CHAPTER18
Seven days later…
It was remarkable, Johnathan thought, how little London had changed.
The streets still clattered with the same carriages. The same vendors shouted at the same corners, peddling chestnuts and lace. The same sooty sky stretched above the same houses with their white-painted shutters and iron fences, as if none of them had noticed the world had shifted.
He had changed.
Frances had changed.
Their carriage rolled past the iron-wrought gates of Hargate House, and the footmen snapped to attention with wide eyes and stunned expressions. No one had expected them. The duke had been gone more than a fortnight. Rumor likely had him dead in a ditch or halfway to the Americas.
Let them think what they pleased.
Johnathan stepped out first, offering Frances his hand as she descended in her traveling gown, her face composed, chin lifted, gaze unflinching.
“Do you think they will remember how to bow?” she murmured to him, lips barely moving.
He smirked. “If not, we will teach them again.”
Inside, the staff scurried like startled hens. Mrs. Tilling, the housekeeper, looked on the verge of fainting until Frances smiled and offered kind words.
“Thank you for receiving us so graciously, Mrs. Tilling. I know we gave you no notice.”
The older woman blinked, straightened her cap, and gave a rather regal curtsy. “Welcome home, Your Grace.”
Johnathan was not sure which of them she addressed. He liked that.
They ascended the stairs to his suite, their steps echoing in the quiet hush of a house reacquainting itself with its master. Or perhaps—for the first time—meeting the man he had become.
Johnathan removed his gloves slowly once inside the sitting room. “I wonder how long it will take for word to spread.”
Frances had already shed her cloak and tossed it across a chair. “I give it until supper.”
He laughed. “You are generous. I give it until tea.”
She turned toward him, her expression softening. “Are you ready?”
He tilted his head. “For the scandal? The sniffs of disapproval? The wide-eyed shock at the reprobate duke returning from Gretna Green with a wife who refused to be bartered?”
“Yes,” she said, “for that.”
Johnathan crossed the room and kissed her forehead. “Let them stew in their propriety.”
By the time they emerged for dinner, the first note had arrived.
An invitation.
Frances opened it slowly at the drawing room hearth. It was from Lady Brunsford, who was notoriously swift at gathering gossip and even swifter at using it to seat herself next to scandal at her table.
“An invitation to her dinner party this Tuesday,” Frances said, holding it between two fingers as though it might bite. “Apparently, she has heard the most thrilling rumors.”
Johnathan leaned back in his armchair, sipping his wine. “She wants to see if you are real.”
Frances tilted her head. “Shall we go?”
“Only if you want to be stared at and whispered about for four straight hours.”
