Page 29 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

“The double play is permitted when you’ve held that card for three turns,” Rachel said, which was entirely invented, and they both knew it.

“You made that up.”

“I remembered it late.”

“Rachel!”

“Oh, fine.” Rachel put the cards face down on the table and took a biscuit instead. “You were winning anyway.”

“I was winningbeforeyou began inventing rules.” Anna set her cards down and reached for her chamomile tea. It was just past ten; the clock on the mantelpiece had announced it. The fire had settled from bright to comfortable. “When did you start cheating at cards?”

“I prefer to think of it asadapting to circumstances,” Rachel said. “Frederick does it.”

Anna looked at her.

“Not at cards,” Rachel clarified. “At everything else. When a situation is not going the way he wants, he adjusts the terms until it does.” She turned her teacup in its saucer, and her voice shifted. “He has always done it. He was thirteen years old when he decided he was going to…” She paused. “When things at home became difficult. He simply rewrote the terms for himself. Decided what he was going to be and became it. He doesn’t realize that I noticed, at least some of it…”

Anna was quiet for a moment and did not press.

“He carries a great deal,” she said carefully.

“He always has.” Rachel looked at the fire. “I understood it less when I was younger. I thought he was simply like that. Very steady, very certain, nothing touching him.” She turned her cup again. “It took me longer than it should have to understand he had built walls around himself to be that way.”

Anna thought about a desk full of papers and a door that was open late at night. She considered the way he sat at the dinner table, with the controlled surface firmly in place. Yet beneath it, she was increasingly certain, something alive and special lay in wait.

“He is proud of you,” Anna said. “He doesn’t say it, but it’s there.”

Rachel looked at her. “You think so?”

“I am quite certain.” Anna set down her cup. “The way he watches you when you’re talking. When you said something at dinner last week about the east wing curtains, I watched him. He looked at you like you had said something perfectly correct that he wished he had thought of.” She paused. “He just didn’t say so, because…”

“Because he never says so,” Rachel finished. She was quiet for a moment. “I am still irritated with him, you know.”

“I know.”

“About the village.”

“I know.” Anna smiled. “Though, I think he was not entirely wrong, even if he was entirely wrong about how he said it.”

“Yes,” she said, finally, with the reluctance of a fair person reaching an unfavorable conclusion. “I suppose that’s about right.” She pointed at Anna. “Don’t tell him I said that. Don’t you dare.”

“Never.”

“He’ll be insufferable. His head will grow ten times its current size.”

“Imagine the sight!”

Rachel laughed, and Anna laughed with her, and the rain went on against the windows, and the fire went down by degrees, and they sat together in the comfortable quiet of two people who had stopped needing to fill the silence.

I cannot get myself to sleep, despite the chamomile tea and good company.

Anna had gone to bed at eleven with every intention of sleeping well. But the sleep would not come. She lay in the dark listening to the rain, which had not stopped. Her mind turned as midnight came. It was not on large things.

She thought about Maura, in the house in London, and hoped she was well. She thought about the statement she had written, which was out of her hands. She had written it in three hours and felt, afterward, as though she had set something down that she had been carrying since the morning itself. She thought about Percy eating the chicken.

She thought about the Duke…

Frederick. I wonder if his parents ever called him Fred, or even Freddie? He has spoken so little of them, although I get the looming feeling that not all was well in the house prior to their deaths.