Page 15 of Duke of Moonstone
“I am sure he has. He is furious about Lady Eleanor and about the ball, and he has come here to express his displeasure in person, and I am going to have to sit there and listen to it, even though I would very much prefer not to.”
Lady Montfort looked at her with the expression of someone exercising significant patience. “Frances. The Duke of Whitestone did not dress himself and come to Evermere at half past ten in the morning to scold you. Men of his position send letters when they wish to scold people.” She paused. “Now stand up.”
Frances stood. Not because she agreed but because her legs apparently decided to before the rest of her had caught up and because something in her chest was doing something uncomfortable that she was not going to examine while her aunt was watching her.
She was absolutely certain he had come to scold her. She was so certain of it that she spent the entire walk to the drawing room constructing her response—composed, unashamed—because she had helped her friend, and she would do it again, and she was not going to apologize for it, no matter how many papers had printed his name alongside hers this morning.
The Duke of Whitestone was standing when they entered, which was not surprising, and he looked exactly as he always did, which was to say entirely composed and faintly forbidding.Frances met his eyes across the room and felt the now-familiar sensation of walking into something solid.
They exchanged greetings. He bowed to Lavinia, inclined his head to Lady Montfort, and looked at Frances with an expression she could not read at all which was his default expression and therefore not especially informative.
Lady Montfort sat down and arranged herself with the air of someone settling in for an excellent theatrical performance. Lavinia sat beside her. Frances remained standing for a moment longer than was perhaps strictly necessary and then sat in the chair across from him because the only alternative was to keep standing, and that seemed worse.
“I wonder,” the Duke, his voice was as even as it always was, addressed to the room in general but somehow directed entirely at Frances, “whether Lady Frances might spare me a few minutes. There is a matter I should like to discuss with her in private.”
“Of course,” Lady Montfort said immediately.
“Certainly,” agreed Lavinia, half a second later.
Frances looked at him.Here it comes,she thought.The lecture. The cold, thorough, perfectly worded lecture, and I am going to sit through it with my back straight and my face composed, and I am not going to apologize for a single thing.
Her aunt and sister withdrew with varying degrees of eagerness, and then the door closed, leaving them alone.
The Duke did not sit. He stood near the window with his hands clasped behind his back and looked at her for a moment in that way he had, measuring, unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world.
Frances looked back, kept her spine very straight, and waited for the lecture to begin.
“The gossip,” he said, “will not disappear.”
Frances blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“The stories in this morning’s papers. The scene in the gardens last night.” He said it with the brisk clarity of someone laying out a set of facts. “Society has drawn its conclusions. In my experience, once society has drawn a conclusion of this nature, no amount of explanation or denial is sufficient to revise it. The story exists now. It will continue to exist regardless of what either of us says about it.”
Frances looked at him carefully. This was not, she had to admit, the opening she had expected. “I am aware of that,” she said.
“Then you will also be aware,” he continued, “that if your reputation and your future are to be protected, there is only one sensible course of action remaining.”
Frances frowned slightly. She turned the sentence over, looking for the part where he told her what she ought to have done differently or what consequences she had brought upon herself, and she could not find it. “I am not certain I follow, Your Grace.”
He looked at her with an expression that suggested he found her failure to follow him mildly surprising. “I am proposing that we marry.”
The word landed in the room as if it had been dropped from a height.
Frances stared at him.
Marry. She heard the word, she was quite certain she had heard it correctly, and she turned it over once and again then she looked at his face which was completely, absolutely composed, and she thought, with a clarity that was almost funny, that he meant it.
He is entirely serious, means every word of it, and is looking at me as though this is simply a matter to be resolved with marriage as the resolution he has selected.
“I can offer you protection,” he continued in the same tone one might use to outline the terms of an estate agreement. “Stability. A name that is more than sufficient to silence whatever society currently believes it has to say on the matter. It is, as I said, the only sensible solution.”
Something moved in Frances’s chest—not quite hurt, not quite anger, something that sat between the two and was warmer than either. She had known, distantly, that this was possible. Lady Montfort had said as much last night, and Lavinia had not contradicted her. She had simply not allowed herself to think it through to its conclusion because thinking it through meant imagining this exact moment, and imagining this exact moment was... She pushed the thought aside and focused on what was directly in front of her.
“Is this,” she said, and she was rather proud of how steady her voice was, “truly how you propose to a lady?”
Something moved across his face, very brief, very small. “I had assumed that honesty was preferable to false poetry.”
“False poetry?”
