The solicitor's letter arrived on a Tuesday, its black seal already cracked before it touched Clementine's palm. Mrs. Whitlow, the housekeeper, set the silver salver down upon the writing desk with a soft clatter, her weathered face carefully arranged into that particular blankness she wore whenever news of consequence passed through the foyer.
"From Mr. Hathaway's office, miss."
Clementine turned the envelope over. The paper was thick, expensive, faintly fragrant with the lavender his clerks used to keep the documents sweet. She could feel the weight of the thing, more than paper ought to weigh, and her thumb traced the embossed H upon the wax.
"Thank you, Mrs. Whitlow. That will be all."
The housekeeper hesitated, a small betrayal of curiosity, then withdrew without another word. Her footsteps faded down the corridor, soft upon the threadbare carpet that had once been a deep burgundy and was now the color of dried roses.
Clementine was alone.
She slid her finger beneath the seal and broke it cleanly, a small violence that sent wax fragments scattering across the desk. Inside, a single sheet folded twice around a longer document covered in Mr. Hathaway's precise copperplate hand. She unfolded it and began to read.
The first paragraphs were familiar. The debts, the mortgages, the careful accounting of a baron's slow financial ruin. She had heard these numbers spoken aloud in the study six months ago, when her father's solicitor had come to read the will to the family, and she had committed them to memory with the grim efficiency of a general studying a battle map. The Ashcombe estate, Thornbury, had been hemorrhaging money for years. The tenants could not pay their rents. The timber had been sold off parcel by parcel. The London house stood empty, its shutters closed, a slow drain upon resources they no longer possessed.
What followed the accounting was new.
Clementine read it twice, then a third time, her lips moving without sound. The words rearranged themselves into a different shape upon each reading, as if the document refused to be understood. Finally, she set the paper down upon the desk and pressed her palm flat against its surface, as though she might hold the words in place through sheer pressure of skin.
Thornbury was entailed.
Her father, in a moment of either extraordinary foresight or extraordinary cowardice, had arranged the estate to pass not to his daughters, not to his widow, but to the nearest male Ashcombe of sound mind and lawful age. The document named him. A distant cousin, three times removed, a name Clementine had never heard spoken in her father's house. Julian Ashcombe. The son of a younger son who had emigrated to the West Indies some forty years past and never returned. Clementine had not known such a man existed. Her father had certainly never mentioned him.
She thought, briefly, of finding her mother, but the thought died almost as quickly as it formed. Lady Ashcombe had been sleeping poorly of late, drifting through the house in a perpetual twilight of worry, and this news would only send her further into her decline. No. Clementine would read the rest of the document first. She would understand precisely what they had lost before she broke her mother's heart with the knowing.
The second page was longer, denser, and worse.
Mr. Hathaway had appended a private note, set in a slightly different hand, written upon the same morning the will had been signed. It was addressed to no one in particular, or perhaps to the cousin who would one day inherit. Clementine's eyes moved across the words, and a coldness began at the base of her spine and climbed.
Mr. Ashcombe, the solicitor had written, has expressed an interest in the welfare of the family and has authorized me to convey to you, Miss Ashcombe, his willingness to enter into an arrangement. Should you find yourself in need of assistance, he stands prepared to discuss terms.
An arrangement. The word sat upon the page like a snake coiled in the grass. Clementine could read the solicitor's careful diplomacy in every stroke of the pen. The cousin had been informed of the will. The cousin had responded not with grief, not with curiosity, but with the cool, mercenary calculation of a man surveying an estate he already considered his own.
She set the page down. Picked it up again. Read the phrase a fourth time.
An arrangement.
Clementine Ashcombe was eight-and-twenty years old. She had been raised to be a wife, a mother, a chatelaine of a comfortable country house, and she had accepted, with the quiet resignation of a woman who had long since stopped expecting the world to cooperate with her desires, that none of these fates were likely to be hers. She was not, by any standard she could apply to herself, a beauty. Her hair was an unremarkable brown, her figure adequate but no more, her dowry a sum so modest that even the most desperate of fortune hunters had not, thus far, come sniffing at her heels with any real persistence. She had, in short, resigned herself to spinsterhood with the practical efficiency of a woman who understood that resignation was, in many cases, the only available course.
But resignation, she had discovered, was not the same as surrender.
She had managed the estate's meager accounts for the better part of two years, ever since her father's health had begun its slow and gentlemanly decline. She had paid the servants what she could, dismissed those she could not, and learned the precise value of every timber tree and every bushel of wheat that passed through the gates. She had written letters to creditors, negotiated with the butcher, and instructed the gardener to plant potatoes alongside the roses. She had done all of this without complaint, without drama, and without ever permitting her mother to see the true state of their finances.
And now a man she had never met, a man whose name she had never heard until this morning, was preparing to claim the house her grandfather had built, the land her great-grandfather had cleared, the orchards her father had planted as a young man with his own hands.
Clementine stood. The chair scraped against the floorboards with a sound that seemed, in the quiet of the morning, unreasonably loud. She crossed to the window and looked out across the lawn, where the first crocuses of spring were pushing their stubborn heads through the cold soil. The sky was the color of old pewter, and the air that crept through the window frame carried the particular stillness of a day that had not yet decided what sort of weather to become.
A small sound drew her attention back to the room. A folded note had been slipped beneath the door, its corner just visible against the dark wood of the floorboards. She crossed the carpet, retrieved it, and recognized at once the hand upon the envelope. Lady Phoebe Ashford. Her dearest friend, her most loyal correspondent, the woman who had once smuggled a contraband novel into the finishing school dormitory and taken the subsequent punishment with a serene smile.
Clementine broke the seal and read.
Dearest Clem, I am in Town for precisely three days, and I shall be at Lady Jersey's rout on Thursday evening. You will attend, because I have already told her you will, and I have something of considerable importance to discuss with you. Wear the green silk. It makes your eyes look less like wet slate and more like a respectable sort of moss. Ever yours, P.
Clementine read the note twice more, then folded it carefully and slipped it into her pocket. The green silk. She had not worn the green silk in nearly a year. She had not been to Town in nearly a year. The mere thought of plunging herself into the endless chatter and calculation of the Season made her feel as though she were being asked to swallow a large and very cold fish whole.
But Phoebe had written of something important. Phoebe never used the word important lightly.
She turned back to the solicitor's letter, still lying open upon the desk like a small disaster waiting to be dealt with. The cousin, Julian Ashcombe, had offered an arrangement. Clementine did not yet know the precise terms of this arrangement, but she could imagine them well enough. A man did not inherit a crumbling estate and a household of dependent women without calculating how those women might be made useful. There would be conditions. There would be expectations. There would, almost certainly, be a marriage proposed with all the delicacy of a commercial transaction, the bride offered up like a particularly fetching side of beef at the local market.
Clementine sat down again, very slowly, and pressed her fingers against her temples.
She had, she realized, a choice to make. She could write to the cousin, accept whatever proposal he was preparing to make, and preserve at least some portion of her family's dignity and comfort. Or she could refuse, allow the estate to pass to this stranger, and watch her mother fade into genteel poverty in some cramped boarding house in Bath, dreaming of the home she had lost.
Neither option appealed to her. Both, in their different ways, felt like a form of surrender.
A knock at the door broke her reverie. Mrs. Whitlow entered, her face still carefully composed, carrying a fresh pot of tea upon a small silver tray.
"Your mother is asking for you, miss. She is in the morning room and seems somewhat distressed."
Clementine smoothed the paper upon the desk, folded it once, and slipped it into the drawer. The lock clicked shut with a sound of small finality.
"Tell her I shall be down directly, Mrs. Whitlow."
The housekeeper hesitated, her gaze flickering toward the desk drawer with the same blank curiosity she had shown earlier, then withdrew. The door closed behind her with the soft click of a woman who had spent forty years learning to mind her own affairs.
Clementine remained seated for a long moment, listening to the silence of the house. Somewhere below stairs, a door closed. Somewhere above, a floorboard creaked beneath the weight of old timbers settling into their slow decay. The grandfather clock in the hallway began its measured chime, counting out the half-hour in notes that fell upon the air like small, polite warnings.
She rose, adjusted the fall of her simple morning dress, and went to find her mother.
Lady Ashcombe was seated in the window seat of the morning room, her hands folded in her lap, a cup of tea growing cold upon the small table beside her. The light from the window fell across her face in pale, unforgiving strips, and Clementine saw, with a small inward flinch, how much thinner her mother had become over the past months. The lace at her throat hung looser than it ought. The bones of her wrists pressed gently against the skin.
"Clementine, my dear. There you are."
The voice was warm, but it carried that faint tremor that had taken up residence in it these past six months, a small quaver that surfaced whenever Lady Ashcombe spoke of anything beyond the most domestic of matters.
"Mama. Mrs. Whitlow said you were distressed."
Her mother waved a hand, a small dismissive gesture that did not quite achieve the casualness it aimed for.
"Distressed is such a strong word, my love. I was merely thinking. One does so much thinking in this house, and there is so little else to do. I had a letter from your Aunt Matilda this morning. She is in Bath for the season, you know, and she writes that the Pump Room is excessively crowded and the lodgings quite beyond what one ought to pay. She wonders, in that tiresome way of hers, whether we might be induced to join her. As though we had the funds to take lodgings in Bath."
The words trailed off into silence. Lady Ashcombe lifted her teacup, saw that it was empty, and set it down again with a small sigh.
"Mama," Clementine said carefully, settling into the chair opposite, "I have had a letter this morning from Mr. Hathaway."
Her mother's gaze sharpened. The tremor in her voice disappeared, replaced by something colder, more alert.
"The solicitor. Has he news?"
"He has news, yes."
Clementine told her. She told her of the entail, of the cousin, of the careful mercenary language of the solicitor's note. She did not soften it. Lady Ashcombe was not a woman who benefited from being managed, and Clementine had learned, through long and painful experience, that her mother possessed a far stouter constitution than she allowed the world to see.
When she had finished, Lady Ashcombe was silent for a long moment. The clock in the hallway continued its steady counting. A sparrow landed upon the windowsill, observed them both with the bright, indifferent eye of a creature without mortgages, and flew away again.
"I see," her mother said at last. "And this cousin. What manner of man is he?"
"I do not know, Mama. I have never met him. I do not believe Father ever mentioned him."
"No. I confess I do not recall the name either. Your father had so many cousins, scattered across the empire like seeds in a high wind. I met perhaps a third of them in our early years together, and the rest remained figures in a family tree that I confess I never troubled myself to study."
Lady Ashcombe paused, and her gaze moved to the window, to the grey sky beyond, to the bare branches of the elm that stood sentinel at the corner of the lawn.
"He will want something," she said quietly. "This cousin. He will not have come forward out of pure family feeling."
"No," Clementine agreed. "I do not believe he has."
"Then we must consider carefully what it is he wants, and what we are willing to give him in exchange."
The words were measured, practical, entirely unlike the fretful Lady Ashcombe of recent months. For a moment, Clementine saw her mother as she had been in her younger years, before the slow erosion of fortune and health had worn her down to this quieter, more cautious creature. Lady Ashcombe had been the daughter of a country solicitor, raised to understand the value of careful negotiation, and that education had never entirely left her.
"Mama, I have been thinking," Clementine began slowly, "that perhaps I ought to go to Town."
Her mother turned from the window.
"To Town? But my dear, we have not the funds for Town. We have not the funds for anything beyond the barest necessities, and you know it as well as I do."
"Phoebe is there. She has written to me. She says she has something of importance to discuss."
"Phoebe is a dear girl, but she is also the sort of girl who considers a new bonnet a matter of considerable importance. What can she possibly have to say that warrants the expense of a journey to London?"
Clementine hesitated. The truth was, she did not know. Phoebe had written of importance, but she had not specified what sort. The possibilities ranged from a new piece of gossip to a matrimonial opportunity of precisely the sort that Clementine had long since abandoned any hope of securing.
But she could not say this to her mother. She could not say that she had been thinking of the green silk and Lady Jersey's rout and the cold, mercenary language of a solicitor's note and wondering whether the two things might somehow be connected.
"Perhaps," she said carefully, "Phoebe has heard of something. Some opportunity. She moves in circles where such things are discussed."
Lady Ashcombe studied her daughter's face with the particular attention of a woman who had known that face since before it had learned to compose itself into pleasant neutrality.
"You are thinking of marriage," she said quietly. It was not a question.
Clementine did not deny it.
"After a fashion, Mama. I am thinking of survival. The two are not, I fear, entirely distinct."
Her mother was silent for a long moment. Outside, the wind had risen, and the bare branches of the elm were beginning their slow, patient dance against the grey sky.
"Your father," Lady Ashcombe said at last, "would not have wished it. He would have wished you to marry for love, as I did, and to be happy in the manner of women in the songs."
"Father is not here to wish anything, Mama. And I do not believe I have ever been the sort of woman who marries for love in any case. I am too practical. Too set in my ways. Too fond of my own company."
The words came out more sharply than she had intended, and she saw her mother flinch slightly at them. She reached across and took Lady Ashcombe's hand in her own.
"I am sorry, Mama. I did not mean to speak so."
"No, no. You are right. You have always been right about these things, my dear. I was the romantic, and your father was the practical one, and now you have somehow become both of us at once, which I confess I do not entirely understand."
Lady Ashcombe squeezed her daughter's hand, and the grip was stronger than Clementine had expected.
"Go to Town, then. See your Phoebe. Hear what she has to say. And write to me. Write often, and write everything, and do not spare my feelings. I am not so fragile as you imagine."
"Yes, Mama."
Clementine rose, kissed her mother's cheek, and withdrew from the morning room. The corridor was quiet, the house settling around her with its small, patient sounds. She passed the closed door of her father's study and did not stop. She passed the drawing room, where the covers still lay upon the furniture like a host of patient ghosts. She climbed the stairs to her own chamber, where the green silk hung in the back of the wardrobe, waiting for precisely this summons.
The journey to London took two days by post-chaise, and Clementine spent most of it watching the English countryside transform from the familiar greens of home to the soot-stained sprawl of the capital. She read the letters Phoebe had sent over the years, tied in a ribbon at the bottom of her portmanteau, and she thought about what she would say when at last she had her friend alone.
The Ashford townhouse occupied a corner of Grosvenor Square, three stories of cream-colored stone behind black iron railings. The butler recognized her at once and showed her to the blue drawing room, where Phoebe was already pacing, her auburn curls escaping their pins in a manner her abigail would have despaired of.
"Clementine!" Phoebe crossed the room in four swift strides and caught both her friend's hands. "You look dreadful. I am so glad you came."
"Thank you for that honest assessment." Clementine permitted herself a small smile. "And thank you for having me. I would not have presumed, but I did not know where else to turn."
"Nonsense. You may always turn here. You know that." Phoebe drew her toward the settee and pressed a cup of tea into her hands. "Now. Tell me everything, and do not spare me the worst of it, for I can see it in your face and I would rather hear it from you than imagine it."
Clementine told her. The entail. Sir Marcus and his persistent courtship. Her mother's fretful face across the breakfast table. The quiet arithmetic of ruin.
Phoebe listened without interruption, which was itself a measure of her concern, for ordinarily she could not remain silent through a passage of three sentences.
"The entail," she said at last, when Clementine had finished. "That odious piece of parchment. I ought to have known your father would have made such a provision. He was excessively fond of doing the proper thing."
"It was the proper thing, I suppose. The estate must pass to a male heir. Cousin Harold is the only one, and he is already so deep in debt that I cannot blame him for wanting what little remains."
"And so he shall have it, and you and your mother shall have what, precisely? Three hundred a year and a cottage in the dower house?"
"If we are fortunate. And if Sir Marcus does not succeed in making me an offer I cannot refuse."
Phoebe set down her teacup with a decided clink. "We cannot have that. Sir Marcus is a scoundrel of the first order, and I would not see you tied to him for all the entailed estates in England."
"You are not the one who must live with the choice, Phoebe."
"I know it. I know it." Phoebe rose and crossed to the window, her silk skirts whispering against the carpet. "There must be another way. There is always another way, only sometimes one cannot see it for looking too hard."
Clementine watched her friend stare out at the square, where a nursemaid was walking a child in a blue coat around the garden. "I have thought of little else these past weeks. If I marry Sir Marcus, Mama is saved, and the worst of it is that I believe I could endure him. He is not cruel, merely tedious and rather too fond of brandy. But to bind myself to a man I do not respect, for the rest of my life, on account of three hundred a year and a leaky roof, "
"Stop." Phoebe turned from the window, and her face had taken on a particular expression, one that Clementine had learned to recognize from their schooldays. It was the expression Phoebe wore when she had conceived an idea and was about to inflict it upon the world. "I have it."
"I am afraid to ask."
"You need not marry Sir Marcus. You need only marry someone with money. And there is a great deal of money in this house at present, though my brother will deny it strenuously if you ask him."
Clementine set down her own cup. "Phoebe. You cannot mean Sebastian."
"I can, and I do."
"Your brother is the Earl of Ravenscar. I am the daughter of a penniless baronet with a positive genius for making unsuitable provisions in his will. He would never look at me twice."
"Sebastian looks at no one twice. That is rather the point. He has made a career of it. Every matchmaking mama in London has thrown her daughter at him, and he has evaded them all with the greatest of ease. But you, Clementine, are not like those girls. You are clever and steady and you do not simper. He might actually notice you, if only because you would be a change from the usual fare."
Clementine felt heat rise into her cheeks. "This is absurd. I did not come to London to angle for your brother. I came to consult with my dearest friend about the entail."
"And I am consulting you. I am telling you that my brother is wealthy, that he is honorable despite his reputation, and that he will never marry for love, which makes him the perfect candidate for a marriage of convenience. You would have his name and his fortune, and he would have a wife who does not plague him with affection or expect him to play the doting husband. It is, in fact, the ideal arrangement."
"You are talking nonsense."
"I am talking the most practical sense I have spoken in years. Come now, Clementine. You cannot accuse me of not understanding your position. I know what it is to be a woman with limited choices. I only ask that you consider an option you have not previously examined."
The door to the drawing room opened, and a manservant entered bearing a fresh pot of tea, followed by a tall figure in a dark coat who had the particular stillness of a man who wished to be elsewhere.
"Phoebe," said the Earl of Ravenscar, "you have a visitor."
"Sebastian." Phoebe's face betrayed nothing, which Clementine considered a small miracle. "May I present Mrs. Clementine Ashcombe, a very dear friend of mine from finishing school. Clementine, my brother, the Earl of Ravenscar."
Clementine rose and curtsied, though she felt the absurdity of the gesture. She had known Sebastian Ashford since she was fifteen years old and had spent a summer at the Ashford country house with Phoebe. He had been a sullen young man of two-and-twenty then, already half in love with a melancholy of his own devising. He was a sullen man of seven-and-twenty now, though the melancholy had refined itself into something more formidable.
"Madam." He bowed, and his eyes, which were the same grey as Phoebe's but considerably colder, met hers for a brief moment. "I trust my sister has not been talking your ear off."
"She has been exceedingly kind," Clementine said.
"She is always exceedingly kind. It is her worst quality." He moved toward the sideboard, where a decanter of brandy stood in patient attendance. "Forgive my intrusion. I did not realize you had company."
"You are not intruding." Phoebe settled onto the settee again and patted the cushion beside her. "Come and sit with us. We are talking of tedious things, and I am sure you have something tedious to contribute."
"I have a great many tedious things to contribute. It is my principal talent." He poured himself a measure of brandy, though it was barely noon, and turned to face the room. "What tedious things are you discussing, if I may ask?"
"Entails," said Phoebe promptly. "And marriages of convenience. And how thoroughly odious men can be when they are permitted to make laws about property."
Sebastian's expression did not change, but Clementine thought she saw a flicker of something at the back of his eyes, there and gone. "I see. And what has occasioned this discussion?"
"Clementine's father," said Phoebe, with the cheerful lack of tact that was her particular gift, "has left her nothing but an entail and a very persistent suitor. She has come to Town to consider her options, and I have been suggesting one or two."
"Phoebe." Clementine's voice came out sharper than she had intended. "That is quite enough."
"Why is it enough? It is only the truth. Sebastian knows what an entail is. He has several of his own, though he is too well-bred to mention them."
"I have, as it happens, three." Sebastian took a small sip of his brandy. "They are the bane of my existence, but one learns to live with one's banes."
Clementine stared into her teacup. She could feel the warmth of Phoebe's sympathy beside her and the weight of Sebastian's attention across the room, and she wished, with sudden and acute longing, that she were back at Ashcombe, listening to her mother fret about the preserves.
"Forgive my sister," said Sebastian, after a pause. "She has a habit of taking up causes and pressing them upon others with very little consideration for anyone's dignity, including her own."
"I am doing no such thing," Phoebe protested. "I am only being practical."
"You are being precipitous. Mrs. Ashcombe has been in Town for a quarter of an hour, and you have already proposed some scheme or other. I know you, Phoebe."
"And you, brother, are a confirmed old bachelor who refuses to see what is in front of his nose."
"Phoebe," Clementine said, and this time her voice was quiet, "please."
Phoebe subsided, though not without a reproachful look at her brother, who returned it with a faint, unreadable expression that might have been amusement.
The silence stretched. Clementine became aware of the sounds of the house: a clock ticking in the corridor, the distant clatter of the kitchen, a horse's hooves on the cobblestones outside. She set her teacup down on the table beside her, very carefully, and folded her hands in her lap.
"I ought to go up to my room," she said. "I am fatigued from the journey, and I have taken up too much of your afternoon."
"You have taken up nothing of the sort." Phoebe rose and took her arm. "Come. I will show you your chamber, and you may rest, and we shall talk more at dinner. I have invited no one else, so it will be only the three of us, which is much more comfortable, I think."
"Phoebe." Sebastian's voice was quiet, but it carried. "A word before you go."
Phoebe paused at the door and turned. Clementine, who had been on the point of stepping out, found herself still.
"I shall leave you," she said.
"No." Sebastian crossed the room in two strides, and he was, Clementine observed, taller than she had remembered. "Stay, if you please. What I have to say concerns you as well, and I would rather not have it repeated in two separate conversations."
He turned to his sister. "You have been proposing to Mrs. Ashcombe that she marry me."
Phoebe's chin came up. "I have been suggesting that she consider the possibility."
"You have been proposing that I marry your friend in order to solve her difficulties, and you have been doing so without consulting me in the slightest."
"It is not the sort of thing one consults about, Sebastian. It is the sort of thing one does."
"On the contrary. It is precisely the sort of thing one consults about." He turned to Clementine, and his gaze was steady and unexpectedly direct. "Mrs. Ashcombe, I beg your pardon for my sister's presumption. She has a kind heart, but she has never learned to let other people's troubles alone."
"It is not a trouble," Clementine said, and was surprised to find her own voice steady. "It is a situation. There is a difference."
"Yes." He regarded her for a long moment. "There is."
"And I am not, in fact, angling for your assistance. I came to consult with my friend. That is all."
"I did not suppose you were." He paused. "But my sister is not entirely wrong, you know."
Phoebe's eyebrows rose. "Sebastian?"
"There is a practical solution to Mrs. Ashcombe's dilemma, and I am, by an inconvenient chance, in a position to provide it. I have a title, I have a fortune, and I have a sincere disinclination to marry for any of the usual reasons. I would not be an object of pity, Mrs. Ashcombe. I would be, I hope, an object of tolerable convenience."
Clementine felt the room tilt slightly, though nothing in it had moved. "My lord, you cannot be serious."
"I am, unfortunately, always serious. It is another of my principal talents, as my sister will attest."
"You have known me since I was fifteen. You despised me then, I think. You have had no occasion to revise the opinion."
"I did not despise you then. I was a sullen young man who found all company tedious. You happened to be included in that tedium, but only because I found all company tedious. It was nothing personal."
"How reassuring."
"It is not meant to be reassuring. It is meant to be honest." He set down his glass. "I will not press you, Mrs. Ashcombe. I am not in the habit of pressing anyone. But I will say this: if you are in earnest about wishing to escape the entail and the baronet, I am willing to discuss the matter in a rational fashion, at a time and place of your choosing. Without my sister present, if you prefer."
"And without any expectation of affection on either side," Phoebe put in, unable to contain herself. "That is the important part. Sebastian does not believe in love. It is his great consolation to himself, and he will not inflict it upon you."
"Phoebe," said Sebastian, in a tone that was almost gentle, "pray be quiet for one moment and allow the lady to draw her own conclusions."
Clementine looked at Phoebe. She looked at Sebastian. She looked at the door, which led to a corridor that led to a bedchamber that led, ultimately, to the street, and to a post-chaise, and to Ashcombe, where her mother was waiting for an answer to a question she had not yet been asked.
"I will think about it," she said. "I promise nothing else. But I will think about it."
"That," said the Earl of Ravenscar, "is all I ask."
He bowed and withdrew, taking his brandy with him, and the door closed behind him with the soft, definitive sound of a decision that had been set in motion.
Clementine did not sleep that night. She lay in the unfamiliar bed at Ravenscar House and watched the fire die in the grate, turning from gold to copper to ash, and she thought about marriage the way one might think about a long journey to a country whose language one did not speak. She had never been in love. She was not certain she believed in it. The girls at finishing school had talked of it constantly, in breathless whispers during needlework and louder debates during the supervised walks in the park, and Clementine had listened with the patient detachment of a student observing a foreign religion. She had felt nothing. She had envied nothing. She had concluded, with the practical certainty of a girl who had been taught to keep accounts from the age of twelve, that love was a luxury item, like French silk or Venetian glass, and that some households could afford it and some could not, and that the Ashcombes had never been able to afford it, and that she herself would do well to stop window-shopping.
Sebastian Ashford was not in love with her. She was almost certain of it. He had looked at her with interest, not with longing, and his interest had been the interest of a man examining a proposition, not a woman. She found this restful. She found it, to her own surprise, rather attractive. A man who wanted to discuss terms was a man she understood. A man who wanted to press his suit with poetry and pressure was a man she would have to outmaneuver, and she was tired of outmaneuvering.
The thought startled her. She had not realized, until that moment, how tired she was of the game. Every drawing room was a field of battle. Every dance was a skirmish. Every conversation with her mother was a negotiation in which she was expected to surrender something, and the something was always herself. The ton was exhausting. The marriage mart was exhausting. Sir Marcus Drayton, with his damp palm and his insinuating smile, was exhausting beyond all measure. The Earl of Ravenscar, cold and pragmatic and entirely uninterested in her affections, was the first man in months who had looked at her as though her mind were worth engaging.
She turned on her side and pulled the coverlet to her chin. The linens smelled of lavender and something sharper, cedar perhaps, and the bed was firmer than her own at home, and the curtains were a deep green that caught the firelight and held it.
She would go to the musicale. She would observe Sir Marcus. She would endure one more evening of her mother's anxious hovering and Phoebe's cheerful scheming. And then, when she returned, she would give the Earl of Ravenscar her answer.
She slept, toward dawn, and dreamed of a country house with long windows and a garden she did not recognize, and a man standing at the end of a path who might have been Sebastian or might have been no one at all.
The musicale was held at the home of Lady Castlereagh, whose husband had recently been elevated to a marquessate and who was determined to celebrate the fact by inviting every notable family in London to endure two hours of Italian arias. The drawing room had been cleared of its usual furniture and filled with rows of gilt chairs arranged in a half-moon before a small dais. Candles blazed in every sconce. The air was thick with the competing perfumes of fifty women who had each applied an amount of scent appropriate to a much smaller room. Clementine, seated between her mother and Phoebe, felt her eyes watering before the first note had been sung.
Lady Ashcombe had dressed with unusual care. Her gown was a deep plum velvet, slightly out of fashion but undeniably fine, and she had pinned a small brooch at her throat that had belonged to Clementine's grandmother. She sat very straight, her gloved hands folded in her lap, and she smiled at everyone who passed with the fixed, brittle smile of a woman who knew she was being observed.
"Mama, you look beautiful," Clementine said, quietly.
Lady Ashcombe's hand found hers and squeezed. "I want you to be proud of me," she whispered. "I know I am not what I was. I know people talk. But I want you to see that I am trying."
"I see it," Clementine said. "I always see it."
Phoebe, on Clementine's other side, was conducting a survey of the room through a small opera glass she had borrowed from her mother. "The soprano is tolerable," she reported. "The tenor is a disaster. Lady Whitmore is wearing the turban again. Lord Pemberton is asleep in the third row, which is rude but perhaps merciful. And Sir Marcus Drayton has just entered and is looking for you with the persistence of a man hunting a fox."
Clementine's stomach tightened. "Where?"
"Far corner, by the fern. He is pretending to study the card catalogue. He is not studying the card catalogue. He is studying you in the reflection of the glass case behind him, which he believes to be a mirror but which is in fact a window into the conservatory. He has miscalculated."
"Phoebe," Lady Ashcombe said, in a warning tone.
"I am merely reporting, Mama. Clementine asked me to be useful. I am being useful."
Clementine smoothed her skirt. The gown she wore was one of her better ones, a deep blue silk that Phoebe had lent her, and she was conscious of it in a way she had not been conscious of clothing in some time. It fit well. The color was becoming. She had allowed her maid to pin her hair higher than usual, and she had worn the small sapphire earrings that had been her father's last gift to her mother.
She did not know why she had dressed with such care for an evening she intended to endure rather than enjoy. She told herself it was habit. She told herself it was the obligation of any well-bred woman to look her best in public. She did not examine the possibility that some part of her was performing for an audience of one, because that audience was not in the room, and because she had not yet admitted, even to herself, that she wanted him to see her.
The soprano began to sing. The tenor joined her, proving Phoebe's assessment accurate. Clementine sat through the first half of the program in a state of vigilant composure, answering her mother's murmured asides and Phoebe's whispered commentary with the minimal responses required, and she did not look toward the fern.
At the intermission, the company rose and circulated. Clementine accepted a glass of lemonade from a passing footman and positioned herself beside Lady Ashcombe, who had been intercepted by Mrs. Whitcombe, the vicar's wife, and was being drawn into a conversation about the parish almshouse. Clementine was therefore, briefly, unoccupied. She had time to take a single sip of lemonade before Sir Marcus Drayton appeared at her elbow, moving through the crowd with the oily grace of a man who believed himself welcome everywhere.
"Mrs. Ashcombe," he said, taking her hand before she could prevent it and raising it to his lips. "You are radiant this evening. That blue becomes you extraordinarily. I must compliment your mother on her taste, or perhaps I should compliment nature, for I suspect no human artifice could produce such an effect."
"Lord Drayton." She withdrew her hand. The dampness of his palm lingered on her fingers, and she resisted the urge to wipe it on her skirt. "I did not see you seated."
"I arrived late. A matter of business, I am afraid, nothing of interest. But I could not bear to miss the pleasure of seeing you. I have thought of little else these past days."