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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Ihave three questions, and I expect honest answers to all of them.”

Seraphina was pacing when Anthony was shown into the drawing room, a tight line worn between the window and the hearth, her skirts snapping with each turn. She stopped the moment she saw him, folding her arms in a manner that suggested she had been rehearsing the line for some time before he arrived.

“Good afternoon to you as well, Your Grace.” Anthony paused just inside the doorway, glancing past her toward William, who stood very still near the mantel, having clearly already tried, and failed, to talk his wife out of precisely this ambush. “I was under the impression I had come to discuss a shipping contract.”

“The contract can wait.” She did not uncross her arms. “Now. My three questions.”

“I have not agreed to answer even one of them.”

“You will. You always do, eventually, once you have exhausted every possible method of avoiding it first.” She gestured him toward the chair nearest the fire, though she did not sit herself, continuing to stand, too restless to sit, plainly finding it harder to stay still than to speak her mind. “I have been informed by no fewer than four separate acquaintances that my sister is engaged to be married. I have been informed of this by everyone except my sister herself, who has said almost nothing on the subject beyond the barest confirmation that yes, it is true, and no, she does not wish to discuss it further. So I have come to you instead, since you were kind enough to agree to William’s business today and spare me the trouble of writing a letter.”

Anthony did not sit. “I fail to see what questions remain that the announcement itself did not already answer.”

“Do you.” Her eyebrows rose, a small, precise motion that reminded him, uncomfortably, of her younger sister. “Very well. First question. Did you ask Leonora to marry you, Anthony? Truly ask her, in whatever manner dukes manage these things. Or did this begin some other way entirely?”

“What does it matter how it began? The engagement stands regardless.”

“It matters a great deal to me, which is rather the reason I asked it and not something else.” Seraphina’s eyes narrowed slightly, as though she had caught the shape of the evasion before the sentence meant to carry it had even finished leaving his mouth. “That was not an answer either, in case you were under some impression it was.”

“We came to an understanding.”

“An understanding is not a proposal.” She resumed her pacing, a short turn toward the window and back, her voice sharpening by degrees. “I have spoken with Lady Carstairs, who was standing rather closer to your grandmother that evening than either of you likely realised, and she tells me the announcement came as something of a surprise to the room. More than a surprise, in fact. She used the word astonishment, and Lady Carstairs is not a woman given to exaggeration where a plainer word will serve.”

“Lady Carstairs enjoys her gossip a great deal more than she enjoys accuracy.”

“Do not change the subject.”

“I have not changed the subject. I am questioning your source.”

“That is not what I asked you either, Anthony, and we both know it perfectly well.” Seraphina folded her hands in front of her. “I asked you a direct question. Why would a man with nothing to hide busy himself picking apart the character of the person who told me, rather than simply answering?”

He said nothing to that for a moment, turning the question over. He knew that Seraphina would not let this go easily. She was, in her own fashion, every bit as suspicious as her younger sister, the sort of woman who noticed when an answer had been constructed rather than simply given, and he was not certain yet how much of the truth was his to share. Whatever lay between himself and Leonora belonged to the two of them first. He did not know what Leonora would wish her sister to hear of it, and he did not think it his place to decide that for her.

“Did you not ask your own sister about this directly?” he said instead. “Before coming to me.”

“I wrote to her. I could not come to her in person, since she has been spending the better part of her days at your estate rather than at home, and a letter seemed the less intrusive approach.” Something flickered across Seraphina’s face, a brief frustration. “She wrote back quickly, which told me she had been expecting the question. Her reply confirmed the engagement, in precisely four words, and informed me that she did not wish to discuss it further. That was the whole of it.”

“Then there is very little I can do to improve upon that account. If your sister has told you she does not wish to discuss it, I am not inclined to override her wishes simply because you have asked me more politely than you asked her.” He glanced toward William, hoping, with no particular confidence, for some manner of rescue. “William?”

“Do not look at me.” William lifted both hands slightly, declining, plainly, to be drawn into a conversation he had already lost once this afternoon. “I have no intention of being pulled into this. You are entirely on your own.”

Seraphina crossed the room toward him then, and something in her bearing had changed, the sharpness softening into something more earnest. “I am not trying to catch you in anything, Anthony, whatever it may look like. Let me tell you what I actually know, and you may judge for yourself whether my concern is reasonable.” She stopped a few feet from him, her hands clasped loosely in front of her. “I know that Leonora went to your estate to be a companion to your grandmother. That was the whole of it, as far as I understood. I know my sister, Anthony, better than most people alive, and I know that she has had something up her sleeve since the day we arrived in London. It worries our family a great deal more than she seems to realise. I understand you may wish to protect whatever arrangement the two of you have built. I had a similar arrangement myself once, with William, before it became something else entirely, so I am not unsympathetic to how such things can shift under one’s feet without warning.”

Her eyes held his. “I do not know if that is what has happened here. I only know that my sister is too stubborn to tell me herself, and if there is something happening that we ought to help her with, I need to know it, so that I can help her, and so that I can set Euphemia’s mind at ease as well. Is there something you know? Are you truly to be married? What are the circumstances of it? Is this your doing, Anthony, or hers, or someone else’s entirely?”

It was the mention of William, and of whatever her own arrangement had become, that caught somewhere in his chest and refused to let go easily. Anthony was not certain why the thought of it, that an arrangement such as theirs could shift into something else entirely, should make his heart beat a fraction faster than it had any business doing in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation, but he decided, with some determination, not to examine the matter any further than that.

He looked at her instead, at the honesty sitting plainly in her face, entirely free of the inquiry she had arrived with, and found he did not have it in him to keep circling the truth any longer. She was family, in every sense that mattered beyond blood, and he had learned well enough from his own grandmother what it cost a person to be kept in the dark out of some misguided notion of protecting them. He did not think it right to let Seraphina go on worrying when a plain accounting might ease it.

“My grandmother did this,” he said. “Not Leonora, and not entirely myself, though I bear my share of the blame for allowing it to continue as long as it has.”

“What do you mean? Why would your grandmother come to any such notion?”

“Because that is the arrangement Leonora and I struck, before any of this became public. She agreed to let my grandmother believe she was my betrothed, rather than simply her companion, because Marian is considerably easier to manage when she believes herself surrounded by family rather than hired help. Her last several companions fled within the week. I needed someone who would stay, and Leonora needed the necklace she had come to collect, and between the two of us, letting my grandmother’s misunderstanding stand seemed the simplest path to both.” He exhaled slowly. “It was meant to remain a private fiction, known only within my household. My grandmother announced it instead, to several hundred people, at the ball, three glasses of ratafia into the evening, with neither of us given any warning beforehand that she intended to say a word of it.”

Seraphina’s hands had come up to her mouth, her eyes wide. “In front of the entire room?”