"You cannot possibly imagine he means anything serious by it," Priscilla said, and there was something almost desperate beneath the condescension now, some genuine confusion at a world that had suddenly stopped making sense to her. "Margaret, you are forty years old."
"I am aware of my own age, Priscilla. I have been present for every one of the years."
"Men like the Duke of Ravensmere do not marry women like you," Priscilla pressed, her voice climbing. "He could have anyone. He could have a girl of eighteen with a dowry the size of a small country. Why on earth would he choose a woman who is already—"
She stopped herself, but the word hung in the air regardless: finished.
Margaret finally looked up from her ledger. She was not angry. That was the strange part. She simply felt, looking at Priscilla's pinched, frightened face, an overwhelming and unexpected wave of pity.
"I do not know why he calls on me, Priscilla," Margaret said calmly. "But I suspect it has something to do with the fact that I have never once asked him to be anything other than exactly what he is. You might try that approach with your own husband sometime. I understand it tends to improve a marriage considerably."
Priscilla left without another word, her face white. And Margaret returned to her ledger with a hand that did not shake nearly as much as she expected it to.
The gossip did not stop, of course. If anything, it sharpened. The society papers began to run little items about the Duke's peculiar fondness for the spinster of Grosvenor Square—some of them cruel, most of them merely bewildered, all of them entirely beside the point as far as Margaret was concerned.
Sebastian never once mentioned them to her. And when she finally raised the subject herself, sitting across from him in her modest drawing room with a pot of tea slowly cooling between them, he simply set down his cup and looked at her with the same steady patience he always seemed to carry.
"They call you a fool for calling on me," Margaret said. "They say you could have anyone."
"I have had anyone, Margaret," Sebastian said, using her given name for the first time, and something in her chest turned entirely over. "For ten years, I have had my pick of every eligible woman in England thrown directly into my path. And not one of them ever once asked me a question about myself that was not, in some fashion, a question about my title."