The Duke Came for a Painted Face—The Mending Widow Said, “They’re All on Your Bad Side”

Sleet is coming sideways at the windows, the drawing room is too warm and too bright, and every ambitious woman in Westmere has arranged herself for the Duke of Stour. He has crossed three counties with a painted face on a scrap of ivory in his breast pocket, and the lady of the house has written to assure him that face belongs to her daughter. So the daughter pinches her cheeks and sings a ballad at a volume meant for a church, the mother keeps time with her prayer book, and the beautiful cousin on the sofa laughs her high bright laugh and tells him the whole county has been laughing too. Nobody looks at the poor relation in the window seat. Nell Hale is a curate's widow of twenty-seven in a grey gown turned twice, with a brass thimble on her finger and a basket of the family's stockings in her lap, and she is the only person in the room who notices that the scarred Duke keeps turning his right ear to whoever speaks, and that his hand goes to his temple every time the song climbs. She sets down the stocking, crosses the carpet while the girl is still singing, and stops at his right shoulder, the one side nobody thought to stand on. "They are all on your bad side, your grace. Change chairs with me. And give me that glove." He gives her the glove. He changes chairs. And when the mother surges up to present her daughter as the girl in the miniature, the Duke stands, sets the little gilt case on the table where everyone can see it, and tells the room that the woman who sat for it is sitting on his right, mending his glove. What follows is a special licence, four terms stated across a library desk, a clever account book that has kept the widow working for nothing for four years, and a marriage neither of them has words for: he gives her a wing on the far side of a cold house, dines with her on Thursdays at opposite ends of a table built for thirty, and never knocks. But a house of silence has room in it. Shutters come open. A ledger gets a second hand in it. A chair by the study fire is taken, night after night, on the side where he can hear. And on the night the gale takes the gallery windows, the man who crossed three counties for a thing that could not refuse him finds out, in front of every servant he has, which of the two things in that drawing room he actually came for. This is a dramatized fictional story. Names, places and events are fictional. #dukestories #regencyromance #historicalromance