered Frances through the terrace doors and through the edges of the ballroom which was still full, the music still playing, most of the guests still entirely unaware that anything had occurred which somehow made it worse.
The carriage ride from Whitestone House to Evermere Hall, where she lived with her sister, was not long. It felt extremely long. Frances sat rigidly with her hands in her lap and her mask still dangling from one finger where she had not thought to put it down.
She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. It did not help, especially.
“Oh, do not weep,” Lady Montfort said, not unkindly. “Your face will be dreadful in the morning.”
“My reputation will be dreadful in the morning,” Frances replied, which came out rather more broken than she had intended.
Lady Montfort was silent for a moment. Frances wiped her face with the back of her hand and tried to compose herself, and she was halfway through when she noticed that her aunt’s expression was not that of a woman in the grip of social disaster. It was, if she was reading it right, something almost the opposite.
“Aunt,” she said slowly, “why do you look like that?”
“Like what, my dear?”
