“You have put me beside the companion again,” said the Duke of Rookwood in a low voice, bending toward his aunt’s ear before the dinner gong. “The whole table of eligible beauties you collected at such expense, and you seat me beside Miss Polk.”



“Did I?” asked the Dowager Duchess with perfect innocence, smoothing her black silk. “How careless of me. Do sit, Lysander. You are blocking the soup.”

He sat. One did not argue with the Dowager Duchess of Rookwood in a dining room she had effectively commandeered before two dozen guests. One merely endured her as one endured weather. And there, on his right, exactly where she had been placed the night before and the night before that, was Araminta Polk, companion to Lady Fane, dressed in the same gray gown she had worn since the house party began.

Her gloves were mended at one finger. Her eyes were fixed with great concentration on the arrangement of her cutlery, as though she would rather be anywhere on earth than seated beside the most sought-after bachelor in three counties. The Duke of Rookwood knew precisely what his aunt was about—or believed he did.

He had come to the country to escape exactly this: the mothers, the daughters, and the endless soft siege of a man with thirty thousand a year and no wife. His aunt had promised him a quiet fortnight of shooting. Instead, she had filled her friend’s house with marriageable young women and then, with the straightest of faces, kept seating him beside the one woman at the table no mother in England would ever have put forward.

A poor relation. A paid companion. A nobody.

He found, against all expectation, that he was grateful.

“Miss Polk,” he said, “we meet again. My aunt’s seating chart appears to have a defect.”

“It does, Your Grace,” Araminta agreed gravely, and at last looked up. Her eyes, he noticed, were a clear and steady hazel, and there was something at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile but knew where one was kept. “I have tried to mention it to her. She says the place cards must have become muddled in the draw.”

“There is no draw.”

“There is never any draw on the nights I am seated beside you, Your Grace. It is a most particular draw. It troubles no one else.”

He surprised himself by laughing. It was a short, genuine laugh, the first the house party had managed to get from him. Down the table, the Dowager Duchess did not look up from her soup, though the corner of her own mouth twitched in a manner her great-nephew would have found highly suspicious had he troubled to look.

He did not look. He was occupied.

For here was the thing he had not expected and that his cunning old aunt had perhaps expected all along. Araminta Polk was the only person at that interminable table who did not want anything from him. The beauties wanted a coronet. Their mothers wanted a settlement. The gentlemen wanted his influence, his horses, or his ear for some scheme.

Miss Polk, who had nothing and could reasonably hope for nothing, wanted only to get decently through dinner without dropping a fork. So she spoke to him as one human creature to another—plainly, dryly, with a quick and lucid mind she made no attempt to dim. The Duke of Rookwood, who had been bored for the better part of a decade, found himself leaning toward her over the soup like a man toward a fire.

“You think the place cards are muddled?” he asked.

“I think your aunt is a schemer.”

“Oh, certainly she is a schemer,” said Araminta. “But you must not blame her too harshly, Your Grace. She is fond of you, and the fond always scheme. It is only the indifferent who leave us entirely to ourselves.”

She buttered a roll with great composure. “I should not refine upon it, however. She cannot mean anything by seating you beside me. I have no fortune, no family worth the name, and a gown that has been turned twice. I am the safest woman in this room—the one woman your aunt may be certain you will never truly look at. That is likely why she does it. To give you a rest from being hunted.”

The Duke of Rookwood looked at her. Then he truly looked at the turned gray gown, the mended glove, and the clear, unbothered eyes. He felt the floor of his certainty shift very slightly beneath him.

“And if I did look?” he asked.

Araminta Polk set down her roll. For one moment, the dryness left her, and something more guarded moved behind the steady hazel eyes. It was the look of a woman who had long ago decided not to want things she could not have, and who did not thank him for unsettling the arrangement.

“Then I should think you very unkind, Your Grace,” she said quietly. “To amuse yourself with the only woman here who cannot afford to be amused.”

She glanced down the table. “Lady Fane is signaling that she wants her shawl, and I must go and be useful, which is what I am for.”

She rose and went, leaving him with his soup and the dawning, disagreeable suspicion that he had behaved like every other careless great man she had ever served.

He thought about her all the next day, which annoyed him. He told himself it was nothing more than the idle interest of a jaded man in a novelty. To prove it, he resolved to pay her no particular attention at all.

He kept that resolution precisely until dinner, when he found himself watching her across the candlelight. She sat among the great folk, neither cowed by them nor reaching toward them, doing the small invisible work of a companion. She passed Lady Fane her drops, retrieved a fallen fan with a quiet word, and deflected a sharp old dowager’s rudeness with a gentleness that left the woman somehow ashamed without ever knowing why.

No one at that table thanked her. No one truly looked at her. She was furniture to them—useful and unseen—and she bore it with a dignity so complete that it did not resemble endurance at all, but a form of sovereignty.

The Duke of Rookwood watched her and found that he could look at nothing else.

That night, a young buck of the party, deep in his wine, made a loud and careless jest about the companion in the turned gown. The table tittered. Araminta merely lowered her eyes and continued with her dinner as though she had not heard.

But the Duke of Rookwood had heard.

He set down his glass and remarked into the fading laughter, in a voice of perfect ducal frost, that he had found Miss Polk’s conversation the most rewarding at the table that fortnight, and that he pitied any man too dull to discover the same.

The laughter died. The young man went scarlet.

Araminta lifted her startled hazel eyes to the Duke across the candles. For one unguarded instant, the careful companion vanished, and only the woman remained, looking at him as though no one in a very long time had stood between her and a cruelty.

His aunt, at the head of the table, said nothing whatever. She merely smiled into her wine.

He told himself it was still the novelty. A man grown weary of flattery would naturally find plain dealing refreshing, as a man sick of marzipan might crave bread. But when the dinner gong rang the following evening and he came down to find Miss Polk seated at his right hand again in her gray gown, the supposed draw having struck for the fourth time, he felt something leap inside him that had nothing whatever to do with bread.

“Miss Polk.”

“Your Grace.” She did not quite meet his eyes. “I asked your aunt to move me. She was unaccountably deaf.”

“I asked her not to.”

That brought Araminta’s head up.

“I have been a fool,” he continued quietly beneath the clatter of the table. For once, he did not care who watched the Duke of Rookwood lean toward a paid companion. “You said I should be unkind to amuse myself with you. You were right, and I am ashamed. So I shall not amuse myself.”

He paused. “I shall be entirely in earnest, which I have not been with a living soul in ten years. You may make of that what you will. I find I do not want a rest from being hunted, Miss Polk. I find I want to stop running. I had not known the difference until a poor relation in a turned gown declined to flatter me over the soup.”

Araminta had gone very still.

“Your Grace,” she said, and her voice was not quite steady. “You must not. People will hear. They will say cruel things—chiefly of me. A companion who sets her cap at a duke is the lowest creature in any drawing room. I have only my good name, and it is the single thing I own outright.”

“Then I shall give them nothing cruel to say,” he answered. “I shall not flirt, whisper, or lean.”

He sat back deliberately, placing a proper distance of polished mahogany between them, and spoke in an ordinary, audible voice.

“I shall court you, Miss Polk, in daylight, before my aunt, Lady Fane, and the entire gossiping pack of them—plainly and honorably, as a man courts a woman he means to marry. There is nothing cruel in that. There is nothing they can make small of. Let them say the Duke of Rookwood lost his heart at his aunt’s dinner table. It is only the truth, and I find I do not mind it in the least.”

Down the table, the Dowager Duchess of Rookwood finally looked up from her plate. She caught her great-nephew’s eye and then the white-faced wonder on the companion beside him. Very slightly, she allowed herself the smile she had been saving all fortnight.

“Lysander,” she called sweetly down the length of the candlelit table, with silver and porcelain gleaming between them and a painted fan idle at her wrist, “do stop muttering at poor Miss Polk and let her eat. Though I confess”—her old eyes twinkled, wicked and fond—“I cannot think how the place cards keep becoming so muddled. It is almost as if Providence has a hand in it.”

“It is not Providence,” said the Duke of Rookwood, “and we both know it. But I shall forgive you the scheming, for I think it the only truly kind thing anyone has done me in a decade.”

He turned back to Araminta, and his voice gentled.

“She saw what I was too proud and too tired to see. She kept setting the right woman beside me until I had the wit to notice. I am very slow, Miss Polk. You will have to be patient with me. But I should like the chance to be patient with you, if you will allow it, for forty years or so—in daylight, before everyone, with nothing hidden and nothing to be ashamed of.”

Araminta looked from the Duke to the twinkling old Dowager and back again. The careful armor she had worn for years—the dryness, the refusal to want, the safety of being the woman no one looked at—cracked clean across. What came through it was not a companion’s composure at all, but a young woman’s whole unguarded heart.

“I have been seated beside you four nights running,” she said, and a laugh broke through the brightness in her eyes. “I told myself each night that it meant nothing, because nothing was the only thing it could safely mean.”

She pressed her mended glove briefly to her lips, gathering herself.

“And now you say this in front of everyone. Your Grace—Lysander—if you are in earnest, if you truly mean to do this thing in daylight where no one can call it shameful—”

“I am in earnest. I have never been more so.”

“Then yes,” said Araminta Polk. “Yes, and yes again. I shall be very glad to be patient with you for forty years, and I shall never once let you forget that it was your aunt who managed the whole of it over the soup.”

The Dowager Duchess of Rookwood raised her wineglass an inch to no one in particular and drank.

They were married before the leaves had fully turned, in the village church near the house where Araminta had once been only a companion and from which she was now to depart as a duchess. The ambitious mothers and their eligible daughters had gone home long since, defeated by a seating arrangement they never did understand.

The Duke of Rookwood, who had come to the country to escape being chosen, discovered that the only choosing that had ever mattered was the one his shrewd old aunt had quietly made for him—four nights running by candlelight—until he had the sense to make the choice his own.

He told his aunt as much on the morning of the wedding, taking her dry old hand in both of his.

“You knew,” he said. “From the first place card, you knew.”

“Of course I knew,” said the Dowager Duchess of Rookwood, patting his cheek as she had when he was a boy. “I have buried a husband and watched a great many marriages, Lysander, and I will tell you the whole secret of the business, for it is short.”

Her eyes were bright.

“The right woman is almost never the one they push toward you. She is the one already in the room, asking you for nothing, whom you have not the wit to see. I only kept seating her where you could not help but look.”

“And the looking?” he asked.

“My dear, you managed that entirely on your own, and a very great deal better in the end than I had any right to hope.”

He kissed her hand and went to be married. To the end of a long and astonished life, he was exactly as happy as his aunt had always known the overlooked Miss Polk would make him.