"I did it in front of you," said Lavinia. "That was the point. You would not have believed it from me in this room. You would have said I was jealous of the girl, or spiteful, or old. So I let you watch her take it." She paused. "She did not deny it, Edmund. She did not even look surprised. She has been arranging to leave you for some time, and she had the sense to do it before you made a fool of her, and of yourself, and of this family."
He stopped walking. He had his father's height and his father's dark hair and, God help him, his father's habit of standing with his back to a window so that one could not see his face. But his voice he had from no one. It was entirely his own, and it had been breaking her heart in small ways since he was a boy.
"I asked you a plain question last week," he said. "I asked whether, if I offered for Miss Bennett, you would stand beside her. You said you would think about it. Is this your answer?"
"My answer," Lavinia said, "is that Lady Arabella Finch arrives on Thursday, as was settled in August, and that you will be civil to her."
"I am always civil."
"You are always polite. It is not the same thing."
He laughed, without any pleasure in it. "And if I tell Lady Arabella on Thursday that I have no intention of marrying her?"
"Then you will tell her so. She is a sensible woman, and has been jilted once already, so she will bear it better than most. But you will not tell her that you mean instead to marry your daughter's governess." Lavinia leaned forward very slightly. "Do you know what they will say?"
"I can guess."
"No. You cannot. You have never been on that side of a drawing room. They will not say that the Duke of Ashcombe has married beneath him. Men marry beneath them every Season and are called romantic. They will say that she trapped you. That she worked her way in through the nursery, using a motherless child as her ladder. They will say it in front of her, smiling, at every dinner she ever sits down to. They will say it in front of Rose, when Rose is old enough to understand. And when Rose comes out, there will be mothers who will not let their sons dance with her, because of what her stepmother was." She sat back. "That is what you would be giving that young woman. That is your forever."
The Duke was silent a long moment.
"You have never seen her with Rose," he said.
"I have seen her every day for eleven months."