The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Nine

  Outside, a whistle blew.

  The train shuddered as doors rattled shut all along its length. And Robert waited in misery for what he knew would come.

  For a moment, all seemed well. Violet reached into her bag and took out some yarn and knitting needles; Sebastian sat, looking straight ahead at absolutely nothing.

  Miss Pursling kept her gaze on the wooden slats that made up the floor. She’d put his letter in her pocket and didn’t even touch the fabric. The train began to move, swaying from side to side, and still she didn’t speak.

  It shouldn’t have surprised Robert—she did this every single time he saw her—but Violet glanced up and over at him, then over at Miss Pursling. Her brows drew down in something like confusion. She exchanged a worried glance with Sebastian.

  “So,” Robert said. “Miss Pursling, are you coming from London?”

  Miss Pursling glanced at him and then looked away. “Yes, Your Grace,” she said meekly.

  “What brought you there?”

  She tilted her head forward so that there was no chance she might meet his eyes. “I had business, Your Grace. Business of a personal nature.”

  If this was pax… Robert sighed.

  He couldn’t very well talk about the handbills. Neither Sebastian nor Violet knew about those, as they didn’t have the protection Robert did, and he preferred to keep it that way. Silence stretched in the car, and it occurred to Robert that banning Violet and Sebastian from speaking had not been the best idea. What felt like a companionable silence among two seemed devilishly awkward with four people staring at one another, mouths clamped shut. This had the potential to be the most painful train ride ever.

  “So,” he tried again, “the Workers’ Hygiene Commission. Why did you take an interest in it?”

  She tilted her head and looked up at him. Her lips flattened as if she were suppressing a smile. “Because,” she said, “hygiene is important. Don’t you think so, Your Grace?”

  “Of course, but many things are important. We’ve all made different choices as to how to spend our time. Violet here volunteers her time at the Botanic Garden in Cambridge, presumably because she likes plants. Sebastian…”

  Sebastian looked up, a look of interest on his face.

  “Yes,” Miss Pursling said, “I would very much like to hear how Mr. Malheur spends his time.”

  “Ah…” Even a clinical description of Sebastian’s work was suspect in mixed company.

  “Because I heard,” Miss Pursling said, “that he threatened to institute a program for human breeding amongst the Cambridge faculty in order to prove his theories on the sexual inheritance of traits.”

  Yes. That was why it was difficult to talk about what Sebastian did. Because in order to do so, one had to say “sexual inheritance” without blushing—something Miss Pursling managed abnormally well.

  Sebastian fixed her with his most earnest gaze, and Robert recalled, rather belatedly, that his cousin had something of a talent for mesmerizing women. What had he been thinking, bringing the man into close proximity with Miss Pursling? By the end of the ride, she’d be smitten.

  In fact, she probably already was.

  But Sebastian simply shrugged once more, placed his hand over his mouth in an exaggerated motion, and then bowed, gesturing to Robert. Robert translated this as I’m deeply sorry, but having promised my cousin that I wouldn’t say a word, I must now embarrass him as best as I can with gestures.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Robert muttered, pressing his fingers into his forehead. The train squeaked as it went around a bend.

  Sebastian shook his finger at him in an invocation of shame and then made a gentle back-and-forth gesture with his hand, not clearly invoking anything at all.

  “Are you…injured? Ill?” Miss Pursling guessed. “Unable to talk for some reason?”

  Sebastian’s face lit up, and he pointed one finger at her.

  “Have you tried tea?” she asked. “With honey—it’s quite soothing on the throat.”

  Another meaningless gesture from Sebastian—this one, his arms thrown up to the heavens and then quickly lowered.

  “At least make an attempt not to strike me in the face, Sebastian,” Violet said. “And for God’s sake, we both know Robert didn’t mean it literally. He wanted us not to embarrass him—but you’re managing that perfectly well without words.”

  Miss Pursling’s eyes darted between the two of them. If ever there was a woman to pick up on what had not been spoken, it was Miss Pursling. He could imagine her reconstructing what he must have told the two of them.

  He felt his cheeks warm. “You might as well speak,” he muttered gruffly.

  “I knew perfectly well what you meant,” Sebastian said. “But I’ve always found that the quickest way to make someone relent in his foolish edicts is to take every command literally and to perform it with flagrant obedience.”

  “It is not too late to toss you from this car,” Robert said. The train was shifting back and forth, scuttling along the tracks. It hadn’t yet come up to full speed—they were still barely out of London, after all.

  “You see,” Sebastian said to Miss Pursling, “my cousin’s true nature revealed: unforgiving, cruel, and violent.”

  Robert did his best not to whimper and was mostly certain that he succeeded.

  “And incidentally,” Sebastian told her, “I did not threaten to create a human breeding program at Cambridge to prove my theory. For one thing, one does not prove a theory in that sense of the word. One tests it by considering the next most likely explanation. For another, that story has been much exaggerated in the retelling. I simply noted that one could use simple principles to determine, after the fact, the probability that a certain don’s wife had—”

  “Ha. Yes.” Robert jumped into the conversation before it could run further afield. “So maybe there are some things we’d all be happier not discussing.”

  “Forgive my cousin,” Sebastian said with a slow shrug, “for he is a bit of a prude. But my apologies; I was intruding into your very delightful conversation. Please, continue with whatever it was you weren’t saying to each other.” He leaned back.

  “Indeed,” Violet said. “Don’t mind us. We’re scarcely even here. And rest assured, if you’d like to talk of secrets, I’ll never repeat a one. I’m known for my trustworthiness.”

  “This is true,” Sebastian said. “The Countess of Cambury is like a deep, dark hole—secrets go in, but none of them ever come out.”

  “Sebastian,” Violet replied, calmly looping the yarn about one of her needles, “it is neither proper nor respectful to let a woman know that you think of her as nothing more than a hole.”

  Miss Pursling choked, and then coughed, and Robert sank an inch lower in his seat, wishing that he had not set his hat on the rack above his head. He needed something to cover the violent flush in his cheeks. He should never have let either one of them anywhere near her, and if they kept on in this fashion, he was never going to forgive them.

  Violet’s face was unruffled; she continued on with her knitting.

  Sebastian waved a hand. “My apologies; the countess is, of course, a sweet flower of womanhood.”

  Shut up. Shut up.

  Thankfully, Sebastian did not take his apology any further.

  Violet seemed to accept this without comment. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “In fact, don’t mind any of us.” She blinked and held up her needles before her as if constructing a wall.

  “I think we may have started this conversation off on the wrong foot,” Robert said finally. In fact, if the conversation had been animate, the merciful thing to do would have been to take it out behind the barn and shoot it.

  “Is that so?” Miss Pursling looked out the window.

  “I just thought that perhaps if we dealt with one another fairly for one afternoon, that we might—”

  “Oh, never believe him when he talks that way!” Violet interrupted, still pretendin
g to be engrossed in her needlework. “He may rattle on for as long as he wishes about fairness and equality, but he is the only one who refused to play princess.”

  Robert’s smile felt a little sickly. This was precisely the sort of thing he had most feared. Shoot the conversation? He wanted to beat it over the head and dump it in an unknown grave.

  Miss Pursling looked over at the other woman, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion. “Play princess?”

  “Yes,” Violet answered. “We did when we were children. Over the summers, his father would go off visiting, and he’d leave Robert with his sister—Sebastian’s mother. Robert, Sebastian, and I used to play a game that they called ‘Knights and Dragons,’ and that I called ‘Extremely Boring.’ They got to be knights, but I had to sit around as the princess and wait for them to rescue me.”

  “I see.”

  “So one day,” the countess continued serenely, “while they were charging about pretending to attack the dragon, I wrote a note saying that I had run away to tread the boards.”

  Sebastian snorted. “I believe you added that you meant to give your virtue to an entire group of bandits first.”

  The countess didn’t seem the least bit offended by this. “At the time I had no notion what that entailed, but my governess was constantly warning me to protect my virtue with my life. It seemed the worst threat I could muster.”

  Miss Pursling leaned forward with a slight smile on her face. She lifted her eyes to Violet’s. “What did your valiant knights do when your defection was discovered?”

  “They decided it was their duty to hunt me down and feed me to the dragon as punishment.” Violet frowned at the mess she’d made of her knitting and then calmly began to pick out the last row. “They were not successful. In any event, it made for a far more amusing game.”

  “Mud was involved,” Sebastian supplied.

  “Thereafter,” Violet continued equably, “it was agreed that it was patently unfair for me to play princess every time. So we tossed a coin for it. But Robert never would play princess—not even when it was his turn.” The countess frowned at Robert, and he looked about.

  “A coin only has two sides,” he said. “There was no way to assign a side to me.”

  “Except by—”

  Robert raised a hand. “And now is not the time to get into methods for making coin tosses balance amongst three. Suffice to say, I would have made a very bad princess.”

  “I see,” Minnie said slowly.

  “You don’t,” Sebastian threw in. “You’re thinking that Violet might make a reasonable princess. But she was exactly like this when she was a child—all prim and proper on the outside, but a hellion when no adults were looking. She only looks respectable. I don’t know how she did it, but Robert and I would return from our outings covered head to toe in mud, and Violet would look fresh as a spring day.”

  “There is this lovely thing called water,” Violet put in. “Boys seem to be unaware of its existence.” She cast a look at Minnie over her knitting. “Hygiene is important.”

  Miss Pursling smiled and looked down.

  “Incidentally,” Sebastian added, “for the sake of my dignity, Miss Pursling, I must inform you that when I played the role, it was called ‘prince.’ Not princess.”

  “Called prince by you,” Robert put in. “The rest of us called you ‘princess.’ It doesn’t make sense otherwise. Dragons want to devour princesses. They don’t care about princes.”

  “You have a great deal to learn about dragons. Think about it: We get more beef from steers than cows. It’s well known that the male of the species produces finer flesh.”

  “I thought,” Miss Pursling said, “that we didn’t eat female cows because we preferred to save them for their milk.”

  Not this argument. Down this road there could only lie doom. Robert hunkered back in his chair and waited for the inevitable time in which Sebastian would send Miss Pursling screaming.

  Mr. Malheur winked at Miss Pursling. “Dragons like cheese.”

  “But dragons cannot milk princesses,” Miss Pursling responded. “They do not have opposable thumbs.”

  Sebastian looked upward. “Very clever, and you’d almost be right. But dragons have minions. In any event, it’s quite clear that the female of the human species has inferior meat. They are saddled with those unfortunate fatty deposits round the front. Whereas flank of manflesh is lean, tender, and succulent.” He emphasized this by standing up and setting one hand against the seat of his trousers.

  Violet rolled her eyes. “The least said about flank of manflesh, the happier we all will be. Besides, I thought you rather liked those unfortunate fatty deposits round the front. You spend enough time—”

  Robert coughed loudly.

  “My preferences are irrelevant,” Sebastian managed, with a great deal of haughty grandness. “I am not a dragon.”

  “True,” Robert put in. “You’re a peacock—flaunting your feathers for the female of the species.”

  “If it works…” Sebastian smiled, and then turned his head, peering at imaginary tail feathers on his behind. “And yes, that is one of my better features, thank you.”

  The countess let out a loud, defeated sigh. “Are we talking about Sebastian’s buttocks again? Has he no other body parts?”

  That was the point when Robert realized that Miss Pursling wasn’t staring at the floor and hadn’t been for some time. She had a small smile on her face, and she was looking between the two of them, her eyes round in fascination, her cheeks flushed pink.

  Robert pointed a finger at Sebastian. “You see?” he said accusingly. “I knew you would do it. You baited me into that, you did. I will never believe a word you say again.”

  “You’re welcome.” Sebastian bowed low and then sat once more. “All that unrequited awkwardness…” He gave a mock shiver. “I will collect my thanks later.”

  “Gah. I hate you both.”

  Normally he’d have loved passing time like this—listening to his friends bat the ball of conversation back and forth between them like deranged cats. But Miss Pursling was going to think he was insane, spending time with these two. Hell; he was related to Sebastian. First cousins. He might as well have announced that he had an entire branch of his family in Bedlam.

  “Oh, dear,” Sebastian said. “Were we not supposed to have said any of that?”

  “Of course we could,” said Violet. “We specifically mentioned that he never played princess. That makes him manly. You still think him manly, Miss Pursling, do you not?”

  “I feel it important to make no comment.” Miss Pursling looked down, but her eyes sparkled.

  “You know,” Sebastian said, “I must object to that line of reasoning. It takes supreme confidence in one’s manliness to play princess. Maybe we’ve only made him appear insecure.”

  “Maybe,” Violet said all too loudly, “if we don’t mention that, she won’t notice.”

  Miss Pursling smiled. “Don’t mind me,” she said, dropping her eyes. “I never notice a thing.”

  “Well, then.” Violet was using her all’s-well-that-ends-well voice. “I don’t see what there is to be upset about. Robert, stop sulking.”

  Robert shut his eyes in defeat.

  When the train stopped, he waited until Sebastian gathered his things and left, until Violet followed after to see to her owl. Then, and only then, did he turn to Miss Pursling.

  She was standing at the door of the car, wrapping a scarf around her neck.

  He turned his hat in his hands. “Look,” he said. “About that conversation…” But what excuse was he to make?

  They’re not usually like that.

  That was a lie.

  You have to understand. Sebastian’s jokes brought me through many a hard time. I love him more than I want to kill him.

  But the truth was too much. He was struggling to find some way to apologize—and he wasn’t sure whether he should even be apologizing. But she adjusted her gloves, glancing down, be
fore looking at him again.

  “Your Grace.”

  “Miss Pursling.”

  Her eyes were gray, light and clear, and they seemed to see straight through his not-quite-apologetic hand-wringing.

  “I always thought you could judge a man by the company he kept.”

  “Ouch.” He winced. “Sebastian,” he finally said, “he’s always been excessive. He can be a little much to take in, all at once. But he’s a good man.” He was. Sort of.

  Miss Pursling frowned. “What are you talking about? I like your friends.”

  “I—you…” He sucked in a breath. “That almost sounds like you like me.”

  She gave him a nod. “Logic,” she said, “is a lovely thing, Your Grace. That is precisely what I said. I only wish it weren’t true.” She turned the handle and stepped out the door.

  “Wait,” he said, reaching after her.

  But the door had already slammed behind her. He was still staring at the space she’d occupied when the conductor blew the whistle. He grabbed his bag and ran.

  She liked his friends. She liked his friends? It was odd, to have all that embarrassment turned around. He found himself grinning madly, gleefully, as he caught up with Violet and Sebastian and the rest of their entourage. They were crowded around Violet’s notebook, peering at the pages.

  “What are you two giggling about?” he asked suspiciously.

  Violet snapped her notebook shut. “I was keeping score,” she said. “I hate to inform you of this, but your Miss Pursling won the conversation.”

  He still had that stupid grin on his face, and it wasn’t going away. “Yes,” he agreed. “Isn’t it marvelous?”