A Lady for a Duke

by Alexis Hall

“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.”

“You see the world too starkly, my dear.” “The world sees all things starkly,” returned Viola, a little sharply. “That is rather the problem.”

Oh God, this was a torment. Wanting so terribly to be seen, and terrified of what it might mean if she was.

Whatever you did, or did not do, whether it was just or the reverse, no matter how necessary it felt, life moved mercilessly forward.

“I think, perhaps, you are inclined to think too well of everyone, and not enough of yourself.

But he had not realised how feeble his efforts had been, thwarted from the outset by the part of him that spoke in his father’s voice and insisted it alone saw him clearly. Knew him truly. As the weak, worthless failure of a man he was, for whom any virtue was façade and any attempt at betterment was futile.

But there is something awry in the world, is there not, that we women must give our everything to men in life, and they theirs to us in death?”

“I am not sure love unshown is really love at all. What good does caring for a person do if you’re never there when they need you?”

For left to her own devices, she would have fled the company of other women, locked herself away in dark rooms in Devon where nobody could look at her and see all the ways in which she didn’t fit.

They were good dreams, though she sometimes wept for them when she woke.

But there was a larger loneliness, one that came from inhabiting a space she’d had no choice but to build for herself, only to find that nobody could inhabit it with her.

“Suffering isn’t something we earn, Gracewood. It’s something we bear.”

Strength is not the capacity to hurt. Or the capacity to remain unhurt. It is…what we let ourselves feel. And how truly we love.”

“Forgive me for what may be an exaggerated sense of self. But I believe who I am resides in some element of me that is immaterial and immortal. Not my body.” “You say that, but you aren’t engaging yourself in carnal acts.” “Not right now,” he agreed mildly. “But I have certainly engaged myself in several.”

It was the most futile of desires—the wish to shield him from his own past. Especially given he had already survived it.

the hard truth of her reality. That in spite of all protests she had accepted the ultimatum society laid before her. That she had chosen to live her life in half-worlds and liminal spaces and to be content with an echo of what she wanted, instead of the whole of it.

“If I had made a monster, firstly I wouldn’t keep saying he was a monster—because monstrosity is very much in the eye of the beholder—and secondly I would give him a name and teach him to read and take him everywhere with me, and tell everyone how terribly proud I was of him. And as a consequence, nobody would have to get murdered or go to the North Pole.”

What a marvel it was. What freedom. To be a woman unabashedly in love beneath a multitude of stars.