Page 51 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

“It came from Lady Westleigh herself, Your Grace, at her own tea party — a fortnight since, or near it⁠—”

“She wept,” said the first, tumbling over her. “She wept telling us of it. She said the Duchess had always been loose, and that she had trapped you, and that the family were sick with the shame of it and could not speak of it aloud. Your Grace, forgive our ignorance, the poor woman seemed so distressed, we believed her⁠—”

Diana stood quite still and looked at the two of them on their knees in the cold.

And you did believe her. Of course you did. My father believed her and gave her his house and his purse and both his daughters; the whole of the ton believes her and calls her an uncommonly fine hostess; and these two believed her enough to say it in a room where I could hear.

She weeps and the world opens its doors to her. I have never once been able to do it. I do not think I ever learned how.

“Stand up,” said Valentine. “Both of you. And go into the hall.”

The women looked at one another in terror and got up. He turned and took Diana’s hand and set it upon his arm.

“Let us go back in,” he said. “I shall see to this.”

“Your Grace—” She lowered her voice. “Please. Let us not make a scene of it. Not here, not at my uncle’s ball, not tonight of all nights⁠—”

“You are quite right that four hundred people need not have it for their evening’s entertainment.” Henrietta’s chin was up, and there was nothing soft in her face at all. “But it will be had, Diana. There is my father’s study, off the library, nobody goes there during a ball, not even Papa. If Uncle and that woman could be brought to it without the rest of the house being any the wiser, I do not see why the whole of London need be troubled with our family’s business.”

She looked to the Duke.

Valentine considered it the length of one breath.

“Kingsell.”

“Already gone,” said Phillip, who had in fact already turned and was making his way back through the crowd with the unhurried.

He was gone more than a quarter of an hour.

Diana spent the whole of it walking the length of her uncle’s bookshelves without reading a single title upon them. Henrietta paced the hearthrug and the two women from the terrace stood pressed into the corner by the window as though the paneling might be persuaded to swallow them, given time.

Then the door opened.

Phillip came first. Behind him, wearing the pleased and faintly puzzled expression of people who believe themselves about to be shown something agreeable, came Levi Fernside and his wife.

“There has been a little talk this evening,” Phillip said, drawing the door behind them, “which Rosewood thought better settled quietly than before your brother’s entire guest list. I hope you will forgive the want of ceremony.”

Levi’s eyes went from the Duke to Diana to Henrietta, and had not yet arrived at any notion that something was wrong.

“Talk?” he said. “What talk?”

“The talk, Uncle,” said Henrietta, “of why two women on your niece’s own terrace should believe her a seducer who trapped a duke into marriage to save herself from the shelf.”

The room went very still.

“That is a monstrous thing to say of anybody,” said Levi. “Who has said such a thing?”

“I have said it, my lord.” The elder of the two women stepped forward, white-faced, her hands twisted together at her waist. “Forgive me — I only repeated what I was told. I never meant⁠—”

“Told by whom?”

Nobody answered him at once.

Octavia had gone very still beside her husband, her gloved hand resting light upon his sleeve.

“By whom,” Levi said again.

“By your wife, my lord.” The second woman’s voice cracked in the middle of it. “At her own tea table, approximately a fortnight since. She wept telling it. She begged us to keep it to ourselves — and I have wondered, since, why she told it to us at all, if that was truly her wish.”