“And that is a terrible thing?”
“Perhaps not. But we all could use someone to tell us, from time to time, that our action is ill-advised. Mr. Somerset is not that person for you, nor do I see you as that person for him—you are too grateful, too determined that he should never hear a harsh word or an adverse opinion from you.”
He startled her. How did he know? How had he sensed the little flutters of anxiety that had characterized her interaction with Stuart of late—the cost she must bear to maintain a false perfection?
“You seem to have thought more about my marriage than I have,” she murmured.
“Perhaps I have,” he said.
Her heart was once again in her throat. “Because you are a student of human nature?” she said, her voice full of forced levity.
“Because—” He stopped.
“Because?” She hoped she didn’t sound too curious, or breathless. She was both.
He pulled the Debrett’s toward himself, and turned the pages purposefully, as if looking for something. “You remember your question about music hall?” he asked, without glancing at her.
“Yes?”
“I have never been to music hall. All my life I’ve only ever been interested in symphonic concerts.”
She thought she heard distant artillery, but it was only the slow explosion of his words against her eardrums.
“That time in Paris, Madame Belleau was hoping to seduce me with a tableau of two entertwined women—I was to join you if everything went according to her plans.”
“But—”
He slid Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage toward her. It was open to the page on the Earldom of Wyden. The book was a slightly older edition, from before the passing of the seventh earl. Five sons were listed for the titleholder. Her attention immediately went to the fourth one: His given name was not William.
Do you remember that hushed-up scandal about Mr. Marsden, the late Lord Wyden’s second-youngest son? Georgette’s answer had been correct. But Lizzy’s question had been wrong.
“You are thinking of my brother Matthew,” said Mr. Marsden. “He is the fourth; I’m the middle one. I left home because I disagreed with my father’s decision to disown Matthew, who was too young and too na?ve to survive on his own.”
“Why did you not say so sooner?”
When she first brought it up, for instance. It would have been embarrassing then. It was ten times so now. She cringed to think how she’d tried to intimidate him with sins not his own.
“I thought perhaps you’d be less wary of me,” he said, “if you believed me to be inclined solely toward music hall.”
“You would tolerate this level of misconception for me to be less wary of you?”
He smiled, a weary smile. “I did, didn’t I?”
She rose, too agitated to remain sitting. “Why?”
He rose also. “Do you not know already?”
She said nothing. He collected his things. Then he came and kissed her just below her ear, an intimate and entirely inappropriate place. And while his kiss burned, he saw himself out.
Her Grace Sarah, the Dowager Duchess of Arlington.
Verity’s vision blurred. “We’ve a duchess coming to dine here?” she asked weakly.
“Oh, yes. The master calls at the Arlington house. He’s been a guest at Lyndhurst Hall—that’s the Arlingtons’ country seat, don’t you know—a good dozen times since I came to work for him,” said Mrs. Abercromby with staunch pride. The middle class might very well despise the aristocracy in this day and age. Those in service, however, preferred the old elite, who on the whole treated their staff much more liberally than did the suspicious and tight-fisted middle class. “But it’s the first time Her Grace will be dining here. The master is moving up in the world, I tell you, Madame Durant.”
The world was a small place. Verity had no idea Mr. Somerset was acquainted with the Arlingtons at all, let alone that the acquaintance was of such standing.
She did not dread cooking for dignitaries. Among the guests who had dined at Bertie’s table had been literary luminaries of the age, tycoons wealthier than entire cities, and even a former president of la Troisième République. But the thought of cooking for the Dowager Duchess of Arlington made her tremble: It would be like cooking for a stone statue of Hera.