Page 2 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

When they had reached the dais, her father said nothing, only smiled in that loose, vague way he wore so often of late. It was Octavia who spoke.

“I have one happy piece of news more to share, since we are all of us among friends.” She laid her gloved hand upon Diana’s shoulder; it sat there light as a bird and twice as cold. “Our eldest, Miss Diana Fernside, is to be married, and married soon. His Grace, the Duke of Rosewood, has asked for her hand, and the wedding is to be held within the week.”

For the space of a single breath the room was perfectly silent.

Then it was not.

The whispers came all at once, a low rushing wave of them, and they were nothing like the soft indulgent murmurs of before.

“Rosewood? Surely she cannot mean Rosewood.”

“The Duke of Rosewood—good God. The poor child.”

“Within the week? Why, that is no courtship at all. A special license, then—one does wonder at such unseemly haste.”

“What manner of father gives his own daughter over to a man like that? They say he—” and the rest was lost behind a fan, but Diana did not need to hear it. Everyone knew what they said of the Duke of Rosewood.

The floor seemed to tilt beneath her slippers. At her side, she heard Arabella draw a sharp little breath.

“I beg your pardon,” Diana said. Her voice came out quite steady; she would never afterward know how. “I am to be married?”

Octavia turned to her with an expression of the tenderest concern, an expression Diana might have believed entirely, had she not stood near enough to see how little of it reached the woman’s eyes.

“Oh, my dear girl.” She said it gently, fondly, pitched just loud enough to carry. “I know how you love your dear papa, and how you dread to leave his side. But you are three-and-twenty now. It is past time you were properly settled and made a lady of, unless you should like to be left upon the shelf, and laughed at for an old maid?”

Diana swallowed. She held her breath behind her teeth and did not let her face so much as move, because there were two hundred people watching, and because Arabella stood trembling against her side, and because to weep here, now, before all of them, was the one thing she would not do.

Her father laughed, an easy, careless laugh, as though his wife had made some clever jest, and raised his glass higher.

“Enough of business,” he declared. “We have come here to be merry. Let us have the music again!”

The instruments struck up. The floor began to turn once more. And just so, before all the world, the matter was settled, and her father turned his shoulder to her.

She found him near the terrace doors, a little apart from the press of dancers, the Viscountess at his elbow as she was at his elbow always now.

“Papa.” Diana kept her voice low, mindful of the company, but she could not keep it from shaking. “Papa, I must speak with you. What was that? What have you done?”

“Diana.” He frowned at her over the rim of his glass. “This is neither the time nor the⁠—”

“I will not marry him.” The words came before she could weigh them. “I will not. I will not leave Arabella, and I will not be handed to a man like the Duke of Rosewood. You must know what is said of him, everyone here knows it, you heard them yourself. You cannot mean to give me over to such a man as that.”

“Now, do not be cross with your dear papa.” Octavia’s hand fluttered toward her arm. “The fault is all my own, my dear. I only thought⁠—”

Diana did not so much as glance at her.

“Papa, I am asking you.”

For a moment something flickered in his face, some ghost of the father he had been, years ago, before grief had hollowed him out and left a stranger sitting in his chair. Then it was gone, and his jaw set hard.

“You had two full Seasons,” he said, “to make a match of your own, and you turned up your nose at every gentleman I set before you. Two Seasons, Diana. Your stepmother has been kindness itself to trouble herself over your future when you would not, and this”—he gestured at her with the glass, slopping wine over the rim—“this is the thanks she has from you. You are an ungrateful girl. You always have been.”

“Ungrateful?” The word tore loose, too loud; a head or two turned nearby, and she lowered her voice with an effort that cost her everything. “She has been in this house two months, Papa, and already she orders my whole life as though I were a parcel to be posted off. You did not so much as ask me. You did not even tell me yourself⁠—”

His hand came up to slap her.

She saw it rise, and she knew, with a sick lurch of her stomach, precisely what it meant; she had simply never once in three-and-twenty years believed her father capable of it. Her eyes squeezed shut. She braced for the blow.

It did not fall.