“What if she hates me, Mother?” He asked when Lucien had left the room.
“She will not. One cannot hate a good man like yourself. It is not something that happens.”
“Lady Ophelia certainly does.”
“I do not think that she hates you. I simply think that she… well, she has always had a dream to fulfill, and when you no longer fit into that you had to go. I shall never forgive her for what she did, but you cannot deny that it is a good thing that that it happened when it did, rather than years into your marriage.”
Philip agreed with her, but it did not make him feel any more confident about meeting Lady Jacqueline. What if history repeated itself, after all?
“If Lady Jacqueline hated you,” his mother continued. “She would not be coming here to enter into a courtship with you, would she? We ladies may be told to follow our father’s instruction, but if we are pushed to do something we truly do not wish to do, then we have ways of escaping.”
Philip sighed, seating himself on a sofa. There had to be some truth in his mother’s words, and so he tried to believe in them.
After all, Lady Jacqueline knew precisely why she was coming.
Chapter 3
Jackie had never lived in a large manor house, not even when they were wealthy.
Her family’s estate was sizable, certainly, and the gardens were vast, but it all seemed miniscule in comparison to that of the duke. She had always loved ivy, and the way it scrawled across the walls and nestled into its cracks caught her attention in an instant.
Not only that, but everything was pristine, straight out of a fairytale book. It was vast, almost intimidating, and Jackie could see that her father was equally as affected by it as she was, perhaps even more.
“It is magnificent,” Elizabeth breathed. “Oh, Jackie, could you imagine living in such a place?”
“We are going to be doing so for a while,” Jackie reminded her. “So I do hope that you become accustomed to it soon.”
“Believe me, I shall find a way to.”
Before they could say another word, an older lady stepped outside. She was small and thin, but she appeared to bedeceptively young. Had it not been for the way she ambled over, Jackie could have been quite easily fooled.
“Welcome, all of you,” she greeted warmly. “I am Lady Anne Churchill, the Dowager Duchess of Creighton. It is so lovely to meet you at last.”
“The pleasure is ours,” Jackie’s father replied. “My daughters have spoken of nothing but this trip for weeks now. Frankly, I am pleased to have at last brought them here so that they might find another topic of conversation.”
The dowager duchess laughed brightly, and Jackie and Elizabeth followed suit, but Jackie couldn’t help but feel confusion. After all, she had been told with a mere day’s notice, not weeks like her father had said.
She looked over at Elizabeth, who did not seem to have caught onto it. Regardless, it was not the moment to ask about it and so she continued to smile and nod and agree to the tour of the household that Lady Creighton had offered.
The opportunity to ask her father what he had meant would require an even longer wait, for he was whisked away by the butler to see his room, leaving Jackie and Elizabeth with the duke’s mother, who was only too pleased to show the girls to their bedchambers.
They were separate, on opposite ends of the hallway. Elizabeth was shown hers first, and Jackie felt strange walking so far from her; they were never too far from one another unless Elizabeth was attending a ball.
“I hope it is to your liking,” the dowager duchess said gently, opening her door. “It has been decorated quite recently. My son said it was his favorite, and so I thought it best that you are the first lady to stay in it.”
“That is most thoughtful of you,” Jackie replied, marveling at the pale blue walls and light green curtains. “Though there is no need to favor myself over my sister. I assure you, I do not require such a thing.”
“Oh, no, it is not that we thought you required it,” she laughed. “No, I simply—well, I never truly thought that my son would marry, not after what happened to him. I am so grateful to you for agreeing to the match, and you have it on my honor that if you only give him some time, then you will see that he truly is a good man.”
Jackie blinked, alarmed but still aware that it was not the time nor place to disagree with the lady; she seemed so hopeful that it would have been unfair to dash said hopes. Instead, she waited until the dowager duchess left her to her own devices, at which point she sat on her bed and looked at the painting on the wall, thinking.
This was the same duke that had been unkind to her all those years before, and now he apparently was hoping to marry her? In the years since their altercation, they had not spoken, not even seen one another. Quite simply, it did not make any sense, but the one thing Jackie continued to think about was how her father had known, for weeks as far as she could tell, and he had not said a word about it.
“Oh, wow!” Elizabeth gasped, entering Jackie’s room. “This room is far larger than mine, no wonder it is so far away! Fear not, Sister, for I do not mind at all. It certainly makes a change from our rooms at home, at least, because your room there is so small and—”
“I am to marry the duke.”
Suddenly, everything made sense. Elizabeth’s face changed in the exact same way that it had done every time that Jackie had asked her if she was hiding something from her. She turned scarlet, and Jackie knew at once what had happened.
