Page 39 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“He is late, Your Grace.” She lowered her eyes to her cup with exactly the correct measure of sorrow — enough to be seen, not so much as to require comforting. “These three years now.”

There it is, he thought. That little dip of the lashes. Timed to the half second. I have watched actresses at Drury Lane do the same thing with less art.

“That must have been very hard,” he said. “A widow, and young yet. No children to comfort you in it?”

“I was not blessed with any.” She said it lightly, and reached for the sugar though her tea did not want it. “Not until I met Levi.”

“And how did the two of you come to meet?”

“A chance meeting, nothing more.” She smiled at him over the rim of her cup.

“Tell me of it.”

“It is rather an intimate story, Your Grace, and not one I share readily, even with family.” Her eyes came up, warm and perfectly composed. “A lady must keep some small thing for herself, must she not?”

Valentine set his own cup down without drinking from it.

He was tired, he found, of the whole performance. He was tired of the lowered lashes timed exactly right, tired of sorrows produced and withdrawn like cards from a sleeve, tired of a woman who had not given him one true sentence in a quarter of an hour of trying.

“I confess I became curious about you, madam,” he said. “So I had a friend look into your history.”

She was quiet, so he continued.

“Madame Juno.”

Her smile did not fall; it froze. That was the thing — it did not go anywhere at all; it simply stopped being alive, the way a clock stops, and stayed on her face exactly as it was.

Phillip had not even had to work at it. He had sent out a note, which rather embarrassed them both. She is not a secret, he had written. She is only a secret here.

“That was the name you went by,” Valentine said, “at the Blue Cockatrice.”

“I have not the smallest notion—” Her voice caught. She began again. “I do not know what you are speaking of. I have never⁠—”

“Have I got it wrong?” He inclined his head. “Then I apologize unreservedly, madam. My friend was able to confirm it from several gentlemen who sought your company there after their drink, but no doubt they are all of them mistaken.”

The room was very quiet.

Octavia’s chin came up.

“I never sold my body.” Her voice had changed. It had dropped half its music and all of its warmth, and it was, for the first time, the voice of an actual person. “Not once. Not to any man who ever asked, and a great many asked. I sold drink. I sat, and I talked, and I laughed at what wanted laughing at, and the gentlemen bought bottles they did not want, and the house took its cut, and I took mine. That is what I did. And I left that place years ago.”

“So you admit it.”

She looked at him steadily.

“There is no shame in labor,” she said. “Surely even a duke can grasp that much. Some of us were not left estates. Some of us worked.”

Valentine walked a few paces and sat down without being asked.

“I have no quarrel with honest work, madam,” he said. “None whatever. I respect it a good deal more than I respect most of what goes on in the House of Lords, and I would lay money your husband would say the same if you gave him the chance. He is a fool, but he is not a snob.” He settled back. “And I daresay the other gentlemen you have married would have said so too. The ones who came out of it penniless.”

Silence.

“So my difficulty is not the work,” he said. “My difficulty is the lying. Why lie about who you are — unless being who you are would cost you something you have not finished taking?”

Their eyes met.

The performance was gone. There was nothing on her face now at all, and it was, he thought, the first honest thing he had seen her do.