Page 3 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

When she opened her eyes, the Viscountess had caught his wrist in both her gloved hands, and her face had crumpled into a perfect picture of distress, and there were even tears, real tears, gathered bright and trembling along her lashes. How does she summon them so quickly? Some cold, far-off part of Diana wondered.

“Oh, my lord, do not, I beg of you, do not. Not here. Not over me. This is all my doing, every bit of it.” Octavia pressed his lowered hand between her own as though in prayer. “If it grieves her so very much, then let us cancel the arrangement. I never meant to bring such trouble into your house. I shall write to His Grace myself, this very night, and⁠—”

“There will be no cancellation.”

Her father wrenched his hand free. His face was dark with wine and temper.

“The girl is spoiled,” he said, “and she is making a spectacle of herself, and she will be married within the week as it was agreed, and there is an end to it. I will hear no more upon the subject.”

Diana stood very still. Her cheek had not been struck, and yet it burned all the same, as though the blow had landed somewhere far deeper than skin.

She turned her head, and there, a few feet off, half hidden behind the spill of a curtain, stood Arabella. The child had followed her. She had seen it all. Her small face was white, her lips pressed hard together, her eyes brimming, and she was fighting with everything in her small body not to let the tears come, because her sister had taught her that a lady did not weep where others might see.

Something in Diana went quiet then. Quite cold, and quite clear.

She drew a slow breath. She crossed to her sister and gathered the small cold hand into her own, and she did not look back, not at her father, nor at the woman weeping her false tears beside him.

“Come, Bella,” she said softly. “We are going.”

And she walked her sister out through the bright, laughing, glittering crowd, every step of it, and did not once let them see her break.

Seven days, she thought. In seven days she would belong to the Duke of Rosewood, and Arabella would be left to that woman, and try as she might, Diana could not see a single way under heaven to prevent either one.

CHAPTER TWO

“There now, do smile, dearest. A bride ought not to look so glum upon her own wedding morning.”

The woman worked a last pin into Diana’s hair as she spoke, then stood back to admire her handiwork with the satisfaction of a cook who has iced a difficult cake. She was a brisk, capable creature, engaged for the morning at the new Viscountess’s particular direction, and Diana had not warmed to her in the three hours she had spent beneath her hands. One did not, she had found, warm easily to a stranger paid out of Octavia’s purse.

“You will be the loveliest bride the season has seen,” the woman went on, twitching the folds of the gown into place. “A duchess, only think of it. There are a hundred girls in this city who would give their all to stand where you stand this morning, and here you sit with a face like a wet Sunday.”

Diana said nothing. She looked into the glass instead, and a stranger looked back.

The gown was ivory silk, cut fine, finer than anything she had ever worn. She did not have to wonder whose vanity had paid for it. Her dark hair had been dressed high and threaded with seed pearls. Her cheeks had been pinched to a becoming color, and her lips reddened with the least touch of salve, and the whole effect was of a lovely, poised, accomplished young lady upon the happiest morning of her life.

I do not know her, Diana thought, looking at the woman in the mirror. I have never met this woman in all my life.

A soft knock came at the door, and it opened, and Betsy put her head in.

Diana turned from the glass so quickly that the dresser clucked in reproach. “Betsy.” Her chest eased at the sight of the familiar, careworn face. “Come in, please.” She turned to the hired woman and made her voice as pleasant as she could manage. “Would you be so good as to leave us a moment? I should like a private word with our maid before it is time. You have worked so hard—do take a little rest.”

The woman’s mouth pursed, but there was no refusing a bride so near the altar. She gathered her pins and swept out with a rustle of disapproval. The latch locked behind her.

Diana was on her feet at once. She came to the little writing table, drew open the drawer, and took out a small purse, worn at the seams, heavier than it looked.

“Betsy.” She pressed it into the older woman’s hands and folded the work-roughened fingers closed over it. “This is for you. Do not open it now, and do not refuse it. It is everything I have put by. Every quarter of pin money I never spent, these five years and more.”

“Miss Diana⁠—”

“Listen to me. Please.” Her voice would not hold quite steady, and she gave over trying to make it. “Keep my sister safe. Keep her fed, and warm, and out of that woman’s way as much as ever you are able. And if it should grow worse, if she is ever truly in want, or in danger, or if a hand is raised to her, you are to bring her to me. To Rosewood. However you must contrive it. Do you understand?”

For that was the whole of Diana’s plan, such as it was. She would go to the Duke’s house a bride, and once she was its mistress in name she would find some way to send for Arabella and keep her there, out of Octavia’s reach forever. She had tried, this past week, to arrange it beforehand. She begged for leave to write to the Duke himself and put the question to him plainly, whether her sister might not come to live with them. But her father had refused her both the pen and the paper. The girl means to bolt, he had said; the moment she was out that door on some pretext she would run and shame them all. And Octavia had stood at his shoulder and fanned that little flame most tenderly, until Diana had not been suffered to set a foot beyond the front step unaccompanied. So the thing must wait until she was married and gone. It was a poor, thin plan, built all of hope and hurry. It was the only one she had.

Betsy’s eyes had filled. She gripped the purse hard against her apron. “I will guard her with my life, Miss Diana. You have my solemn word upon it, before God. As I would have guarded you, had they let me. As I guarded your dear mother, rest her soul, every day of the sixteen years I dressed her hair.”

Diana’s throat closed. That was the reason she trusted this woman and no other in all her father’s house; she learned it only a fortnight past, quite by chance, from a word let slip in the kitchen. Betsy had been her mother’s own maid. Sixteen years at the late Viscountess’s side, and kept on after her death out of some last remnant of the master’s grief, then put down to scrub and carry once that grief wore thin, and the new mistress came. Of everyone beneath this roof, only Betsy had loved the woman Diana had lost. Only Betsy could be trusted to love what that woman had left behind.

“Then I am easy,” Diana said, though she was not, and would not be until Arabella was safe beside her. “One thing more. Keep her with you today, in the kitchen, the garden, anywhere but the church. I will not have her at the wedding. She has wept enough this week. I will not have her stand there and watch me taken away and think it a thing to grieve over.” She managed the ghost of a smile.