Page 102 of The Wolf Duke's Wife
“Almond kisses,” the girl chirped. She looked past Christine and added, sotto voce, to her companion arranging trays behind the partition.
“It’s the Scullery Maiden. See the stick? Must have tripped over a broom.”
The words came neat as pins. And stuck as fast.
Blanche’s head turned. Christine reached for her sleeve. “Let it pass.”
She lifted the little white bag and paid with more coins than the kisses deserved.
“Thank you,” she said to the girl, and left before she could say anything less gracious.
On the pavement, Christine thrust the bag at Blanche.
“Eat one. It will stop your mouth from saying something beautiful and cutting and unwise.”
“It is outrageous!” Blanche said around the confectionery.
“Technically true. I did work in a scullery, and I am to be a duchess.”
They stood a moment beneath the shop awning and watched London jostle itself along.
“It will be everywhere,” Blanche said gently, “you know that. The whispers, the sneers. You are walking a very narrow plank over an ocean of envy.”
“I know,” Christine pressed her hand to the head of the cane until the ridges impressed themselves into her palm, “I told myself I could bear it.”
“And can you?”
She looked at Blanche and made herself smile. “I can bear much.”
“Which is exactly how women break,” Blanche murmured. “On the things they can bear.”
They went on. At a chandlery, they ordered extra oil for lanterns; the tallow-woman wanted cash in hand. At a warehouse near the docks, Christine inspected crates of glass shades and discovered, mysteriously, that Duskwood’s order had been placed twice and cancelled twice. The clerk shrugged as if the facts were utterly unworthy of notice. In the Strand, a footman in a famous modiste’s livery held a door for a countess and let it swing shut on Christine’s shoulder.
By noon, the little white bag was empty, and Christine’s patience had worn a hole fine enough to thread a needle through. They stopped at an eating-house for a plate of cold beef and toast. Blanche chose a table in the window and made a show of being amused by everything. Christine, who had not eaten properly since breakfast, discovered that hunger could forget itself when humiliated enough times in a row.
“I have a very vulgar thought,” Blanche said, when the toast was almost gone. “Would you like to hear it?”
“I should like a whole choir of vulgarity.”
“Very well. To hell with them,” she said it like a benediction, “you have a man who sees you when he is trying very hard not to. You have children who sing off-key at you adoringly. You havea duchess for an ally and a housekeeper who could fell an oak by looking at it. Are you happy with the man? If yes, the rest is varnish on a door you aren’t going to use.”
Christine looked at the toast and discovered her eyes had filled. Blanche sat back at once, as if she had stepped on something painful in the dark.
“There. That was the wrong door. I am sorry.”
“No,” Christine said, swallowing. “No. It was the right one. I have been closing it with my foot for a week.”
Blanche did not touch her hand; she merely set her palm on the table, close enough that the warmth of it crossed the small gap.
“Then tell me the true thing.”
Christine folded her fingers around the head of the walking stick and let its solidity anchor her. She had held the lie like a glass bauble, careful and bright. The impulse to keep it glittering rose up, habit, protection, but the day had abraded her until she could feel the raw truth beneath.
“The marriage is not a marriage,” she said quietly. “It is an arrangement, a fiction, a bridge. When Charles…” Her voice snagged.
She cleared it. “When my brother is found, the bridge is meant to be dismantled. I will be…set aside. Kindly, I suppose. But setaside. There will be no vows. No name. Nothing to keep Lady Gillray from dragging me back into her house and calling it duty.”
Blanche’s eyes darkened, and for a moment, the pretty, sparkling mask she wore to please the world slid aside, and the woman under it looked like someone who could break a jaw for love.
