Page 66 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

She came in, and gathered her skirts, and sat down on the flags beside her.

“I am as downcast as you are,” she said. “I cannot laugh yet.”

Octavia turned her head and stared at her.

“You,” she said at last, “were born a lady.”

“That is hardly⁠—”

“No, let me say it. You were born to it, and you cannot even see it.” Her voice had lost every scrap of its music. “Elegant to your fingernails, and none of it put on, because it is simply what you are — so much so that you won a duke you had never laid eyes upon.” She gave a small broken laugh. “And I plotted, and I lied. I schemed for a year and a half for that man. I made myself into somebody’s dream of a wife, and the instant he learns what I am, he walks past me as though I were furniture.”

“You were dishonest with him. Every day of it.”

“Do you know what I did to keep it from him?” Octavia’s hands had closed in her lap. “Do you know what it cost me? I gave your sister to your husband. That is what I did. He came here and he stood in my drawing room and he told me my old name to my face and what house I had it in, and he said give me the child, and I gave her — that same hour, on the spot, without a word to my husband — because it was the only coin I had left and I paid it.”

Her mouth twisted. “And then a merchant your father plays whist with hears it from a man in the City and tells him over port, and the whole of it comes down anyway. All of it for nothing.”

Diana sat very still on the cold flags.

So that is how.

So that is what “trust me” meant.

She had wondered how a man could ride out at ten in the morning and come back at four with a child who had refused to come. She had let herself imagine that he had reasoned with the woman. That he had appealed to something.

You did not persuade her. You found her throat and you put your hand on it.

And the strange thing, the thing that sat oddly in her chest, was that she could not make herself sorry. She thought of Arabella asleep upstairs with a wooden horse.

What am I to make of you? she thought.

“If I had not been dishonest,” Octavia was saying, “I should still be in a house in Bath at nine and thirty years old being pawed over by men with wet mouths for the price of a bottle of wine. That is the honest life that was on offer to me.”

“You are a horrible woman,” said Diana. “Do not play the injured innocent with me. It does not answer twice.”

“I do not deny it.” Octavia looked at her steadily. “I am horrible. I have never once pretended to myself that I am anything else. But you must understand, my choices have all of them been bad choices. I lie and I steal because the alternative was to live and die a pauper, and I found I would not.”

“Then why are you sitting on a kitchen floor?” Diana said. “You have lied and stolen quite enough. Four hundred and sixty pounds, I am told. Take it and go. Find another fool with a title and a soft heart and begin again. It is what you do.”

Octavia said nothing.

The fire ticked in the range.

“I love your father,” she said.

Diana turned her head.

She looked at the woman’s face. She knew exactly what she was looking for, because she had spent a year learning the tells. The little shine at the back of the eye. The flicker of the mouth held down. The awareness of an audience. There was nothing. There was a swollen, exhausted, forty-year-old face with nobody behind it doing anything at all.

Diana cleared her throat.

“Why?” she said.

“Must there be a reason?” Octavia gave a wet laugh. “I do not know why. I have asked myself. I wake in the morning and I see him lying there and I breathe out, and it is⁠—”

“He feels like home,” Diana completed.

Octavia’s head came round.