Page 3 of Two Blessings For His Duchess
She swallowed hard and downed the content of her glass before looking back up again. “I do not think I am fine.”
“I know,” Emily whispered.
“I think… I’m scared,” Euphemia said and shook her head. “I… all of this… Lord Finch jilting me at the altar, and the rumors that I am a desperate huntress trying to trap a man to saveus from ruin.. It is going to affect my sisters. They have done nothing wrong.”
Euphemia tried to take in a deep breath but found the air was too heavy. “My sisters only came to London because I asked them to. Seraphina gave up her research, Leonora left behind a perfectly comfortable life in the country, and they did it because I wanted company and I was too selfish to come alone.” She stopped. “Now everything that follows me follows them too. That is what I cannot forgive myself for.”
“Neither of them even wants a husband,” Euphemia continued, her voice dropping to a low, jagged whisper. “They have made that perfectly clear, but I foolishly thought I could change their minds about love.”
“You can!” Emily chimed in. “Euphemia, you are speaking as though you’re running out of time.”
“I am,” she said. “What if Lady Byron comes to London and sees all of this? Hears all the rumors? She will force us back to the country. I would have failed.” She turned her glass slowly in her hand. “Just last week, Seraphina went to Lady Holt’s literary gathering and three women she had been close with suddenly found reasons to be elsewhere in the room. Then Leonora, who could charm the very birds from the trees if she wanted to, confided in me that Mrs. Cavendish’s daughter has stopped calling altogether.”
She paused. “Their lives are changing because of me, and the worst of it is that they will never say a word. They are too loyaland far too proud to admit they are being iced out, preferring to pretend nothing is wrong rather than let me see the damage I’ve caused.”
The music played on. Someone laughed too loudly near the fireplace and the sound landed wrong, too bright against what Euphemia had just said.
“The rumors are the cruelest part,” she said. “That I was desperate. That I knew about my father’s debts and concealed them to trap a wealthy man, because what other explanation could there be for a woman of my circumstances pursuing a husband? What happened to my father was awful, but I never lied to anyone. I never deceived anyone. If anything I am the deceived. Everything is all a lie. Lord Finch was a lie. London is a lie. Love is a lie. Redemption is a lie. It’s all a lie. Everything!”
“Effie!” Emily’s voice was quiet but firm, cutting through the frantic spiral of Euphemia’s words. She reached out, grabbing Euphemia by the shoulders and giving her a firm, grounding squeeze. “Calm yourself. Breathe.”
Her touch broke through the hot, embarrassing momentum of what had just come out of Euphemia’s mouth in the middle of a ball, in a room full of people, where she had spent the entire evening performing composure.
Euphemia blinked, her chest heaving as she sucked in a lungful of the cool air. She hadn’t realized she was shaking. She hadn’t realized her voice had risen to a pitch that could easily carrythrough the room and straight into the ears of the very vultures she was trying to avoid.
“Forgive me,” she said, very quietly.
“There is nothing to forgive.” Emily shook her head. “You’re frustrated and you have every right to be.”
“I am fine,” she said, which was so obviously untrue that Emily did not even dignify it with a response.
She was not fine. She had not been fine for some time, and the effort of pretending otherwise had accumulated in ways she had not fully accounted for until this moment.
She thought about where she had come from. Not London... not the borrowed rooms near her uncle’s house, but before all of that. She thought back to the quiet, sun-drenched halls of their country estate where she had grown up under Lady Byron’s firm but fair hand. It was the only house she had ever truly thought of as home, with its crooked garden gate, its library that smelled of old paper and its particular quality of quiet that London did not have and never would.
She thought about growing up there with Seraphina and Leonora. They weren’t sisters by blood, but by a shared circumstance that had forged a bond stronger than any family tree. They had been happy in their own little district, a trio of companions who needed nothing from the world but each other’s company and a good library.
Lady Byron had taken them in when they were children and given them a life that was small by London’s standards but complete by every other measure, and it had been enough.
It had been more than enough.
It had been Euphemia’s idea to leave it all behind.
She had been the one who had read too many novels and believed too firmly in the idea that there was something waiting for them beyond Lady Byron’s garden gate. She had been the one to convince them that they deserved a debut, that they shouldn’t spend their lives hidden away because of the shadows their fathers had left behind. She had been so sure she could protect them. She thought that if she played the game perfectly, if she found a love match that would secure their status, thetonwould forget the past.
‘I made a mistake’,she thought. ‘A massive, arrogant mistake.’
She had expected the talk about the Byron sisters returning after so many years. She had prepared herself to fend off the questions about how their fathers had passed away and the state of their inheritance.
She had known, walking into it, that people would talk about her family. The late Lord Vane’s daughter, raised by Lady Byron with two other girls, after her father’s spectacular financial collapse and death, coming to London after years in the country. She had known that would be the story, had prepared herself for it, had told herself it was manageable.
A curiosity, nothing more. People would remark upon it and move on to the next thing.
But she hadn’t prepared for Lord Finch.
No… Nothing had prepared her for Lord Finch. She hadn’t prepared for a man to look her in the eye, speak of devotion, and then systematically dismantle her reputation by leaving her at the altar.
Now, every room they entered felt like a battlefield they were losing.
