Something in Alexander's expression cracked open at that, some final piece of the armor he had worn into the drawing room finally giving way entirely.
"I mocked you," he said. "In front of the whole room. I called on you specifically because I thought it would make for an amusing story. Because I assumed a poor companion tucked away with her books could offer nothing but an excuse for the table to laugh. And instead, you have handed me back my father's dying love for me, and quite possibly the salvation of my entire estate. And I have not even had the grace to apologize for the manner in which I asked it of you."
"You may apologize now, Your Grace, if it would ease your conscience," Eleanor said, and there was, for the first time all evening, the faintest suggestion of dry humor beneath the words. "I have found that most people never trouble."
"I am sorry, Miss Marsh," Alexander said, and he said it with a gravity that told her he meant every word of it. Not the practiced apology of a man smoothing over an awkward social moment, but the genuine contrition of someone who has just been shown in the space of a single hour exactly how badly he had misjudged a person he had never once troubled to actually see. "Truly. I have spent this whole evening drowning in my own self-pity, and I took it out on the one person in that room who had done nothing whatever to deserve it."
Eleanor set the translated letter down on the desk between them. "Your father's solicitor should be written to at first light, Your Grace. Mr. Blythe of Edinburgh will need to see proof of your identity, and I imagine the original letter itself, before he releases any funds from a trust held in such secrecy. I would recommend you take the unciphered note your father mentions along as well, if you can lay hands on it, to establish the whole chain of the thing beyond any doubt."
"You are already managing my affairs, Miss Marsh, and we have known each other scarcely two hours."
"Somebody ought to," Eleanor said, and there was no malice in it, only the same flat, practical honesty she brought to everything. "You have been managing them rather poorly on your own, Your Grace, if you will forgive my saying so. Eighteen months of selling horses and dismissing stewards while the answer sat sealed in a solicitor's strongbox seems, to a person raised on rather less money than a dukedom affords, like a great deal of unnecessary suffering."
A short, startled laugh escaped Alexander—the first genuine sound of amusement Eleanor had heard from him all evening, entirely different from the brittle performance at the card table, warm and unguarded in a way that made him look, for just a moment, considerably younger than the weary, brandy-flushed man who had walked into the drawing room an hour before.
"You are remarkably blunt for a poor relation, Miss Marsh."
"I have very little left to lose by it, Your Grace. Bluntness is, I find, one of the few luxuries available to a woman in my position free of charge, and I confess I have grown rather fond of indulging in it whenever the occasion allows."
They returned to the drawing room together some twenty minutes later, and Alexander, before the assembled, avidly curious guests, counted out one thousand pounds in banknotes from his own pocketbook and pressed them into Eleanor's hands with a formal, public bow that left absolutely no room for anyone present to mistake the seriousness of the gesture.
"Miss Marsh has solved a puzzle that defeated my solicitor, two Cambridge scholars, and a former agent of the War Office," Alexander announced to the room, his voice carrying the same clarity it had earlier, though every trace of mockery had gone entirely out of it. "The wager was one thousand pounds, and I intend to honor it in full. And I would ask that anyone in this room who thought to laugh at her expense an hour ago consider carefully before they do so again, exactly whose judgment proved sound this evening, and whose did not."
The room, predictably, did not know quite what to do with itself. Lady Featherstone's face performed a rapid and remarkable transformation, from faint embarrassment at her niece's earlier public humiliation to a gleaming, calculating warmth the moment the banknotes changed hands. And Eleanor understood, with the weary clarity of long experience, exactly what direction her aunt's newfound affection was about to take.
It took less than a week for Lady Featherstone to decide that a niece worth one thousand pounds and evidently a duke's personal gratitude was a niece worth marrying off to considerably better advantage than the quiet spinsterhood she had previously resigned Eleanor to.
Suitors of a sort began appearing at Featherstone House with unseemly speed: gentlemen who had never previously troubled to learn Eleanor's Christian name suddenly discovering a passionate interest in Latin verse and cryptography. And Eleanor found herself, for the first time in three years, fending off attention rather than starving for the lack of it, which proved, if anything, considerably more exhausting.
There was a baronet's second son who arrived twice in one week bearing hothouse flowers and clumsy questions about ancient Rome he had clearly memorized from an encyclopedia the night before. There was a widowed merchant twice her age—and three times her aunt's preferred candidate—who spoke to Eleanor for a full quarter hour about the excellent condition of his stables before mentioning her at all.
Eleanor received each of them with the same flat, patient courtesy she had once reserved for card players who never looked at her, and declined each of them in turn with the same unhurried honesty, until Lady Featherstone, exasperated, finally demanded to know what precisely her niece imagined she was holding out for, given that one thousand pounds, however welcome, would not last a lifetime, and a duke's gratitude was not the same thing as a duke's hand.
Eleanor had no ready answer for her aunt that evening. She was not at all certain, in truth, that she had one for herself, beyond a small, stubborn, entirely unexpected hope that had lodged itself somewhere beneath her ribs the moment Alexander Kestrel had looked at her across a borrowed writing desk and said with plain and evident sincerity that he was sorry.
Alexander returned to Featherstone House four days after the card party—not for cards this time, but with a letter of his own, this one entirely legible, from Mr. Alistair Blythe of Edinburgh, confirming that the trust established by the sixth duchess did indeed exist, untouched, and quietly accruing interest for sixty years, and amounting, once the full sum was calculated, to a figure considerably larger than even Edmund Kestrel's letter had suggested.