She hadn’t touched him back, hadn’t even bent to pat his head. She’d simply glanced at him, told him to show some decorum, and kept walking.
So he didn’t move to touch her now. He didn’t think she would like it, and he felt too raw to risk a rebuff.
“Well, then,” he said briskly. “Thank you for taking time from your indifference to meddle in my marriage prospects. I thought she was made of sterner stuff. Apparently.”
“Oh, no,” the duchess said. “I approve of her. Find another girl just like her, but a marquess’s daughter this time.”
“You know,” he said, “I have no idea who her people really are. Pursling isn’t even her real name.”
“No?”
“She was born Minerva Lane.”
At that, his mother gasped aloud. “Minerva Lane?”
“You know who she is?” He looked at her in surprise. “She told me it would be a scandal.”
“Scandal? Her? No.” She shook her head violently. “Scandal is what happens when girls are too easy with their favors—a simple matter to overcome, one that can be papered over, if not forgotten, by a good marriage and enough money. Miss Lane wasn’t ruined, Robert. She was destroyed. Utterly destroyed.”
Chapter Nineteen
MINNIE HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO SPEAK to her great-aunts on the prior evening.
But there was no putting off the conversation when the Duchess of Clermont sent over a draught from her bank. She brought them into the front room and sat them down.
“There is something you both should know,” she said. “Yesterday, when Lydia came to get me, it was because Stevens had gone to Manchester. He knows that there is no Miss Wilhelmina Pursling. That I’m an imposter. He knows I was born Minerva Lane.”
The two women gasped and then looked at each other. “Do they know what—”
Minnie shook her head. “They don’t know everything.”
“Don’t scare me like that,” Caro said, putting her hand over her heart. “But what are we to do? With Gardley gone…”
Minnie looked away. “As it turns out, I’ve come into some money. Five thousand pounds.”
Her great-aunts stared at her. The women looked so different, and yet the shocked expressions on their faces were mirrors for each other.
“Dear,” Eliza finally said. “We know that this is a difficult time. But five thousand pounds is a great deal of money, and we would hate it if, ah, if…”
They really thought she might have come into it by unsavory means. If they thought that, they might wonder…
“No,” Minnie said bitterly. “I earned this, fair and square.” Well, maybe it hadn’t been fair. And maybe it hadn’t been precisely square. Still, she’d earned it legally. Legally and…rectangularly. That would have to do.
“How?”
“I had an offer of marriage. His mother didn’t want me to accept.” Minnie looked away. “I didn’t.” Two words, and still they broke her heart.
But she’d long since given up any desire to wish that things were different. Wishes were stupid, foolish things.
“An offer of marriage?” Caro echoed. “But from whom? I cannot imagine—” She cut herself off as the downstairs maid entered.
“Miss,” she said, nodding to Minnie. “Misses. There’s someone here to speak with Miss Pursling.”
“Who is it?” Eliza asked.
Lydia. Lydia had come. Minnie would be able to explain everything, make everything right—
But the maid ducked her head, suddenly self-conscious, and Minnie knew with a sense of great foreboding who it was.
“His Grace,” she said, “the Duke of Clermont.”
Her stomach turned to ice, but her hands seemed too warm. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to run into his arms or to clamber out the window to escape. She simply stared ahead of her, the draught for five thousand pounds folded in her pocket in silent accusation.
“Oh,” Eliza said.
“I had heard rumors.” Caro rubbed her head. “But it sounded so improbable. You would have told us if there was anything to it. Wouldn’t you have?”
Minnie couldn’t make herself meet their eyes.
“I—maybe we should discuss this later. Later.”
Caro nodded. Eliza came to her feet, leaning heavily on the cane she used indoors. “Minnie,” she said softly. “If you don’t want to marry him, you don’t have to. We’ll never force you to do it. No matter what has happened—what you’ve said, what you’ve done. No matter what you choose. We love you.”
When he was shown in a few moments later, Minnie was fighting tears. She couldn’t even turn to look at him. She could only mark the sound of his boots against the floor, coming close, stopping a few feet behind her.
He stood, perhaps waiting for her to acknowledge him. But she couldn’t. If she turned around now…
“I thought of climbing up to your window,” he said, his voice grave, “but I’d have to take off my boots to attempt brick, and besides, the window I thought was yours looked suspiciously narrow. Now I know why Juliet had a balcony. So I decided on the remarkably unromantic route—I knocked on the front door.”
She let out a shuddering laugh. “Romeo was also sixteen.” She took another deep breath, schooled her face to calmness, and then turned around. “I thought you’d said your farewells already. What are you doing here?”
In answer, he reached for her hand. While her back had been turned, he’d removed his gloves and laid them on the table. She should have pulled away, but she was still too raw to resist. His fingers entwined with hers. His hands were soft and strong against hers.
“All right,” he said. “I’m just going to come out with this. I ruined everything.”
“You ruined everything,” Minnie repeated. “You ruined everything.” She stared at him, wondering if he’d somehow lost his mind overnight. He nodded in response to that, though, and she gestured to a seat. Her head was spinning.
“You told me,” he said, sitting down, “that you couldn’t be a duchess. I waved off your concerns.”
She blinked and then sat in a chair opposite him.
“It didn’t start coming together until my mother told me that she’d paid you to refuse me, not to expose me. And that didn’t make sense either, once I thought about it. My income is a minimum of ten thousand pounds a year—something everyone knows. Given a choice between five thousand pounds and marriage to me, any rational person would choose me. If you were as coldly calculating as I thought, we’d be married, not glaring at each other across two feet of space.”