Page 25 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“Those who noticed her called her pretty,” he murmured, reading the line aloud in the empty room. “Those who failed to notice her called her unremarkable.”

He read on.

Her pianoforte was indifferent. Her watercolours were rather better than average. Her French was fluent enough to get on. She rode well. There was no scandal of her own anywhere in the pages, and no debt in her own name, which in that household stood as a small monument to someone’s care.

The someone was not her brother.

Theodore rose and carried the report to the window. The day outside had given him nothing he could use, only a pale morning and the ordinary movement of London conducting itself as though human beings were not being sorted, priced, and rearranged behind glass.

“A man attaches himself to a girl,” he said quietly, letting the sentence find its shape in the room. “He abandons her the week her fortune fails, vanishes for a season, and reappears when his own debts have caught him up.”

He folded the report once along its original crease.

“That is not devotion delayed. It is appetite returning to a plate it remembers.”

Whether Vance intended to use her for himself or for someone willing to pay, the report could not say. The timing alone told Theodore enough. The girl upstairs in the failing house on the southern street was waiting, with all the stubborn faith of twenty, for a man who had already shown precisely what he was and would show it again the moment usefulness required him to do so.

He weighed whether the existence of the lieutenant was reason to draw back from the matrimony.

It was not.

Whatever Vance intended by his September notes, the attachment had ended in every way that signified. Miss Middleton would learn the man. She would be wiser for the learning, and wisdom cost less with a roof, a name, and a settlement standing between a woman and the weather. A half-pay lieutenant with a gambling habit could have laid none of those at her feet.

Theodore returned to the desk and took up his quill.

Then he paused.

“Tell her?” he asked the empty room.

The empty room gave him the only answer worth considering.

She would never believe him. A girl of twenty would not take the word of the stranger who had bought her over the word of the man who had kissed her hand. The disbelief, once given air, would settle into resentment, and resentment could poison a house more efficiently than scandal.

The information would keep. Most information kept. It was one of the few mercies of the work.

***

The Tuesday came grey and clear, the way the day of his decision had come.

Theodore dressed without speaking and breakfasted alone with the newspaper held open before him. He read three columns twice without taking in a word, noticed the failure, and declined to examine it. The carriage was at the door at the proper hour. He did not rehearse the morning in advance. To dwell perpetually upon an unalterable fate is but to practice a cowardice that serves no purpose.

Lady Augusta was already inside the church when he arrived, installed in the front pew on the bride’s empty side as though she meant to chaperone the ceremony itself. She rose and came to meet him at the head of the aisle, her gloved hands clasped and her chin held at the angle he had known since boyhood.

“Theodore.”

“Aunt.”

“I have not met her.”

“You will meet her in a quarter of an hour.”

“I am told she is twenty.”

“So I have been told.”

Lady Augusta’s eyes went down the church and came back to him. “Do not be glib with me in a church. It gives the Almighty too much assistance in judging you.”

“I would not presume to deprive Him of the pleasure.”