Against the wall was shoved a narrow, soft bed heaped in layers of coverlets, topped with a quilt, and crowned with a plump pillow. Alongside it lay a braided rug in shades of rose and green; it was a pleasure to press her feet into it first thing in the morning. A mirror the size of her face was hung on the wall above a basin and a water pitcher painted in little pink flowers. Across from the wardrobe was a desk, and on it perched a tiny vase from which a sprig of white blossoms peeped. It made the entire room smell like spring. She’d carefully tied her cherished pink satin ribbon, the one her parents had given her on her tenth birthday, around the vase, to make the room feel a little more like home.
Her window offered a view of another building, all brick, and an alley in which she’d seen two cats making love.
She rehearsed in her head another approach to the letter.
Dear Mama,
I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve some wonderful news. I’ve moved into a lovely new room at an exclusive boardinghouse. You must pass an interview to be admitted. If you’re found wanting they won’t let you in! I’ve made many fine new friends and the food is very good. I’m to sing at an event featuring only me at the end of the month, and lords and ladies will be invited. Right now, there is a little blossom in a vase on my writing table, and the smell of it reminds me of the first trip you and Papa and I made to the seashore so many years ago. Do you remember the green hills on the way? Sometimes I picture them when I can’t sleep.
It was neither untrue, nor entirely true. Much like the gossip written about her, the difference was in what was omitted and what was included.
Was it dishonest?
It left out the part where she’d awakened with a start last time, from a dream in which she plummeted out her window into the gaping maw of someone screeching the wordharlot harlot harlot.
She suspectedthosedreams would be her lot for a while.
But she’d be fed and housed at least through the month.
At any rate, she didn’t write the letter.
She would try again tomorrow. It was time to go downstairs to the sitting room to join in the cozy familial atmosphere and spirited discussions, and revel in the fact that for now, she was safe from anyone in thetonwho might judge her, even if she wasn’t quite safe from the epithet jar.
Chapter Three
She came to an abrupt halt when she noticed a man standing between Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Hardy.
Something about him seemed immediately as stark and strange as if an obelisk had been dropped into the sitting room. The lines of him—the span of his shoulders, the incline between them and his waist, his jaw—were as elegant, severe, and clean as if his maker had trimmed them out with the tip of a rapier. The top of her head, she suspected, would just about reach the knot in his cravat.
She was a cobbler’s daughter and she always looked down. His boots—Hoby, if she had to guess—were black mirrors.
Mrs. Hardy saw her, and her face lit in welcome. “Your Grace—”
YourGrace? Holy Mother of—!
“—we should like to introduce Miss Mariana Wylde. Miss Wylde, His Grace, the Duke of Valkirk.”
Thusly the first legend she’d ever met in the flesh turned to face her directly.
She didn’t know whether she would call himhandsome. Only that his presence worked on her senses like the clash of a gong.
His nose seemed to have been broken at least once, but the result suited the terrain of his face, and intriguingly suggested he’d come up against violence and walked away the victor. His mouth was long and rather fine. Beneath thick, straight brows, his gaze was deep-set and uncomfortably penetrating, as though he was forever searching for enemies on the far horizon. He could probably frisk a soul for sins and, once discovered, keep the knowledge of them to himself, for strategic use at a later date.
The stark colors he wore implied he thought he needed no embellishment. She was inclined to agree. But she knew one would need to pay a tailor dizzying fortunes for that fit and that fabric, not to mention the staff to keep it jet black and snow white.
She was instinctively certain there wasn’t a soft place on the man.
When she wrote to her mother about this later, she would leave out the part where she stared up at him, mutely, like a looby, for a full three seconds, and go right into the part where she curtsied.
Because her curtsy was a thing of beauty. She knew, because it had gotten rave notices when she’d played a perfidious courtier inThe Glass Rose, before she’d been promoted to queen for a night, which was more or less immediately before two men decided to shoot at each other over her. She had not been born genteel, but damned if she couldn’t convince anybody that she was.
“Your Grace . . .” Nerves had made her voice go a little too seductively breathy. “Meeting you is an honor I never dreamed I’d have in this lifetime.”
Whenshe was upright, she thought it best to appear simultaneously devastating and virtuous. This meant lowering her gaze shyly at least a second or two. This was a brutal sacrifice, because her entire being wanted to continue studying his face to decide how she felt about it.
She raised her head what seemed like a vast distance to meet his eyes.
Only to discover that a screen of faint but unmistakable bored cynicism had moved across his features.
