Page 40 of Rules for Heiresses
The levity disappeared from Fuller’s face as he adopted his stern butler persona once more. Over the past few years, he’d become more of a father figure than a butler, and Ravenna felt flattered that the stoic, very proper fellow had chosen to share his true self with her. If only her standoffish husband would do the same.
On impulse, she hugged him, not caring which servants might see. She already had a reputation for being untoward and unpredictable. “I’m sorry for scaring you.”
Fuller nodded, fondness flaring in his eyes.
Smoothing her patterned burgundy and ivory dress, Ravenna took a deep breath and walked down the familiar hallway. She deserved what was coming and more. She rounded the corridor and entered the salon, where her mother was sitting like a reigning queen on the settee, her face imperious, with a tea tray situated to her right.
“Her Grace, the Duchess of Ashvale,” Fuller announced in the most affected voice she’d ever heard.
“Good Lord, man,” Ravenna muttered under her breath. “Since when do you sound like a thespian?”
“You deserve it for disappearing as you did without nary a word, don’t think you’re forgiven,” he said through the side of his mouth.
Ravenna stopped herself from pulling a face at the last minute, knowing her mother could see her. At first glance the dowager looked the same—haughty, untouchable, cold—but upon closer inspection, Ravenna could see the fine lines of strain at the corners of her mouth, the pallor of her already pale skin, and the gauntness of her cheeks.
Guilt slammed through her. She’d left a letter saying she was visiting with Clara and not to worry, but that was hardly an excuse. If any ugly gossip about her exploits had reached London, there was no telling what state her mother would be in.
“Mama,” she greeted softly.
The dowager’s icy gaze swept her, noting the fashionable new gown she wore, before examining her face and then pausing on the mop of curls that she’d attempted to smooth down with a hot iron and pomade. Her mouth curled down. “You’ve cut your hair.”
Not like Ravenna could reply with:I was pretending to be a man on a ship full of men. I cut my hair so as not to be ravaged.
“Possibly not one of my better decisions,” she said instead with a wary nod.
The duchess sniffed and lifted her tea to sip it. “It suits you.”
Ravenna blinked. Who was this woman and where was her mother? “Er, thank you?”
“Sit, wretched child of mine, and pour yourself a cup of tea,” the duchess said with an irritated frown. “And stop staring at me as if I’ve grown warts on my nose or some such. Surely I’m not so awful as to criticize a perfectly charming coiffure.”
“Of course not, Mama,” Ravenna said, obligingly taking a seat on the sofa across from the tea tray. “But you’re rather calm in the face of…” Her voice trailed off.
“In the face of your disappearance and your barefaced fabrications?” The dowager tutted. “Poor Clara, she was in such a state after my arrival. That poor girl being with child and all. To think any daughter of mine would be such an awful, insensitive friend.”
There were so many things to parse in that speech, starting with the fact that her mother was the queen of ice herself and ending with the fact that she went looking for Ravenna in Scotland. “You traveled to Edinburgh? And wait, Clara’s withchild?”
“Of course I went to Edinburgh,” her mother said. “My fool daughter was missing!”
“I was hardly missing, Mama.”
“And then, when I arrived to be told that you weren’t in residence and that you never had been from the start, I feared the worst had befallen us.” Ravenna waited. Theworstto the Duchess of Embry could mean any number of things. “I feared that you had been abducted by highwaymen or had eloped with that dreadful scoundrel.”
Which dreadful scoundrel? There were quite a number of them. But Ravenna could only think of one who would deserve such a designation—the very man she’d run from.
“The Marquess of Dalwood?”
The duchess shot her a peeved look.
The hand holding the teacup shook slightly, a pair of steely eyes rising to hers, and Ravenna braced herself for what was to come with the tiniest inhale of breath. “But nothing, not even a runaway heiress, could eclipse the vile gossip that reached my ears a few days ago…that my only daughter, theruinedLady Ravenna, had been on the verge of being dragged to the stocks in the West Indies, dressed inmen’srags, no less.”
Ravenna’s heart quailed in her chest. “The clothes were a lark, Mama, and I wasn’t in danger of being dragged anywhere.”
“And the ruination?”
“All a terrible misunderstanding.” She was stretching the truth to threads, she knew.
There was no misunderstanding when she’d crashed lip-first into an unmarried man in front of witnesses. But their plan had been to play it off that they’d been secretly engaged all along, and a stolen kiss between an affianced couple was just that. The reasoning sounded feeble to Ravenna’s ears even now. Her mother would see right through it, given her daughter’s long-standing refusal to marry and her recalcitrant views on the subject. Besides, the dowager had the memory of an elephant. Duke or not, she’d remember the boy next door.
