Page 4 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“I’ll tell her, miss.”

Betsy pressed her hand and slipped out. The door had scarcely closed before it opened again, without a knock this time, and Lady Westleigh came in, resplendent in dove-gray, and stopped, and looked back over her shoulder down the passage after the departing servant.

“Who was that?”

“A maid,” Diana said. “She came to ask whether I had eaten anything this morning.”

Octavia gave a short laugh through her nose. “Eaten. Who in her senses eats before a wedding? You will lace out of that gown before the vicar has done.”

“You would know, I suppose.” Diana turned back to the glass and smoothed her gloves with great care. “This is not your first marriage, after all.”

The laugh vanished. In the mirror, Diana watched the lovely face go hard, and found she did not much care.

“You are very free with that tongue this morning, girl.” Octavia’s voice had dropped its music. Diana rolled her eyes and Octavia’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Mind yourself with me, Diana Fernside. You forget your sister remains beneath my roof.”

And there it was. Diana set down the glove. She turned from the mirror and looked the woman full in the face, and when she spoke it was quite quietly, and quite without heat, which made it the worse.

“Should any harm come to my sister while she is in your keeping, any harm at all, I will cease this charade of polite play.” For a moment the Viscountess said nothing. Something flickered behind her eyes, surprise, perhaps, that the sullen chit had teeth after all.

Then Diana laughed, light and bright, and the spell broke. “But how foolish of me. We need none of us fret over that, for you are kindness itself. Papa says so a dozen times a day. You would never do a child the smallest wrong. Would you?”

“So long as she keeps to her tasks and makes herself of some use, she and I shall do very well.” Octavia lifted her chin. “I am not a woman to coax and pet other people’s children, whatever your papa may fancy. She would do well to learn it early.”

I must find a way to reach the Duke myself, Diana thought, with a new clarity. Betsy is not enough. I must reach him, and soon, or that woman will grind my sister down to nothing while I am away.

The door opened a third time, and her father stepped in, and in the space of a single breath the Viscountess was transformed. Her shoulders softened. Her eyes brimmed. She pressed a hand to her breast as though wounded to the quick.

“I know she does not trust me, my lord,” she said, before Diana could speak a word, “but I would sooner die than do that dear child any hurt⁠—”

“What is this?” The Viscount crossed to his wife and took her by the arms, all tender concern, his frown bent not upon her but upon his daughter. “What has been said? Octavia, my love, what has upset you so?”

Diana looked at her father, at the soft, foolish, grieving man this woman had made of him, and was surprised to find she had no tears left for him at all.

“I told her the truth,” she said. “That I do not trust her to care for Arabella. That is all.”

“Diana!” her father snapped.

She smiled, her face stretched as she struggled to hide her growing rage. “May I have some time alone?”

For a long moment her father stared, his color rising, his jaw working. Whatever he saw in her face seemed at last to persuade him, for he mastered himself, and turned, and bent his head close to his wife’s.

“Come, my dear,” he said softly. “Leave her. Let her stew.”

And they went out together, the two of them, and the door fell shut. Diana let out a long breath she felt she had been holding since the day the woman first crossed their doorstep.

She sank upon the little stool before the glass and pressed her cold hands to her colder cheeks. She might have run. She knew that she might. Henrietta had offered it more than once, and even now, did she choose it, there were doors in London that would open to a viscount’s daughter with a friend and a little courage. But it had never been for herself that Diana stayed.

She could weather this city and all its cruelties; she had the wit and the years for it, and a runaway who was grown might contrive, somehow, to live. A child of eight could not. Arabella needed what only a settled house could give her, a roof, a fire, a name, a father, poor thing though he had become. To take the child and flee was to trade one danger for far worse.

And what of it, she told herself. Let him be cold. Let him be cruel. A great house has a great many rooms. Perhaps she might keep to a quiet corner of it with her sister and trouble him not at all, might live beside him as strangers live in the same inn, and from that corner make whatever plans the future asked of her. It was not much to hope for. But of one thing she had grown certain of in these last seven days; if she did not stand up before the vicar this morning and become Duchess of Rosewood, then Arabella’s whole young life would be handed over, unguarded, to a woman who reckoned a child of eight as one more mouth to be made useful, and that, she would not permit. Not while she had breath.

“Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

The words reached Diana from a very long way off.

Her father’s arm had brought her down that aisle and abandoned her at the altar with no more ceremony than a man surrendering a parcel at the posting inn, and now, there was only the clergyman’s patient face, and the murmur of a half-filled church at her back, and beside her, unmoving, the man they called the Beast of Rosewood. Be brave, keep your wits, and hold to the plan. A room for Arabella. That is all you need today.

She saw him for the first time from the head of the nave.