Page 18 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“I have taken a cold,” said Diana, and fled.

She did not stop until she had turned the corner of the passage, and then she leaned against the wall with her hand pressed flat over her heart and waited for it to slow. But it would not.

The next day, she poured herself into the accounts as a drowning woman pours herself into a plank. She had found her corner. It was a small writing table in the alcove off the great hall, and from it she could see the sweep of the stairs, the front doors, and the long passage to the kitchens, which meant she could see very nearly everything that happened in the house. This was, she had decided, what a proper mistress did. She could not tell the housemaids their business, for they knew it far better than she did, and the whole place had been running without her, and it went on running now with perfect indifference. But she could sit where they might all see her sitting. She could look up when a footman crossed the hall, and nod, and look down again. It was a performance of mistress-ship rather than the thing itself, and she knew it, and she did it anyway, and in between she kept the books. That was at least honest work. She was at the ledgers when a shadow fell across the page.

“Will you take anything, Your Grace? It’s gone two, and you’ve not eaten.”

Mrs. Fletcher stood with her hands folded and her keys still. Diana set down her pen. She had been waiting all day to ask, and had put it off a dozen times, and now heard herself ask it anyway.

“Mrs. Fletcher, I have not seen His Grace. He was not in his study this morning.”

“Oh, he’s away, Your Grace. Went off early this morning with the Duke of Kingsell.” The housekeeper said it comfortably, as one states the weather. “There’s business between them, up at the works — some matter of the canal, I believe, though I’m sure I don’t understand the half of it. He’ll be back tomorrow, most likely. He generally is.”

“I see.”

“Was there a message wanted?”

“No.” Diana picked her pen back up. “No, nothing at all. Something light, please, whenever it suits.”

Mrs. Fletcher curtsied and went, and Diana sat looking at a column of figures she had stopped seeing some while ago.

He did not tell me.

The thought was small, and she was thoroughly ashamed of it. He had gone off on his own business, as he had every right to do, in his own house, in his own life, in which she had occupied a place for the total of four days. He was not obliged to account to her for his movements. He had told the housekeeper, and the housekeeper ran his house, and that was as it should be.

We are strangers, she reminded herself. You have known the man less than a week. He owes you nothing.

And then, on the heel of that, with a sourness that surprised her: and how, pray, does he mean to make me yield to him from thirty miles away?

She put her pen down again and pressed her fingers to her eyes.

A letter came at four.

A maid brought it up on a salver, and Diana knew her father’s seal at once and had it open before the girl was well out of the room.

It is improper for the child to live with you. Do not trouble the Duke on the subject. You would do better to attend to the pleasing of your husband. Arabella will be raised here.

That was all. There was no direction, no greeting, no signature beyond the scrawl of Westleigh at the foot of it.

Diana read it three times.

She was not aware of standing. She was not aware of her hand closing until she felt the paper crumple in it, and the tears came stinging up hot and furious behind her eyes, and she blinked them back savagely. She was already halfway to the door before she knew where she was going.

I shall go and get her. Now. Today. I shall take a carriage and go to that house and walk in and take my sister out of it and let them try to stop me⁠—

She stopped.

She stood in the middle of the hall with the letter in her fist and felt the whole thing collapse under her, quite calmly, the way a bridge collapses.

And then what? She had no legal claim to the child. None. Arabella belonged to her father as surely as his horses did; a daughter’s affection weighed nothing at all against a father’s right. To take her would be to steal her. They would send men. They would fetch her back within the day, and Diana would have gained nothing but the certainty that Octavia would make the child pay for it.

She sat down slowly on the bottom step of the great staircase, which was not at all where a duchess ought to sit, and smoothed the letter out on her knee, and looked at it properly for the first time.

And went very still.

This is not his hand.

She knew her father’s hand. The heavy leaning strokes, the way he crossed his t’s halfway up. This was small and neat and upright, with a pretty tail on the y, and the signature at the foot was a copy, and not even a very careful one.