"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Tomorrow morning," he agreed. She turned to walk back up the path. Then she stopped. Without turning around, she said, "And for what it is worth, I do not think it is simply what you are.
I think it is what you practiced because no one ever asked you to practice anything else. " She walked back up toward the house. Behind her, the Duke stood holding the empty cup and looking at the place where she had been standing for a considerable while before he went back inside himself. What neither of them saw was the figure standing at the upper window of the East Wing. Lady Mirabelle Dunmore was 24 years old, the daughter of the Earl of Dunmore, and she had been considered the frontrunner of the entire selection by every person who had an opinion on the matter, which in social circles of this kind was everyone. She was elegant.
She was well-connected. She had red-gold hair and a speaking voice that music instructors had described as naturally musical. And she had also already mentally chosen the furniture she intended to move when she became the Duchess of Ashvale. She watched Nora walk back up the path toward the house. She watched the Duke stand by the stone wall for a long moment before following.
Then she turned from the window and sat down at the small writing desk in her room and picked up her pen. She wrote two letters before breakfast. The first went to her mother, Lady Dunmore, who was staying at a townhouse 3 miles away because the manor could not accommodate all the families of the candidates. The second went to Lord Harwick Fenn, who was Lady Mirabelle's cousin, who was also quietly and without announcement one of the most effective collectors of damaging information in three counties. He knew things about people.
He found things out. He had never once been thanked publicly for it, but he had been very well compensated privately. The letter to Lord Harwick was short. It said, "Find everything there is to find about Miss Nora of Ketmore. I want to know by Thursday. " She sealed both letters and handed them to her personal maid, a quiet girl named Agnes, with instructions to have them dispatched before 8:00.
Then she went down to breakfast with a perfectly composed expression and complimented the Dowager Duchess Heloise on the quality of the eggs. Breakfast at Ashvale Manor on the second morning of the selection was an exercise in sustained performance. The dining room was large enough to seat 20 comfortably. That morning it held 12, counting family members who had stayed as guests and the candidates who remained. The four families had departed the day before, their withdrawals ranging from quietly dignified to loudly offended, depending on temperament.
Six candidates remained. Lady Mirabelle Dunmore sat at the middle of the long table and smiled at everything. This was, Nora had begun to understand, her primary strategy. She smiled at the footman. She smiled at the weather through the window.
She smiled at Nora in a way that felt like being handed a flower with thorns still on the stem. "Miss Vane," Lady Mirabelle said, reaching for the toast rack, "how are you finding Ashvale Manor? I imagine it must be quite different from what you are used to in Ketmore. The table shifted almost imperceptibly. Several faces turned.