Page 69 of Five Nights to Claim His Duchess

She blinked. Nothing else in her face moved at all.

Diana got up off the bench.

“I shall come with you,” she said.

“You will do no such thing.” Octavia’s eyes came round. “You should be resting, you should be lying down with your feet up like a sensible⁠—”

“If I stay here he will try to speak to me.” Diana pulled on her gloves. “He has been trying all week. He is working himself up to it and this afternoon he will manage it, and I would rather be almost anywhere else in England.”

Octavia considered this.

“Whereas I,” she said, “would give my right hand to have him try to speak to me.”

“Yes.” Diana looked at her. “Is that not a very funny arrangement?”

Neither of them laughed. They both, at the same moment, let out precisely the same breath and then had to look away from each other, because it was too absurd to be borne.

The carriage went down the hill toward the village.

They sat opposite one another and did not speak for the first mile.

“I owe you a great deal,” Octavia said at last. “I am aware of it. I shall find some way to make it up to you.”

“I shall be waiting.”

“You do not believe me.”

“I did not say that.” Diana looked out of the window. “I said I should be waiting.”

Octavia turned her rings.

“If he has not forgiven me in a month,” she said, “I shall ask him for a divorce and go.”

Diana’s head came round.

“A divorce.”

“Or a separation, or an annulment, or whatever it is that men of his sort can be got to arrange. I do not much care what it is called.”

“You stole four hundred and sixty pounds from him; you can hardly complain of⁠—”

“I am not complaining.” Octavia looked up. “I took it. Every penny, exactly as they say. I took it because I have never in my life been more than a fortnight from having nothing at all, and I do not know how to stop. That is the honest answer. It is not a good one.”

The carriage went over a rut and they both put a hand out.

Diana said, “And the two before him. Did you truly leave them without a penny?”

Octavia smiled. It was very tired.

“How readily,” she said, “did the whole of London believe what I told them about you?”

Diana said nothing.

“I told four ladies at my own tea table that you seduced a duke and forced his hand. It was not true in any particular. It was not even possible — you had never met the man. And inside a fortnight it was a settled fact in every drawing room in town, and two women I had never met were saying it aloud on a terrace.” Octavia shrugged one shoulder. “Anything at all can be the truth, if it is interesting enough. I have made a living out of that and other people have made a living out of me. Two husbands, three, six; a brothel or a drinking house; penniless or merely disappointed. It hardly matters which of it happened. It is a better story the way they tell it.”

Diana looked at her a long moment.

“That is not an answer,” she said.