"Here?" she asked. I was not at home. Constance placed the calling card on the table beside the salt cellar with the careful casualness of someone who had been planning this reveal since 3:00. "He left this." Felicity looked at the card.
Ambrose Robert Sinclair, Duke of Alifford. Clean engraving, very little ornamentation. The card of a man who is precisely what the card says and has no interest in additional description. "Shall I suggest he call again on Monday?" Constance offered in the tone of someone who would absolutely arrange this regardless of the answer. "If you like," Felicity said.
Constance returned to her soup with the expression of a woman who had made an excellent decision. He called on Monday. Constance received him with perfect propriety and the minimum present social obligation required, showed him to the morning room, requested tea, mentioned that her cousin was in the library, and then excused herself for a letter that was regrettably urgent and would require her full attention in her sitting room on the other side of the house for as long as proved necessary. The letter was to her cousin in Bath. It was not urgent.
Constance wrote it very slowly. Felicity was in Hullbrook's library working on her reply to her brother, who had asked for her opinion of Wiltshire, and received four crossed-out attempts. She had been trying to explain that Wiltshire in October was a different category of landscape from what she had expected, and that the particular quality of light in the valley below Alifford Court was a thing that could be identified, but not adequately transmitted in a letter, and that she had not yet found language for what she meant, which was unusual for her. She was staring at the fifth attempt when the Duke appeared in the doorway. She stood.
He said there was no need to stand. She stood anyway because she found she wanted to, and because the morning room was warm, and his coat was the same dark blue, and there was something in the quality of his presence in the doorway that made the room slightly more organized than it had been a moment before, as if furniture naturally arranged itself when he entered. "Constance is engaged," she said. "Yes," he said. "I thought she might be." This was so close to an awareness of Constance's maneuver that Felicity nearly smiled.
She managed not to. He came into the library and looked at the shelves with the genuine attention he paid to shelves, reading actual titles, not surveying books as a category of furnishing. "Did you need something specific?" she asked. He turned from the shelves. His hands were clasped behind his back in the way she had come to associate with him, thinking about what he was doing rather than simply doing it.