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At last, mercifully, coffee appeared. The Dowager rose; the room stood. The ladies swanned away in a flurry of silk and whispers toward the drawing room and its quiet wars.
For a moment, he lost sight of Pepper in the drift.
He endured another ten minutes of port and politics. Darley held forth about duty; Harcourt promised to “consider” half at noon; Leinster’s cousin told a story about a Russian general and a salted herring. Chester nodded when required, his mind in a rose garden with a woman who did not want to marry a man she liked. She wasn’t refreshingly odd or oddly refreshing. Pepper was… extraordinary.
I want nothing more in this world than to know everything about her and prove myself worthy of holding what I learn.
At last, his mother gave the look with an arched brow and a hard stare at the crystal glasses – a look she always did when she thought the gentlemen had drunk enough to be biddable and not enough to be foolish. Chairs scraped; men stood.
Chester stepped out into the corridor—and saw her.
Not in the drawing room with the others, attending politely to some ancient lady’s story. Not at his mother’s elbow, being paraded. Lady Barbara had slipped between two footmen and was disappearing down the long side passage toward the smaller parlor and the rear stair.
Her shoulders were tight. Her hands were empty. She walked too fast for someone whose right foot protested when she hurried.
He didn’t think about it and just followed.
The corridor dimmed as they left the main rooms behind; the murmur of voices thinned. A single wall sconce threw an island of light at the turn where the hall bent toward the back. The smell of beeswax and sea air mingled in the quiet.
“Lady Barbara,” he said. “Pepper?”
She stopped. He saw the stiffness in her spine before she turned.
“I hope,” he said, reaching for a lightness he did not feel, “that dinner with my mother was not too testing for you.”
No answer. Her head was bowed; her jaw set in the way he was coming to recognize—bravery, hastily assembled.
“Pepper?” he tried again when they were in a secluded part of the house.
She lifted her face.
The words he’d meant to say died.
Tear tracks glistened on her cheeks, catching the meagre light. The quiet, contained kind. The kind people hid until they believed themselves safely alone.
His chest tightened.
He had come prepared to argue gently with her. To say he had thought about her words in the garden and that she was wrong to believe she must never marry a man she liked. He had intended to convey variations of I don’t intend to ask you to give up Pepper and there might be men who would walk into flour dust beside you—things no sane duke said to a lady in a rented house within earshot of his mother.
Now, with those tears on her face, all that came out was, “I…came to say that I thought about what you told me earlier about not wanting a husband to love, and I disagree.”
Her eyes widened—hurt, startled, raw—and for one disastrous instant he wished he could reach out, pull the words back into his mouth, and swallow them whole.
She opened her lips—
—and a door at the far end of the passage clicked open, spilling lamplight and footsteps, driving the next breath between them into silence.
Chapter 17
Pepper hadn’t known four words could hurt until Chester said, “I disagree, Lady Barbara.”
The corridor outside Darley’s North Steyne drawing room was all half-light and echoes—lamps turned low; music and laughter leaking from the open doors behind her, the faint tang of sea air creeping in from somewhere ahead. A footman lurked discreetly at the far turn. It was the sort of space where nothing important was meant to happen, just a long strip of paneling and a single tall window set back in a little alcove.
Her chest did not seem to know that.
Of course he disagrees. Nobody understands what it means to be damaged—or likely to be.
In her mind, the Dowager Duchess of Wyndale’s chilly voice supplied the rest: a duchess’s worth began and ended with what her body might produce. If a woman could not dance, could not bear children, what use was she?
