Cecily opened the door.
The whispers stopped.
Two faces turned toward her simultaneously, and the contrast between them was so immediate and so complete that she almost laughed.
The elder, Isadora, was sitting very upright in the chair nearest the window, a closed book in her lap that she had clearly been pretending to read, with the expression of someone who had been caught mid-sentence and was deciding how to recover her dignity.
She was sixteen, with William’s dark hair and a stillness about her that suggested she observed more than she disclosed—serious eyes, a composed mouth, the look of someone who had learned very early to think before speaking.
The younger, Letitia, had no such composure. She was fourteen and made no attempt to conceal it. She had been sitting on the edge of the sofa in a way that suggested she had a philosophical objection to sitting still, and she was now looking at Cecily with such a bright, unguarded, wholly undisguised curiosity that Cecily found it entirely endearing.
“Hello,” Cecily greeted.
A beat.
“Hello,” Isadora returned, with careful politeness.
“You’re smaller than I thought,” Letitia said.
“Letitia–” Isadora chided.
“That isn’t an insult. I only meant–”
“I know what you meant,” Cecily said. She moved into the room and sat on the sofa opposite them, not in the formal upright manner of a new duchess conducting an introduction, but simply sat with easy naturalness. “I thought the same thing about the house. I had built it up in my head, and then the carriage rolled through the gates, and I thought,Oh, it’s a house.”
Letitia stared at her. Then she laughed—a genuine, surprised laugh. “William would be furious if he heard you say that.”
“Probably,” Cecily agreed. “But I said it to you and not to him, so we are all safe.”
Something shifted in Isadora’s expression.
“I am Isadora,” she offered. “William has not told us very much, only that you were—that there had been a misunderstanding in Brighton, and that he had done the honorable thing.” Shesaid it carefully, precisely, the way she had clearly been trained to speak about complicated things. “He said you were a good person.”
Cecily felt something move in her chest that she hadn’t expected. “Did he?”
“He said it once and then refused to elaborate,” Letitia explained, “which is exactly how William says everything important, so we knew it was genuine.”
Letitia grinned at her. “Did you know who he was? When you found him?”
“I had no idea. I thought he was simply a man in difficulty who needed help.”
“And when you found out he was a duke?”
“I thought,” Cecily replied, with complete honesty, “that I had made a very thorough mess of things.”
Letitia let out another laugh.
“I am sorry,” Isadora said, after a moment. The laughter had died down, and she was serious again. “I am sorry that this happened to you.”
Cecily looked at her. “Thank you.”
“William felt terrible about it.” Isadora said it simply, as a statement of fact. “He didn’t say so. He never says so. But I could tell.”
“How could you tell?”
“He reorganized the library.”
Cecily blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
