Ada read these letters in her room at Miss Hartley’s, by the window, with a composure that her mother would have found suspicious if she’d seen it. She was not nervous about the season. She was not nervous about the dinners or the assemblies or the prospect of suitors.
She was thinking about one thing only, and that thing was this. She was going to see him again. And whatever happened next, whatever the truth of him turned out to be, whatever the distance between the man and the memory, she would know.
She would finally know. She packed her trunk at the end of March 1810 with the thoroughness of someone who does not intend to return. 10 years. She had been patient for 10 years.
Patience, she had learned at Miss Hartley’s, was not the same as passivity. It was just waiting with your eyes open. The Duke of Ashvale had not changed his position on marriage.
He had, if anything, reinforced it. He was 40 years old in the spring of 1810. 40. A number that his mother, the Dowager Duchess, had apparently decided was a kind of deadline.
She made her position known at breakfast in January with the calm certainty of someone announcing the weather. While Maximilian was reading correspondence and hoping very much to be left alone. You are too old to go another season without choosing a bride. People are beginning to talk.
People have always talked. Without looking up from his correspondence. It is their primary occupation. Maximilian. His name in her voice had a particular weight that still, at 40, produced the instinct to pay attention.
You need an heir. The estate needs continuity. And frankly, I am tired of making excuses for you at dinner parties. He set down his papers and looked at her with the expression he reserved for conversations he intended to end quickly.
I am too old, he said, each word measured and deliberate, to begin choosing a bride. The ship, as they say, has sailed. The appropriate season for all of that was 15 years ago, and I am afraid I simply missed it.
The Dowager Duchess held his gaze for a long moment. That, she said at last, is the most convenient lie you have ever told yourself. And she left the room, the most effective response available to her.