The Duchess War

The thought of being the duchess—of fielding those whispers, feeling the weight of everyone’s stare everywhere she went—made Minnie feel dizzy. But she had the opportunity to provide for herself, for her great-aunts, for good. She shook her head. “I know it would be a disaster. But I have no choice. I must do it.”

She looked up to find that the duchess was actually smiling at her. “How refreshing,” the other woman said. “Here I thought you would wail and beat your breast amidst protestations of love. But you’re singularly unromantic.”

Minnie gave a sharp jerk of her head in denial. “I can imagine castles and dukes as much as any woman.” But she would never have imagined Robert. He was better than any prince. She could see the gleam in his eye as he told her he wanted the peerage abolished. If it were just the two of them, she might have fallen in love with him. It was a miracle, given her past, that she’d met someone she could come to love—and who seemed to return her regard in some form. Rejecting that felt dangerous. Some gifts might not come around a second time.

And yet proclaiming herself a duke’s wife? That was the kind of pride that went before not a mere fall, but a tumble off a steep cliff.

She could see every jagged stone waiting at the bottom.

She was well and truly caught between hope and hubris.

“I could be romantic,” she said softly. “But romance is also a luxury I can’t afford.”

“How ironic.” The other woman stared at her. “I actually think you’d be good for him, if only you were someone else entirely.”

Minnie laughed and shut her eyes.

The duchess leaned forward. “So let us see how your principles fare when you have a choice. I’ll give you five thousand pounds.”

Minnie’s eyes jerked open. She looked at the woman—she was sure she had to be joking. But the duchess watched her with all seriousness.

“You will,” Minnie said, dazedly. Five thousand pounds—it seemed an impossible amount. Enough to live on. Enough to assure her great-aunts’ future. Enough to form a reasonable dowry, if that’s what she wanted, or for her to move to the continent. It was too much money.

But then she considered the gown the duchess was wearing—all that fabric, yards and yards of lace, the careful stitchery. That gown itself probably cost more than a hundred pounds.

“I’ll have to refuse him for it, I suppose.”

The duchess shrugged. “I can’t pretend that I can offer you enough to compensate you for marrying him. He would probably settle more on you in marriage than a mere five thousand. But… I told you, I know him. He’s rather too persistent for a bare refusal.” The woman looked off into the distance, as if remembering something. Her lips compressed in distaste. “He tries, and he tries, and he tries again. With Robert, he won’t give up until you slap him in the face as hard as you can. Betray him once, and he’ll never look your way again.”

The duchess had said she didn’t love her son. But she was an odd woman—cold and angular one moment, fragile the next. She was a shard of stained glass, casting colors about the room, and yet capable of slicing everything she touched. In one moment, she seemed to care about her son. In the next…

“You can’t actually want me to hurt Robert,” she said. “You cannot be asking me to do that.”

The duchess shrugged. “It would be good for him, I think. He’s too romantic as it is. Too trusting.” She looked up at Minnie and shrugged without an ounce of apology.

A strange, hard woman. Maybe Robert could be made into a creature like her…

“I don’t know that I can do that,” Minnie said hoarsely. “Hurt him so badly that he…”

But she was already envisioning how it might be done.

“You seem a capable woman,” the duchess said with a frown.

Minnie’s own secrets had once been thrown wide to the world. How could she do it to someone else? How could she do it to him?

But how could she marry him?

Minnie met her gaze. “I don’t know,” she repeated, “that I can do that.”

After the duchess left, after Minnie fended off Caro and Eliza’s well-meaning questions, she went up to her bedroom. The house on the farm was not large; Minnie had a small chamber in the front, just above the ground-floor parlor. From here, she could see the acres of cabbage fields, picked over in preparation for winter, waiting to be plowed under. But her view was mostly occluded by the barn. On cold days, the heat from the cattle would release steam when the doors were opened. Today, only little wisps of white escaped the barn, scarcely visible through the rain that had begun.

The property had once been a hunting box with some attached acreage. Caro and Elizabeth had made it into a farm. They’d pooled what little money they had been between them, had hired men to lay the fields and plow the ground, year after year. Even with all that work, though, the land wasn’t truly theirs. Caro had been left the hunting box for her lifetime only. After she passed away, the property would go to some distant cousin.

With five thousand pounds, Minnie might purchase her great-aunts’ farm when the time came.

With five thousand pounds, she could do that and go very far away. Wilhelmina Pursling might disappear. She could go where nobody had ever heard of her. Somewhere where she wouldn’t have to make herself small to try and please a man. All she would have to do to get that safety was precisely what she’d promised Robert in the first place. She would have to be his enemy.

But the alternative…

She could simply tell the duchess no. For all the woman talked about knowing her son, Minnie didn’t believe she had any notion of who he was. Robert wouldn’t be happy with some proper peer’s daughter. She’d seen the light that came into his eyes when he talked about his plans for the future. If she did this, she couldn’t pretend it was for his benefit.

It was for hers. Because she would rather betray a man she could come to love than face the crowd again.

She could see her pale reflection in the window glass, superimposed on the farm. She looked herself over—those too-pale cheeks, the scar on her face. Eyes that shifted around, refusing to fix on any one spot. She held up her hand and watched it tremble.

“You’re only considering this because you’re scared,” she told herself.

But that wasn’t quite true. It was because she was terrified.

Chapter Seventeen

DUSK CAME, BUT MINNIE HAD NOT YET COME TO A DECISION. She was pacing in her room when she heard a pounding on the door below. There was the noise of scuffling and then a shriek from the entry beneath her feet.