A Lady for a Duke

by Alexis Hall

I’m afraid that settles it.” Having come to the end of the letter she had been reading, Lady Marleigh brandished it in a rather warlike fashion. “We shall have to intervene.”

First line

“My dear, an accomplishment is inventing the hydraulic press or investigating the properties of nitrous oxide. It is not making a picture of a willow tree on cloth.” “Don’t you think that’s rather a matter of perspective?” Viola gazed upon her only mildly blood-spattered willow. “If putting pictures on cloth was the province of men, you may be quite sure it would be hailed as the miracle of the age.”

“Very well. So Miranda is miserable. Why must you confront me with it?” “Not to hurt you.” “I know that.” Viola glanced up again, mustering the semblance of a smile. “You may be somewhat ruthless. But you have never been cruel.” To Viola’s surprise, her sister-in-law actually blushed a little. “I’m grateful you recognise the distinction. I’m well aware that I’m not the easiest woman to like.”

continued. “He’s so biddable. And quite magnificent without his clothes on.” Retrieving her needlework, Viola tried to use her half-finished willow tree to distract herself from unwelcome images. “We are related. The former I knew. The latter I had no need to.”

Viola’s mouth curled irresistibly into a smile. “And cleave I shall, though, of course, I will never marry.” Lady Marleigh did not smile back. “Never have friends. Never marry. Is that really the life you want, Viola?” “It is the life I must have. And still more to my liking than the one I was intended to live.” “You see the world too starkly, my dear.” “The world sees all things starkly,” returned Viola, a little sharply. “That is rather the problem.”

“The church is a dumping ground for superfluous lordlings, what the law doesn’t know won’t hurt it, and men are more understanding than you think. After all, what is love but understanding?” “And”—Viola lifted her brows into sardonic little arches—“Badger understands you, does he?” “Well,” admitted Lady Marleigh, with a smile, “not what I say much of the time. But he understands that I am the worst kind of arrogant, unsentimental, managing female, and he adores me.”

It was what it represented. Legacy. Home. Family. Things she was, at last, liberated to want, but completely unable to have. There were times she could almost have laughed at how absurd it was. This endless dance of what was given and what was taken away, what felt like freedom, and what its cost had been. A children’s game of barter: this piece of string for a marble, a sea-smoothed pebble for a peacock feather, your self for your future, your choices for the loss of them. After all, it was better to laugh than to weep.

trees twisted in naked entreaty to an unremitting sky.

I like it

Again Viola hesitated, wondering how best to explain so delicate a situation to Little Bartholomew without telling too many lies or too much truth. “I think,” she went on carefully, “the Duke is very sad. And because he is sad, he is making his sister sad.”

“Mr. Dowling tells me that terrible things happen to wicked people.” A chill came over Viola. A slow, sick chill that started below her stomach and ran up her back and over her shoulders. “I’m afraid that Mr. Dowling is wrong. Wicked people often prosper, and the good often suffer.”

The problem with long coach journeys—even putting aside the tedium and the discomfort—was that they gave one time to think. And the problem with thinking was that it furnished one with a comprehensive list of all the ways in which one’s most recent decision was terrible.

The only thing worse, Viola realised, than being trapped in a small moving box was being trapped in a small moving box full of Lady Marleigh’s opinions. “We cannot be friends as we once were. He could find me repulsive or absurd or simply incomprehensible. And, even if he does not, I may still have destroyed for both of us the memory of everything we used to be.” “Or”—to be well acquainted with Lady Marleigh was to understand that fortitude was not always a virtue—“he could simply be happy you’re alive.”

“What other options? Men and women are permitted to interact in three ways: marriage, ruination, and polite indifference.”

Apparently it’s never been taken, though many have tried, including Warwick the Kingmaker.” “I would not have thought you a historian, Viola.” At that, she laughed. “Nor has any person who has ever attempted to teach me history.

“I am the Viscountess Marleigh”—being all of five foot had never stopped Lady Marleigh from looking down her nose when she wanted to—“and you are a terrible butler.” “That’s because,” Viola put in quickly, “he’s a groom.”

Morgencald had been built to withstand everything, including change.

Janner frowned. “Lady Marleigh? But the Viscount wasn’t married.” “This,” she said firmly, “is the wife of the present Viscount Marleigh.” A soft “oh” of understanding stirred Janner’s candle flame. “If it’s not speaking out of turn to say, we were all very fond of His Lordship. Fair broke His Grace’s heart to come back from the war alone.”

Gracewood needed her. Their whole lives they had been there for one another, from the playing fields of Eton and Cambridge to the killing fields of Salamanca and Waterloo. She had left him only once, and only because the vicissitudes of war had torn her from him. She could not abandon him again.

His head was full of mist. It used to comfort him. It used to soften the edges of the raw, empty places of his world, so he didn’t cut himself bloody on them. It used to help him forget. But the memories were too strong, the good and the bad, running together like the blood and the mud in the rain at Waterloo.

“I’m not a ghost.” He lowered himself into a chair by the fire, pain clanging distantly from his leg. “You had better be. Otherwise I just shot a guest, and I’m not so lost to humanity as to think that’s acceptable.”

Her cheek felt warm against his fingertips. And the things she knew, the ghosts always knew. But on most nights they used that knowledge as he had once used a rifle: to maim and bloody and murder. “You’re kind tonight. You’re not usually so kind.” “Maybe tonight I’m telling you the truth.” “The truth isn’t kind. Why do you think I…?” He gestured at the library, its guttering fire, and its chaos of bottles.

All those bodies were someone’s friend. Someone’s brother. Someone’s Marleigh. He’d not only lost, he’d taken. And ever since, when the dead clustered close about him, in their blue coats and bullet wounds, they always wore his Marleigh’s face.

There was supposed to be anger, hatred, grief. He was a coward and a failure. He had sacrificed everything he most valued, all to spite a man who had never valued him. Everything for nothing. And devils laughing in the corners of his mind. Why would a ghost be sorry? And how was her skin so soft? He caught a lock of her hair, rough-smooth, like the wrong side of silk.

Talking about his father

“I doubt he’d want to be a corpse either, rotting in some foreign field.” That made her shudder. “Not all are meant for the life they are given. Perhaps there could have been some mercy in what happened—beyond your understanding.” “My understanding? I knew him better than my own soul. He may well have been my soul, for what little I am worth without him.”

“I wanted to be left alone.” “By guests or ghosts?” “Both. I’m not fit for company.” “Are ghosts terribly discerning in that regard?” Another laugh, this one catching painfully in his throat. “No. That’s the problem. They’re like great-aunts. Can’t get rid of them, no matter what you try.”