Page 32 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“Be quiet,” said Valentine.

Phillip looked up, genuinely startled.

“I did not say anything,” he said.

“Your Grace! You’ve a visitor come — and I’ll not say who, but you’d best come quick.”

Mrs. Fletcher’s severe old face was doing something extraordinary. It took Diana a moment to identify it as a smile.

Henrietta was in the hall. She had her bonnet still on, and she got both arms around Diana’s neck before Diana had come the last three steps down.

“Duchess,” she said into her ear.

“Do not.”

“Your Grace. Shall I curtsy? I ought to curtsy⁠—”

“Hen!” Diana giggled.

“I am curtsying⁠—”

They were both laughing so hard by the time they reached the drawing room that a passing footman had to look very hard at the opposite wall.

“Oh, how I have missed you.” Henrietta took both her hands and would not let go. “You cannot imagine. The house is a tomb.”

Diana felt her throat go tight and covered it by squeezing back.

Eleven years old, she thought. Both of us up an apple tree at Fernside and Hen’s stocking torn to ribbons, swearing blind to my mother that we had been in the still-room the whole afternoon. Every scrape of her childhood had Henrietta somewhere in it, usually holding the ladder.

“And I you,” she said. “More than you know.”

A maid came in with the tea things, set them down, poured, and withdrew. Henrietta watched the whole performance with her eyebrows climbing steadily toward her hairline.

“Well,” she said, when the door had shut. “You are a Duchess now, aren’t you?”

Diana laughed.

Henrietta leaned forward at once, tea abandoned, voice dropped.

“Now. How does he treat you? Truly. Is he as dreadful as they all said?”

Diana opened her mouth.

And found, with some surprise, that she had to stop and think about it.

Dreadful.

She turned the word over, and it would not fit anywhere. She thought of him getting down on a nursery floor in his shirtsleeves and letting an eight-year-old fold his fingers into the right shape. She thought of him saying, Do not thank me; I have not done anything yet. She thought of him carrying her out of a room full of broken glass.

“He is direct,” she said slowly. “He says exactly what he means and nothing else at all, which I find I like a great deal more than I expected to. He can be — intimidating.” She turned her cup on its saucer. “He is very dutiful. And he is gentle. Much more than anyone would believe.”

“Gentle,” Henrietta repeated.

“Yes.” And then, because her mouth ran ahead of her, and because some warm and traitorous thing had risen in her chest: “He is also very good at a great many things.”

The silence lasted about a second and a half.

“Oh,” said Henrietta.