I told myself it was nothing.
The telling required some effort. I had spent the morning in my usual occupation — managing Lady Audrey's household correspondence, which she dictated and I transcribed, and which constituted the single most reliable cure for romantic optimism known to the nineteenth century.
Nothing restores one's sense of proportion quite like copying out three pages of instructions regarding the proper starching of table linens while privately nursing the memory of a duke's private room and a question that had rearranged one's entire understanding of the future.
I was a governess in all but name now — Victoria having grown rather beyond the age of requiring French conjugations — and my duties had expanded accordingly into whatever the household required and nobody else wished to do.
By the time afternoon arrived I had transcribed eleven letters, reorganised two cupboards, and convinced myself on at least four occasions that my instincts regarding the covered letters were entirely hysterical.
I was not hysterical. I was merely thorough — a distinction I had been waiting for someone to acknowledge for the better part of four months.
I informed Lady Audrey that I required items from the milliner on Carrew Street — ribbons, for the mending — and she waved me off with the distracted benevolence of a woman who has ceased to track one's movements because one has proven consistently unremarkable.
I purchased actual ribbons, tucked them under my arm as evidence of a legitimate errand, and presented myself at the front door of a duke's residence with the composure of a woman who had every right to be there — which I had not, but composure is nine-tenths of credibility, and I had made a study of it.
Edward's man showed me up without comment — he had developed the diplomatic blindness of a servant who has decided that whatever is occurring above stairs is considerably above his pay grade.
I found Edward at his desk, and there were letters — not the ordinary correspondence of a gentleman — these were stacked in quantities. Suggesting a man who had been receiving a very great deal of communication recently and had not troubled to conceal it until approximately one second after I entered the room.
His arm came across the desk with a smoothness that would have been impressive under other circumstances.
"Rose." He smiled. "I did not expect you."
"Evidently," I said, and left it at that.
He was not quite himself. There was a tension in his shoulders, a careful neutrality in his expression that had not been present the previous evening, when he had looked at me as though I were worth dismantling his entire life for.
He looked, at present, like a man who had a great deal on his mind and had decided none of it was available for discussion.
"Just correspondence," he said. "Estate matters. Nothing that need concern you."
"Are you quite all right?" I asked.
"Perfectly." A brief, distracted smile. "I have a good deal to attend to this afternoon, I am afraid."
I looked at his arm resting with elaborate casualness across the desk, and at the smile that did not quite reach his eyes, and understood I was being managed — gently, by someone who had a great deal of practice at it.
"Then I shall leave you to it," I said.
"Don't." The word came out before he had apparently decided to say it. He stood and crossed to where I was, some of the careful neutrality falling away.
He took my hands. "Not like that. There is much to arrange, before — " He stopped. Started again. "You are my light, do you know that?"
He had various names for me in private, all absurd, all delivered with such sincerity that one's ability to find them absurd was severely compromised.
"You employ that word rather loosely," I said.
"I employ it precisely." He brought my hands to his lips. "Don't worry. I love you. All will be well."
I looked at him — at the sincerity, and at whatever sat behind it that he had not told me — and decided Victoria was right and I was being hysterical, and said goodbye, and left.
I stopped at the milliner's on the way back and spent longer than strictly necessary selecting between two nearly identical shades of cream ribbon. I handed the ribbons to Lady Audrey's maid, climbed the stairs, and found Victoria in the sitting room.
She looked up from her book. "You have that look."
"I have no look whatsoever," I said, which was the response I always gave, and which had never once convinced her.
"You have the look of a woman who has just done something she has decided to regret." She set the book aside. "Sit down and tell me at once, because I shall only imagine something worse."
I sat. I told her about the letters, the arm across the desk, the distracted smile, the thing behind his eyes he had not named.
Victoria listened with the attentiveness she always brought to my disasters — completely, without interruption, with the expression of a physician who has already diagnosed the complaint and is waiting for the patient to finish.
She was the closest thing I had to a sister, and I did not use the phrase loosely. I was an orphan of unspecified origins — no particular claim on the word sister in any technical sense, no way of knowing whether a real one existed somewhere in the world.
Victoria had performed the office for as long as I could remember. She was the only person who knew about Edward. The only person I trusted with information that could reduce my entire existence to rubble if it reached the wrong ears.
"He is a duke," she said, when I finished.
"I am aware of that," I said. "The title rather precedes him."
"Dukes have correspondence. Estates to manage, tenants to answer, parliamentary obligations, family solicitors — matters of business that would fill three ordinary men's desks."
She tilted her head. "Did it occur to you that perhaps his correspondence was simply correspondence?"
"It occurred to me," I said. "Briefly."
"And he covered it quickly, I suppose."
"Quickly," I said. "And fluently. Which is almost worse than guilt — guilt, at least, is legible."
"Men cover their correspondence quickly," Victoria said, with the serenity of someone dispensing ancient wisdom.
"They find it disagreeable to be observed in the act of administration. It diminishes the mystique." She looked at me with something between amusement and patience exercised at considerable personal cost.
"Rose. He promised you an island. Do you truly imagine he is concealing something so sinister it cannot survive a Tuesday afternoon?"
When she put it in those terms it sounded, I will admit, somewhat unhinged. "He promised me an island," I said anyway.
"He promised you an island. That is not a thing one says idly." She squeezed my hand. "Trust him. He has given you every reason to."
I was almost persuaded — sitting in the specific state of almost-persuasion that passes for contentment when one is determined to be optimistic against one's better instincts — when the door opened.
Lady Audrey Lancaster appeared with the particular efficiency she brought to communications too significant for the servants but beneath the dignity of a formal summons. She looked at Victoria.
"His Grace has sent word," she said, holding up a folded note with the Lancaster seal already broken.
"Duke Beaumont will be paying a visit tomorrow morning. An important matter to discuss with the family."
She did not look at me — not the casual oversight of a woman distracted by more pressing concerns, but the specific, deliberate non-looking of a woman who knows precisely where everyone in a room is standing and has made a considered decision about which of them merits her attention. I was not, it appeared, among the family.
The door closed. Victoria said something — something warm and explanatory about estate business and the particular protocols governing a duke's formal visit to a countess's household.
I heard approximately none of it, because I was still thinking about the letters.