The 10 women in the line turned their heads in near unison toward the corner, then back at the duke, then back at the corner again. The young woman with the ink stain slowly set down her needle. I beg your pardon? The matchmaker finally said, her voice barely above a whisper. Your grace, that is that is Miss Nora Vane.
She is Lady Farrow's niece. She was not presented. She is not a candidate. She is simply—" "Bring her forward," the Duke said. That was all.
And in that single moment, 10 carefully arranged futures cracked open like porcelain dropped on stone. Nobody in the receiving room of Ashvale Manor had expected the morning to go this way. Lord Percival Dunn, the duke's personal secretary, had prepared every detail of the selection with the kind of obsessive precision that had kept him employed for 11 years. He had the names written in alphabetical order. He had the family summaries bound in a leather folder.
He had even arranged the women by height to make the presentation more aesthetically pleasing, as a decision he had spent 20 minutes debating with himself the night before. None of that mattered now. The Duke had not looked at a single page of the folder. He had not asked for names. He had not requested family histories or dowry figures or the elaborate descriptions of temperament that Lady Farroww had personally submitted on behalf of each candidate, including a paragraph about one girl's exceptional skill at watercolor painting, which Percival had thought was genuinely impressive.
The Duke had pointed at the corner, and now Percival was standing very still, holding his leather folder against his chest like a shield, watching Miss Nora Vane rise slowly from her stool near the fireplace and look around the room with the expression of a person who suspects they may be the victim of a misunderstanding. She was 22. Well, Percival knew this because he had, out of habit, noted everyone present in the room when he first entered. She was Lady Farroww's niece on her late mother's side, brought to Ashvale Manor not as a candidate but as an extra pair of hands. Lady Farroww had three daughters in the selection.
Managing three nervous daughters required support. Nora had been the support. She mended things. She fetched things. She reminded people of appointments and smoothed over small disasters before they became large ones.
At the county assemblies back in Ketmore, where she was from, people generally treated her the way they treated useful furniture. Present, appreciated in passing, never the subject of conversation. She was not considered a beauty in any conventional sense. Her features were soft rather than striking. Her eyes were a warm brown that tended to look thoughtful when they should perhaps have looked delighted, and delighted when the situation called for solemnity.
She had a habit of tilting her head slightly when listening that made people feel heard whether they wanted to be or not. She was also, at this precise moment, looking at Duke Calder Reinhardt with an expression that suggested she was about 3 seconds away from asking him if he had perhaps meant someone else. The Duke met her gaze and did not look away. Lady Farroww moved first. She was a tall woman with excellent posture and a voice like cut crystal, clear and capable of drawing blood.