Their first week at Ashbourn House was an exercise in boxing up frustrating emotions and stowing them away.
At every turn, Lucy complained and resisted; the duke insisted. Over and over, Bess counseled Lucy in patience, reminding her that the duke was finally behaving as he ought toward her. Reminding her that this was Lucy’s chance to enter the Society she’d been born to.
Lucy did try, bless her. As the days went on, she seemed to give up on her frustrations, submitting to her lessons and fittings with a dull resignation that Bess disliked. She understood it, though. The process of readying a young lady for her debut was an inordinately boring one.
Trying to set an example, Bess did her best to hide her own feelings of boredom. They fit nicely in a box beside the inconvenient attraction she could not believe she still felt toward the duke.
There must be something wrong with her, Bess feared. Why did she find Ashbourn so infernally fascinating?
She would never forget that first day they’d arrived at Ashbourn House, bedraggled and exhausted and hardly able to comprehend what was happening because it had all happened so quickly.
Ashbourn had introduced them to Mrs. Drummond, a head housekeeper with an impressively stoic manner, and then the dratted man had disappeared off to wherever dukes spent their time, and he didn’t reappear until Mr. Goring, the elderly butler, announced dinner.
Lucy had been in a towering rage over the change in their circumstances, steaming like a kettle about to whistle as the footmen brought out course after course. Though normally she would have been extremely interested in the food, which was fancier and richer and Frencher than anything Bess had ever seen, she couldn’t enjoy it while trying to keep the peace between the two half-siblings.
She hadn’t done a very good job. Instead, she’d managed to stir up some obviously very painful memories for the duke.
Not that he had admitted to having any feelings at all, but Bess’s heart felt tender and sore in her chest even now, merely imagining the young boy, his entire world upended by the loss of his mother and his father’s hasty marriage.
She wondered what Henrietta remembered of that time. It was hard to imagine the woman Bess knew sending a small boy away from the only home he’d ever known, to be surrounded by a lot of monstrous little bullies who’d no doubt thought they’d found a perfect victim in a much younger child with a scandal already attached to his name.
Somehow, Bess doubted that he’d made it easy for them. But at what cost?
But whatever goodwill he’d inadvertently elicited with his revelations about his childhood, he’d immediately lit on fire when he managed to bring it all back around to being Henrietta’s fault for not being nobly born.
Bess couldn’t fathom how a man so self-assured, so arrogant, could care what anyone else thought of him or his family.
You don’t want to understand, a silky voice whispered in her head. Because then you’d have to admit to yourself that you wish he could see you as more than the sum of your low rank and nonexistent connections.
That would never happen. Bess needed to acknowledge the tiny seed of this desire now, and prune it back vigorously.
The Duke of Ashbourn could never, ever know who she was and where she came from, Bess reminded herself. He couldn’t think her highborn, since in a panic, she’d claimed to be a distant relation of Henrietta’s—but he seemed to assume she was of decent enough stock to serve as a chaperone to his sister.
If he discovered the truth, Bess would be out on her ear and then where would Lucy be? She’d have to finish the Season with no one but her status-obsessed brother to help her.
Bess couldn’t allow that to happen. She would keep her secret, and all would be well.
After all, Bess and Lucy did not spend much time with Ashbourn, all told—yet his presence loomed over their every waking moment.
And, if Bess was honest, some of her sleeping moments as well.
She’d had one absolute corker of a dream after another, in her luxurious carved mahogany canopy bed draped in the softest linen imaginable.
The duke directed their every activity, each designed to get Lucy ready for her first ball of the season, where she would be judged by the strictest lionesses of the Ton on every aspect of her face, form, style, comportment, grace, elocution, and bearing.
As promised, the duke had engaged a veritable army of instructors to come to Ashbourn House and tutor Lucy in whatever ladylike arts she had missed in her somewhat casual upbringing.
A dancing instructor and a singing instructor, a pianoforte teacher and a gentleman whose only purpose appeared to be taking tea with Lucy and speaking to her in French. There was even a no-nonsense lady’s maid who took the arranging of Lucy’s wavy dark hair as seriously as the surgeon had taken the gunshot wound of Charles Truitt, the young sailor Lucy had begun visiting during his convalescence.
Ashbourn appeared once at the outset of each type of lesson, presumably to impress upon the instructors that they were to treat his half-sister with all due deference, as he had done with Mrs. Lister, the dressmaker.
Beyond that, he made himself scarce. They didn’t encounter him at any further mealtimes—he took breakfast at an ungodly early hour, before even Bess, who was used to rising with the sun and keeping country hours, could manage to pry herself free of her bed.
And then he spent all day doing who knew what ducal things. After that night when he’d talked so briefly, yet heartbreakingly, about his childhood, he seemed to dine out every single evening, thus escaping Lucy’s needling about her mother and her litany of complaints about the day’s lessons. Perhaps one could not blame him, though there were times Bess was tempted to wring his neck, and Lucy’s too, if they would not make at least a token effort toward getting to know each other.
Truly, the duke kept very odd hours, in Bess’s opinion. She’d even heard him come in once at a quarter past four in the morning.
She’d jerked awake, gasping and overheated from one of the dreams that had plagued her ever since that strange not-kiss in the carriage, and she’d been unable to fall back asleep right away.
