The Duchess War

Another meaningless gesture from Sebastian—this one, his arms thrown up to the heavens and then quickly lowered.

“At least make an attempt not to strike me in the face, Sebastian,” Violet said. “And for God’s sake, we both know Robert didn’t mean it literally. He wanted us not to embarrass him—but you’re managing that perfectly well without words.”

Miss Pursling’s eyes darted between the two of them. If ever there was a woman to pick up on what had not been spoken, it was Miss Pursling. He could imagine her reconstructing what he must have told the two of them.

He felt his cheeks warm. “You might as well speak,” he muttered gruffly.

“I knew perfectly well what you meant,” Sebastian said. “But I’ve always found that the quickest way to make someone relent in his foolish edicts is to take every command literally and to perform it with flagrant obedience.”

“It is not too late to toss you from this car,” Robert said. The train was shifting back and forth, scuttling along the tracks. It hadn’t yet come up to full speed—they were still barely out of London, after all.

“You see,” Sebastian said to Miss Pursling, “my cousin’s true nature revealed: unforgiving, cruel, and violent.”

Robert did his best not to whimper and was mostly certain that he succeeded.

“And incidentally,” Sebastian told her, “I did not threaten to create a human breeding program at Cambridge to prove my theory. For one thing, one does not prove a theory in that sense of the word. One tests it by considering the next most likely explanation. For another, that story has been much exaggerated in the retelling. I simply noted that one could use simple principles to determine, after the fact, the probability that a certain don’s wife had—”

“Ha. Yes.” Robert jumped into the conversation before it could run further afield. “So maybe there are some things we’d all be happier not discussing.”

“Forgive my cousin,” Sebastian said with a slow shrug, “for he is a bit of a prude. But my apologies; I was intruding into your very delightful conversation. Please, continue with whatever it was you weren’t saying to each other.” He leaned back.

“Indeed,” Violet said. “Don’t mind us. We’re scarcely even here. And rest assured, if you’d like to talk of secrets, I’ll never repeat a one. I’m known for my trustworthiness.”

“This is true,” Sebastian said. “The Countess of Cambury is like a deep, dark hole—secrets go in, but none of them ever come out.”

“Sebastian,” Violet replied, calmly looping the yarn about one of her needles, “it is neither proper nor respectful to let a woman know that you think of her as nothing more than a hole.”

Miss Pursling choked, and then coughed, and Robert sank an inch lower in his seat, wishing that he had not set his hat on the rack above his head. He needed something to cover the violent flush in his cheeks. He should never have let either one of them anywhere near her, and if they kept on in this fashion, he was never going to forgive them.

Violet’s face was unruffled; she continued on with her knitting.

Sebastian waved a hand. “My apologies; the countess is, of course, a sweet flower of womanhood.”

Shut up. Shut up.

Thankfully, Sebastian did not take his apology any further.

Violet seemed to accept this without comment. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “In fact, don’t mind any of us.” She blinked and held up her needles before her as if constructing a wall.

“I think we may have started this conversation off on the wrong foot,” Robert said finally. In fact, if the conversation had been animate, the merciful thing to do would have been to take it out behind the barn and shoot it.

“Is that so?” Miss Pursling looked out the window.

“I just thought that perhaps if we dealt with one another fairly for one afternoon, that we might—”

“Oh, never believe him when he talks that way!” Violet interrupted, still pretending to be engrossed in her needlework. “He may rattle on for as long as he wishes about fairness and equality, but he is the only one who refused to play princess.”

Robert’s smile felt a little sickly. This was precisely the sort of thing he had most feared. Shoot the conversation? He wanted to beat it over the head and dump it in an unknown grave.

Miss Pursling looked over at the other woman, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “Play princess?”

“Yes,” Violet answered. “We did when we were children. Over the summers, his father would go off visiting, and he’d leave Robert with his sister—Sebastian’s mother. Robert, Sebastian, and I used to play a game that they called ‘Knights and Dragons,’ and that I called ‘Extremely Boring.’ They got to be knights, but I had to sit around as the princess and wait for them to rescue me.”

“I see.”

“So one day,” the countess continued serenely, “while they were charging about pretending to attack the dragon, I wrote a note saying that I had run away to tread the boards.”

Mr. Malheur snorted. “I believe you added that you meant to give your virtue to an entire group of bandits first.”

The countess didn’t seem the least bit offended by this. “At the time I had no notion what that entailed, but my governess was constantly warning me to protect my virtue with my life. It seemed the worst threat I could muster.”

Miss Pursling leaned forward with a slight smile on her face. She lifted her eyes to Violet’s. “What did your valiant knights do when your defection was discovered?”

“They decided it was their duty to hunt me down and feed me to the dragon as punishment.” Violet frowned at the mess she’d made of her knitting and then calmly began to pick out the last row. “They were not successful. In any event, it made for a far more amusing game.”

“Mud was involved,” Sebastian supplied.

“Thereafter,” Violet continued equably, “it was agreed that it was patently unfair for me to play princess every time. So we tossed a coin for it. But Robert never would play princess—not even when it was his turn.” The countess frowned at Robert, and he looked about.

“A coin only has two sides,” he said. “There was no way to assign a side to me.”

“Except by—”

Robert raised a hand. “And now is not the time to get into methods for making coin tosses balance amongst three. Suffice to say, I would have made a very bad princess.”