A governess, perhaps, if anyone will have you. But I am done trying to marry you off. Norah felt a strange cold calm wash over her. A governess. It meant poverty.
It meant endless days dealing with other people's spoiled children, sleeping in cold attics, never having a life of her own. But as she looked at her aunt's contorted face, and then over at Louisa, who was delicately nibbling a cake, while a man fifty yards away bled into the dirt for her comfort, "Norah felt nothing but relief." "Very well, aunt," Norah said quietly. Mildred blinked, caught off guard by the lack of tears or pleading. What? I said, "Very well.
If you are done with me, then I am done pretending to be one of you." Norah turned her back on her aunt. She walked away from the shaded tables, away from the clinking crystal and the suffocating perfume. She walked to the far edge of the terrace, leaned her hands against the warm marble ballustrade, and looked back out at the lawn. Down in the trench, the dark-haired man was working again, but he was slower now. The frantic anger was gone.
He swung the pickaxe with a steady, measured rhythm, as if feeling her eyes on him, he paused. He looked up. Across the expanse of dying grass and shimmering heat, their eyes met again. Norah didn't look away. She didn't hide behind a fan or lower her gaze demurely.
She looked at him with the honest exhaustion of someone who had just thrown away her entire future and found she didn't mind the loss. Gabriel stared back. He saw the mud on her dress. He saw the isolation in her posture, standing alone at the edge of a crowd that despised her. She was a woman who had nothing, who had risked the little she had left just to give a stranger a cup of water.
A slow, dangerous smile finally broke across Gabriel's dirt-streaked face. The ton thought they owned this world. Croft thought he ruled this estate. Aunt Mildred thought she held Norah's fate in her hands. They were all wrong.
Gabriel went back to digging, but the dirt didn't feel heavy anymore. The mud on his boots didn't bother him. Let them have their tea. Let them enjoy their shade. The Duke was home, and he was about to burn their perfect little world to the ground.
The punishment for Norah's rebellion was swift and profoundly quiet. She was not yelled at again. She was simply erased. Dinner that evening was a lavish twelve-course affair in the grand dining room. Norah was not invited.
Aunt Mildred had instructed a maid to bring a tray of cold mutton and stale bread to Norah's small drafty room on the third floor. It was the social equivalent of a firing squad. By morning, everyone in the house would know that Norah Hastings was officially persona non grata. She was damaged goods, cut off from the herd. Norah ate the cold mutton.