Your grace? Victor blinked, pulling his attention back to the table. Lady Harrington was looking at him with an expectant smile. Forgive me, Lady Harrington.
The journey was taxing. What did you say? I was merely asking if you found the local scenery appealing. She chirped.
Though I fear the roads are dreadful. We heard your carriage suffered a mishap near the old Penrose property. Victor stilled. The Penrose property?
Yes, just bordering our estate to the south. A tragic situation, really. Lady Harrington lowered her voice, leaning in with the eager posture of a practiced gossip. Old Mr. Penrose lost everything in a mining speculation.
Died of apoplexy. His wife followed soon after. The house is a ruin. Only the sister-in-law lives there now.
An awful woman named Agatha Hawley. And the niece. The niece? Victor repeated, his voice dangerously quiet.
Yes, Florence. A tragic case. Lady Harrington sighed, though her eyes gleamed. Penniless, of course, and quite on the shelf.
She must be six and twenty by now. Between us, your grace, she is entirely unmarriageable. A dreadful temper. She insulted Lord Danbury's nephew just yesterday.
Sent him packing. Her aunt is at her wit's end. Victor looked down at his crystal wine glass. He saw the reflection of the candle light in the dark red liquid.
I find lying takes too much effort. He looked up. His pale gray eyes fixing on Lady Harrington with an intensity that made the older woman flinch slightly. Is that so?
Victor said smoothly. "How unfortunate for her." He didn't hear a single word spoken for the rest of the evening. Ten miles away, Florence sat in the dark.
The three coals had burned down to ash hours ago. She was in her bedroom, wrapped in two thin blankets, listening to the wind rattle the loose window panes. She had returned from the fence soaked to the bone. Aunt Agatha had been waiting.
The carriage on the road had not gone unnoticed by the few servants they still employed. The gossip had reached the kitchen before Florence had even managed to take off her wet boots. Agatha had found out the crest on the carriage belonged to the Duke of Westmoreland. The explosion had been spectacular.
"You spoke to him!" Agatha had shrieked, her face mottled purple with rage. "You stood in the mud, looking like a beggar, and spoke to the Duke of Westmoreland? You insolent, stupid girl! You could have invited him in. You could have offered shelter."
"I offered him directions to a pub," Florence had replied wearily. "We have no fire, Aunt. What shelter were we to offer? Our drafty parlor?"
"You have ruined us. If word gets out that we treated a duke like a common traveler..." Agatha had raised her hand, her fingers trembling, pointing at Florence's face.
"You are poison, Florence. You ruin everything you touch with your pride. I told you this morning, no gentleman will ever want you. And you just proved it to the highest peer in the county."
Florence pulled the blankets tighter around her shoulders, shivering violently. Her bones ached from the damp, but the ache in her chest was worse. She had known who he was. She hadn't recognized the crest, but she had recognized the air of authority, the inherent assumption that the world would yield to him.
She had sent him away because Agatha was right. If Victor Cavendish had walked into Okehaven, he would have seen the rot. He would have seen the poverty, the desperation, the pathetic clinging to faded gentility.
And he would have looked at Florence not with the amused respect he had shown at the fence, but with pity. Florence could survive cruelty. She had survived it for eight years, but she could not survive pity. She closed her eyes, trying to force sleep.
But, every time she drifted off, she felt the rough, cold wood of the fence under her hands, and saw the startling, piercing gray of the stranger's eyes. She was 26. She was poor. She was alone.
And for the first time in her life, sitting in the freezing dark, Florence Penrose cried. Morning at the Harrington estate was a symphony of wealth. Soft slippers on thick carpets. Silver cloches lifted to reveal coddled eggs and hot house peaches.
The smell of expensive coffee roasting over a hardwood fire. Victor sat in the breakfast room, a newspaper completely ignored in his hands, staring out the vast bay windows. The rain had stopped, leaving the Gloucestershire countryside looking bruised and washed out.
"You are uncommonly quiet, Westmoreland," Harrington noted, loading his plate with heavily buttered toast. "Still mourning the carriage wheel?" "Thinking about the local geography," Victor murmured. He hadn't slept. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the muddy, defiant face of Florence Penrose. The women in Victor's world were cultivated flowers, grown in glass houses, shielded from the wind.
Florence was a root torn out of the earth, dirty, and stubbornly clinging to life. He couldn't stop wondering what it took to break a woman down to that level of raw, biting honesty. By 10:00 he could no longer stand the clinking of silver and the smell of hot sugar. He ordered a horse saddled.
He didn't take a groom. He rode out alone, tracing the route his ruined carriage had taken the day before. The road was deeply rutted, the mud half frozen in the morning chill. Okehaven appeared over a rise, and Victor felt a tight, uncomfortable pull in his chest.
From a distance, it had the shape of a grand manor. Up close, it was a carcass. The stone was black with damp and ivy. The roof slumped in the middle like a broken spine.
The gardens were a tangle of dead briars and rotting weeds. He dismounted, tied his horse to a rusting iron ring by the front steps, and used the heavy brass knocker. It echoed hollowly inside. Minutes passed.