"A pretty face and an empty head. That is what a man of quality desires in a wife, Prudence. Something you can provide neither of."
Lady Honora Lockhart adjusted a silk flower in the vase on the mantelpiece, her gaze not on the bloom but on her niece's reflection in the mirror behind it.
A plain face. A head, unfortunately, quite full. Prudence Bellamy said nothing. She was on her knees on the cold library floor, her fingers smudged with ink, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand books.
Her uncle was dead, his fortune was in tatters, and his library, his entire world, was being dismantled for auction. Her job was to catalog every last volume, every forgotten folio, every leather-bound memory, so that they could be sold to pay the debts her aunt had so diligently accrued. She did not cry. She had learned long ago that tears changed nothing.
They only made the ink run. Her hands, however, were steady as she numbered another tag. Competence was her only refuge, precision her only armor. Her aunt continued, her voice like the rustle of dry leaves.
"The Duke of Blackwood arrives within the hour. He is interested in the Sorrel Down parcel. Felicity will receive him. You, Prudence, will make yourself invisible."
Honora's eyes finally met hers in the glass. "The Duke is a man of immense importance. He is not to be troubled by the sight of poor relations doing the work of clerks." Prudence's cousin, Felicity, was all the things Prudence was not.
Blonde, buxom, and blessed with a laugh that tinkled like a shopkeeper's bell. She was currently being laced into a new French gown, purchased with money that ought to have settled the butcher's bill. Prudence thought of the unpaid bills, the anxious tradesmen in the village of Marley, the slow, creeping decay of her uncle's estate. She had a ledger of it all, not just in a book but in her mind.
She knew to the shilling how dire their situation was. Honora preferred not to know. She preferred to gamble on a single high-stakes throw, marrying Felicity to a man of title. And now the highest stake of all was arriving.
Gideon Devereux, Duke of Blackwood. A man whispered about in the county. War hero. Widower.
Cold as the North Sea. His estate, Kestrel Chase, bordered their own crumbling property, and the 30 acres of Sorrel Down lay between them like a threadbare patch on a quilt. It was good land, meadow and light woodland running down to the river. It was also the last unencumbered asset the Lockhart estate possessed.
Prudence knew her uncle had never intended for it to be sold. It had been part of her own mother's dowry, a fact Lady Honora chose to forget. "I will be finished in the west wing of the library by then," Prudence said, her voice quiet and even. "I shall not be seen."