Page 55 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

She came to Ellen’s door before bed, which she did not often do, and stood in the passage with her candle and did not come in.

“Sleep if you can, child,” she said, and her face for once was unarmed. “And if you cannot, do not lie there building a case against yourself in the dark. You will lose it. We always lose, against ourselves, at that hour.”

Then she went off down the passage to her own room, and Ellen stood a moment in her doorway, oddly steadied and oddly seen, and then went in and closed the door and proceeded to do precisely the thing she had been warned against.

She lay awake that night and told herself she had done nothing wrong.

It had been a chance meeting on a public street with her own housekeeper three feet off. She had been civil and nothing more. There was nothing in it to carry to anyone, nothing to confess, and nothing that any wife alive might not have done. She told herself this, and told herself again, and somewhere in the course of its third repetition, she understood that a woman who had truly done nothing did not lie in the dark rehearsing her own innocence, and that the rehearsal was itself the confession, and she turned her face to the wall and did not sleep.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“You will be the Lieutenant Vance the whole town speaks so well of.”

The man had sat down across the table without invitation, and Vance, pleasantly and harmlessly drunk, enjoying the fire and the last of the regiment’s good humor, looked up to find a stranger settling himself with the ease of a man who had never once worried whether he was wanted.

The brother officers had gone up a quarter-hour since, yawning and unsteady, leaving him to the dregs of the bottle and the better dregs of his own good opinion of himself. He had told the tale of the colonel and the grey gelding twice and been laughed at both times, and a man laughed at twice is a man at peace with the world.

He was not, he would have told you, a bad man. He was an unlucky soul, born without competence into a world that insisted upon it, yet gifted with a face and a manner forever on the cusp of winning him a fortune, though they never quite managed the feat. He had always planned to enter into a matrimony of financial convenience. The Middleton girl had been a pleasant rehearsal for the wedding until the Middleton money turned to air, and a man could hardly be blamed for declining to wed air. That the rehearsal had left a sweet-faced creature crying somewhere was a pity, and pities were things that happened to other people, which was the whole of his philosophy and had served him tolerably until the night a stranger sat down across his table.

“I am Vance.” He gathered himself toward dignity. “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

“Greaves.” He let the single word do its work and watched it do it. “You have heard the name, I do believe.”

Vance had heard it, as everyone within twenty miles had, the great cold house across the river, the earl who neither frequented society, nor was sought after by it, and he sat up straighter in spite of the brandy, which was the first small victory the evening handed the older man and by no means the last.

“My lord. I had not looked to find such company at the Black Swan.”

“The Swan keeps a tolerable cellar and asks no questions, which are the only virtues I require of an inn.” Greaves lifted a finger, and the landlord brought brandy unbidden, which told Vance more than the brandy did. “You have had a tedious autumn. The militia always does. A great deal of standing in the wet, waiting on a war that will not come.”

“It has its tedium, I confess.”

“And its expenses.” He said it gently, naming a thing already looked into. “You owe Captain Lorrimer three hundred at hazard, a Jermyn Street tailor near as much, and a man by the Fleet a great deal more than either, at a rate that will completely consume you by Easter. I do not say it to wound you. I say it so we need not pretend, you and I, that this is a conversation between men who can afford their scruples.”

The brandy went cold in his hand. “You are remarkably well informed about a lieutenant of militia.”

“I am well informed about every man I mean to find useful. It is the only flattery worth paying, that one has troubled to learn a fellow to the bottom of him.” Greaves turned his glass by the stem. “I believe you are acquainted with the new Duchess of Rosanne.”

It came then, whatever it was, somewhere sharper than the brandy had reached, and Vance should have been wary and was instead, flattered, because a great man had crossed a river and a public room to ask about a woman of his, and there is no vanity so reliable as a vain man’s.

“More than acquainted, my lord, in her maiden days. Miss Middleton, as she was. A sweet little creature, quite devoted. She wept when the thing ended. They generally do.”

“And what was the issue of the affair?”

“Our acquaintance grew distant. A position was secured, and circumstances altered.” He waved away the bankruptcy he had fled the week it broke, the silent summer, the September notes sent only when his own pockets ran dry. He let Greaves take it for a gentleman’s mutual fading, because it sounded better, and because he had told the flattering version often enough to half believe it. “We parted amicably; at the very least a polite understanding remained between us.”

“You disapprove of her match. I saw it cross your face when I named the duke.” Greaves studied him. “A girl of twenty handed across a desk to clear her brother’s gaming debts, to a man so vastly her senior, with not a warm word in him. That is no matrimony. It is a purchase, and it would be utterly impossible for me to harbor a favourable regard for any man who buys what the rest of us must earn.”

“No more can I.” It was a comfortable fabrication of the truth, and Vance settled into it.

“Then consider. You would not harm the lady. You would remind her, and the world with her, that she was a person before she was a chattel. There are men who would call that a kindness.”

“And you, my lord? What would you call it?”

“A debt of my own. Long owed, longer deferred, and no concern of yours past the figure I mean to name.” Greaves let the fire crack between them. “Would you be willing to renew the acquaintance, Lieutenant, in a manner advantageous to certain parties, yourself not least?”

Vance set down his glass, and the fog cleared a degree, as it always did at the approach of money or danger, which had ever smelled much the same to him.

“What manner.”