Page 43 of A Virgin to Tempt the Duke

Lady Oldbarrow was quiet for a moment. Frederick watched her look out at the party.

“Of course,” she said, pleasantly. She turned to go and then paused. “That is all.”

She went back to the party. Frederick stood on the terrace and drank from his glass, which he had not intended to do, and found it had gone warm.

Anna was in the middle of reading when Rachel came home. She heard the carriage, and then voices in the entrance hall below, and then Rachel’s footsteps on the stairs. She set down her book and met Rachel in the doorway of the sitting room, still wearing her hat and coat. She was resplendent in the bright energy she brought back from social events she had enjoyed more than she expected to.

“Mrs. Blickard is engaged,” she announced, pulling off her gloves. “The widow will be marrying a baronet from Shropshire. She looked absolutely terrified and absolutely radiant at the same time, which I have decided is probably a good sign. I always wanted that for her!” She sat down on the chair across from Anna and took her hat off and set it on the table beside her in the vague direction of a hat stand. It did not reach the hat stand. “And Lord Alardock has dyed his hair. He thinks no one has noticed. Every single person has noticed!”

Anna put down her pen entirely. “What color?”

“A very dark soot, sort of brownish black.” Rachel’s expression conveyed volumes. “He is seventy-one years old. No one has said anything to him because they are all curious to see how long it continues. It is terribly fascinating!”

“Rachel,” Anna said.

“I’m serious! It is a genuine experiment in social endurance. We are all participants.”

Anna laughed. Rachel looked satisfied.

“How was the rest of it?” Anna asked.

“As these things are.” Rachel settled more fully into the chair and looked at the ceiling. “The right people were there. Frederick did everything correctly. He spoke to several bores and managed not to look bored, which is its own achievement.” She tilted her head back down. “Lady Oldbarrow was there, which was not announced.”

“Was it all right?”

“Lady Oldbarrow is always all right. She is one of those people who makes things more all right simply by being in them.” She paused. “She asked after you.”

Anna was quiet.

“You don’t have to look concerned,” Rachel said. “She is entirely on your side. She was from the first moment she understood the situation, and I cannot imagine she has revised that since.” She crossed her ankles. “She is very fond of Frederick, in the way of someone who sees him clearly and is fond of him anyway.”

“Do many people do that?” Anna asked. She said it lightly, but not entirely lightly.

“Not as many as should,” she said simply. “He makes it rather difficult.”

Anna looked at her book, at the half-finished page.

“He has always been better at seeing things than letting himself be seen,” Rachel said. Her voice was quieter now. “Even as a boy. I think… I think he learned very early that being known was not necessarily safe, and he never entirely unlearned it.” She looked at the window. “Though I notice…” she began, and then stopped.

“What?” Anna said.

“Nothing.” But she was smiling. “Tell me what you’ve been doing all afternoon.”

Anna looked at her for a moment. “Reading,” she said. “And attempting to befriend Percy properly.”

Rachel’s smile became a grin. “How didthatgo?”

Percy was asleep on the windowsill.

This was, Anna had concluded, his preferred occupation in the afternoon. He enjoyed the second windowsill from the end of the first floor corridor, which caught the sun from approximately two o’clock until four, at which point it shifted away, and Percy relocated to wherever the warmth had gone. She had learned this by watching, over the course of a week, the way she had learned everything about him.

She came down the corridor with her book and stopped a few feet short of the windowsill. Percy did not open his eyes. But his ears moved, which she had come to understand was his version of acknowledgment.

She sat down in the corridor. Not dramatically, not in any kind of performance of patience. Simply down, her back against the wall and her book in her lap, because the afternoon light was good here and she had thirty pages left in her novel and this was a perfectly reasonable place to read. She read.

Let us see how this goes…

Percy slept, or did whatever cats did that resembled sleep while remaining alert to all relevant developments.