Chapter 6

They had barely left the train station in Marlborough when Annabelle admitted defeat—translating Thucydides in a rumbling carriage was impossible. She lowered the book.

“There she is,” Hattie cheered from the bench opposite.

Annabelle grimaced. Her stomach was roiling. Next to her, Catriona calmly kept reading while she was bounced around on her seat, and Hattie’s chaperoning great-aunt seemed equally unaffected, already snoring openmouthed in the corner across.

“You look a touch pale, greenish, even,” Hattie observed with her keen artistic eye. “Are you sure it is wise to read in a moving vehicle?”

“I have an essay due.”

“You are on a break now,” Hattie said gently.

Annabelle gave her a grave stare. “That was hardly my choice.”

She was still struggling with the fact that she was en route to a ducal house party. How naïve of her to believe that securing an invitation for the ladies would suffice. Lucie had been adamant that Annabelle, too, go to the party—three wooden horses behind enemy lines were better than two—and since Lucie held the purse strings, here she was, on her way into the lion’s den. She had tried a number of wholly reasonable excuses, the most reasonable being that she had nothing to wear for the occasion. Her trunk, tightly packed with Lady Mabel’s walking dresses and evening gowns from seasons past, was currently thudding about on the carriage roof. Lucie herself had stayed back—she was a known radical, and the duke didn’t suffer radicalism gladly.

The duke is not home.

Even if he were, it was highly unlikely that he’d remember a woman like her. Crossing paths with commoners must be a wholly unremarkable experience for him. Still. Was it truly just reading Thucydides that made her feel ill? The last time she had been inside a nobleman’s house, it had been a disaster . . .

She moved the carriage curtain and peered at the landscape slipping by. Snowflakes flitted past the window, leaving the hills and sweeping ridges of Wiltshire white beneath a cloudy morning sky.

“Will it be long now?” she asked.

“Less than an hour,” Hattie said. “Mind you, if it keeps snowing at this rate, we might become stranded.”

Hopefully, the roads to Kent would remain clear. Be back in Chorleywood on December twenty-second, Gilbert had written. A little over a week from now, she would be scrubbing floors, making pies, stacking firewood, all with a fussy child strapped to her back. Hopefully, three months of scholarly life hadn’t made her soft. Gilbert’s wife, like her or not, needed all the help she could get.

“Say, just what made you become interested in this?” Hattie was eyeing The History of the Peloponnesian War in Annabelle’s lap.

She studiously avoided glancing at the dancing letters. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I had a choice in the matter. My father taught me ancient Greek as soon as I could read, and the wars in Messenia were his specialty.”

“Was he an Oxford man?”

“No, he went to Durham. He was a third son, so he became a clergyman. He mostly taught himself.”

“If only they had educated women sooner,” Hattie said, “there would be fewer books about carnage, and more about romance and beautiful things.”

“But there’s plenty of romance in these books. Take Helen of Troy—Menelaus launched a thousand ships to win her back.”

Hattie pursed her lips. “Personally, I always found a thousand ships a little excessive. And Menelaus and Paris fought over Helen like dogs over a bone; no one asked her what she wanted. Even her obsession with Paris was compelled by a poisoned arrow—what’s romantic about that?”

“Passion,” Annabelle said, “Eros’s arrows are infused with passion.”

“Oh, passion, poison,” Hattie said, “either makes people addle-brained.”

She had a point. The ancient Greeks had considered passion a form of madness that infected the blood, and these days, it still inspired elopements and illegal duels and lurid novels. It could even lead a perfectly sensible vicar’s daughter astray.

“Plato was romantic, though,” Hattie said. “Did he not say our soul was split in two before birth, and that we spend our life searching for our other half to feel whole again?”

“Yes, he did say that.”

And he had found the whole notion ridiculous, which was why his play about soulmates was a satire. Annabelle kept that to herself, for there was a dreamy glow on Hattie’s face that she did not have the heart to wipe away.

“How I look forward to meeting my lost half,” Hattie sighed. “Catriona, what does your soulmate look like? Catriona?”

Catriona surfaced from her book, blinking slowly like a startled owl. “My soulmate?”

“Your other half,” Hattie prompted. “Your ideal husband.”

Catriona blew out a breath. “Why, I’m not sure.”

“But a woman must know what she desires in a man!”

“I suppose he would have to be a scholar,” Catriona said, “so he would let me do my research.”

“Ah.” Hattie nodded. “A progressive gentleman, then.”

“Indeed. How about yours?” Catriona asked quickly.

“Young,” Hattie said. “He must be young, and titled, and he must be blond. That rich, dark-gold color of an old Roman coin.”

“That’s . . . quite specific,” Catriona said.

“He will sit for my paintings,” Hattie said, “and I can hardly have a grandfatherly Sir Galahad, can I? Think, have you ever seen a knight in shining armor who wasn’t young and fair?”

Annabelle bit back a snort. Small village girls talked about knights and princes. Then again, for a girl like Hattie, knights and princes weren’t just creatures from a fairy tale, they came to dine with her parents in St. James. And if one of them married Hattie, he would shelter and indulge her, because at the end of the day, he would have to answer to Julien Greenfield.

Even she might consider marriage under such circumstances—being well treated, with an army of staff at her command to look after the household. As it was, soulmate or not, marriage would mean an endless cycle of scrubbing, mending, and grafting for a whole family, with the added obligation of letting a man use her body for his pleasure . . . Her fingertips dug into the velvet of the coach seat. What would be worse? Sharing a bed with a man she didn’t care for, or with one who had the power to grind her heart into the dirt?

“Annabelle,” Hattie said, inevitably. “Tell us about your soulmate.”

“He seems occupied elsewhere, doesn’t he? It’s just as well that I mean to rely on my own half.”

She evaded Hattie’s disapproving eyes by glancing out the window again. A village was drifting past. Honey-colored stone cottages lined the street, looking edible with the snow icing roofs and chimney tops. A few fat pigs trundled along the pavement. The duke took care of his tenants, at least.

By the gods. “Is that Claremont?” She touched a finger to the cold windowpane.

Hattie leaned forward. “Why, it is. What a lovely house.”

House and lovely did not describe the structure that had moved into view in the far distance. Claremont rose from the soil like an enchanted rock, huge, intricately carved, and implacable. Sprawled against a gently rising slope, it oversaw the land for miles like a ruler on a throne. It was utterly, frighteningly magnificent.

The clop-clop-clop of the horses’ hooves seemed to die away unheard in the vastness of the cobblestoned courtyard. But a lone figure was waiting at the bottom of the gray limestone stairs leading to the main house. Peregrin Devereux. He was bleary-eyed and his cravat was rumpled, but he had a firm grip when he helped them out of the carriage.