A Lady in Disguise for the Brooding Duke (Preview)

Prologue

April 1809, Ashcombe, Wiltshire   

Rosalind Vale had discovered early on that poverty, though much praised by the virtuous for its power of improving the heart, had a very indifferent effect upon the temper.

At twelve years old, she possessed a temper of uncommon liveliness, a mind too quick for her circumstances, and a pair of eyes so singular that every old woman in the parish considered herself entitled to remark upon them. One was hazel and warm as a nut in autumn. The other, however, was green, clear, and sharp as a young leaf after rain. 

Rosalind had long ago ceased to mind the stares. If people would look, she reasoned, then she might as well give them something worth seeing.

The cottage in which she lived with her grandmother stood a little beyond the market town, where the road bent toward the fields, and the hedgerows grew wild from neglect. It had once been neat. There were traces of gentility in the whitewashed walls and in the careful trimming of the rosemary by the door. But wind slipped through the window frame in winter, while the little garden yielded more nettles than vegetables unless Rosalind fought it like an enemy.

That morning had been warm for April. The market town smelled of damp straw, horse sweat, hot bread, and the sharp green scent of crushed herbs beneath careless boots. Rosalind had escaped her grandmother’s mending basket under the respectable pretense of fetching thread and had instead spent half an hour among the other children behind the blacksmith’s yard, where a wall, a ditch, and two overturned crates had been made into a kingdom.

She was its most troublesome subject.

“Rosalind cheats,” cried Tom Baker, who was nine and therefore considered every defeat an injustice.

“I do not cheat,” said Rosalind, standing upon the wall with her skirts gathered in one hand. “I improve the rules.”

“That is cheating.”

“Only to those without imagination.”

This answer, being above the general taste of the company, was received with boos, pebbles, and admiration in equal measure. Rosalind laughed, jumped down, and landed in the dust with the lightness of a cat.

It was then she saw the boy.

He came tearing around the corner by the apothecary’s shop, quite too well dressed to be running and much too frightened to be at play. His coat was dark blue, his boots were polished, though now splashed with mud, and his hair, black and cut shorter than was fashionable, had been disordered by either haste or indignation. He was perhaps thirteen, tall for his age, and carried in his face that peculiar look of boys born to command who have just discovered, to their astonishment, that they are not always obeyed.

Behind him, at a less impressive speed but with a great deal more noise, came a thin gentleman in spectacles.

“Young master! Stop at once! Do you hear me? At once!”

The boy cast one glance over his shoulder and nearly collided with a cart of cabbages. Rosalind’s interest, always easily provoked by disorder in the lives of the better-dressed, sharpened immediately.

The boy darted into the narrow passage between the baker’s and the cooper’s yard. It was a foolish choice if one did not know the town. The passage ended in a locked gate, unless one was small enough to squeeze behind the broken fence, climb the rain barrel, cross the cooper’s shed, and drop into the lane beyond. Rosalind knew it very well.

She stepped neatly into the man’s path just as he came panting after his charge.

“You there! Girl!” he cried. “Did you see a young gentleman pass this way?”

Rosalind looked up at him with all the innocence she had never found useful until that moment.

“A young gentleman, sir?”

“Yes, yes, a boy. Dark hair, blue coat…running.”

“Oh,” said Rosalind, thoughtfully. “There was a boy running.”

“Where?”

She pointed, with perfect conviction, toward the churchyard. “That way, sir. He went past the pump and down by Mrs. Bell’s geese.”

The man gave a groan of exasperation and hurried off in the direction indicated. Rosalind waited until he had turned the corner before she slipped into the passage. The boy was standing before the locked gate, breathing hard and looking as if he found the existence of locked gates a personal insult.

“You went the wrong way,” she observed.

He spun around. “You lied to him.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. The boy stared at her, astonished less by the lie, perhaps, than by the calmness with which it was admitted.

“Why?”

Rosalind shrugged. “You were running. He was shouting. It seemed plain which side was more interesting.”

His mouth twitched, though whether with amusement or irritation she could not tell. 

“Can we get out?” he asked.

“We?”

“He will come back.”

“That is true.” She considered him a moment, making no attempt to conceal her inspection. The coat alone might have fed her and her grandmother for a month. Around his neck, half hidden beneath his collar, hung a fine gold chain. At the end of it, warmed by his skin, rested a signet ring.

Gold…real gold. She knew the color of brass, gilt, and wishful thinking. This was none of them.

“This way,” she urged. 

She led him to the broken fence and went first, for she did not trust a gentleman’s son to follow any instruction that involved ruining his clothes unless provided with a demonstration. She slipped through, climbed the barrel, caught the low edge of the roof, and hauled herself up. The boards were warm beneath her palms and smelled of tar and old rain.

The boy followed less gracefully, but with determination. Once, his boot slipped, and he cursed under his breath in a manner that made Rosalind turn and grin.

“Do tutors teach that?”

“Only the useful ones,” he replied.

This surprised a laugh out of her. She reached down and caught his wrist to steady him. His hand was smooth, his cuff of excellent linen. Hers was scratched from brambles, the nails short and none too clean. For one brief second, they balanced there, both crouched upon the roof of the cooper’s shed, with the town spread below them in noise and sunlight.

Then Rosalind slid down the other side and dropped into the lane. The boy landed after her with a thud, breathless but triumphant.

They stood beside a stack of empty crates, hidden from the market by a hanging horse blanket that smelled strongly of leather and damp wool. From somewhere beyond came the distant voice of the tutor, still calling. The boy bent forward, with his hands on his knees, laughing now between breaths.

“He is still in the churchyard,” she told him. “You have time.”

The boy straightened. “You know every hiding place in this town, I suppose.”

“Most of them.”

“You must be a terror.”

“I am useful.”

“To whom?”

“To myself.”

He smiled, and it made him look younger, less grand, and much less deserving of a tutor. Rosalind smiled back. 

“I must go,” he said. “If he finds me, he will write to my father, and then there will be sermons.”

“My grandmother gives sermons,” Rosalind replied. “They are never improved by delay.”

He glanced toward the lane. “Thank you.”

She gave a little curtsey, exaggerated enough to be impertinent. “Your servant, sir.”

He ran down the lane, taking the left turn that led toward the open road and, no doubt, toward some waiting carriage, some anxious servant, some house where boys might flee tutors and still be fed roast meat at dinner. Rosalind watched until he disappeared.

Only then did she notice that the chain had slipped free of his collar during the climb. The ring swung there, bright as a small captive sun. She lifted the chain with two fingers, loosened it from where it had caught at his collar, and let the ring slide into her palm.

For a moment, she contemplated running after him, but she wouldn’t be able to catch up with him. She shrugged, assured that he probably wouldn’t even notice it was missing. 

Then, she took a closer look. It bore a crest she did not know, engraved deep into the gold: a raven, perhaps, or some proud dark bird with wings half spread. It was not merely valuable. It was beautiful. The chain pooled about it like captured sunlight.

For the rest of the afternoon, Rosalind felt the weight of it through the fabric of her pocket. It seemed to beat there like a second heart.

By the time she reached the cottage, the sun had begun to lower, and smoke from the chimney hung blue in the mild air. Inside, the room smelled of lavender, starch, and the thin onion broth her grandmother had set upon the fire. The right wall of the room was lined with old books, which her grandmother first insisted had to be read, but later, Rosalind found herself reading without needing to be forced to. 

The old woman sat near the window, with her spectacles low upon her nose, mending a cuff by the last of the light. Mrs. Lark was small, upright, and severe in the manner of those who have lost nearly everything except their standards, and therefore cling to them with both hands. Her hair, white and fine, was pinned beneath a cap so carefully that Rosalind often suspected pride had more to do with it than neatness. Her eyes were hazel, like Rosalind’s left one, and though age had clouded them, they missed very little.

“You are late,” she said instead of a greeting.

“The thread seller was slow.”

“There is no thread.”

Rosalind looked down at her empty hands. “He was also unsuccessful.”

Her grandmother’s needle paused. “Rosalind.”

There were many ways in which her grandmother could say her name. This one advised caution.

Rosalind, however, had carried her triumph too long to hide it. She crossed the room, pulled the ring from her pocket, and dropped it onto the table. It struck the wood with a rich, decisive sound.

Her grandmother looked at it. For one glorious moment, Rosalind expected astonishment, perhaps even praise, not for stealing, of course, but perhaps for cleverness. Instead, the old woman’s face changed in a manner Rosalind did not understand.

“Where did you get that?”

Rosalind’s pleasure faltered. “From a boy.”

“What boy?”

“A rich one.” She tried to sound careless. “He was running from his tutor. I helped him escape.”

“And then?”

Rosalind lifted her chin. “And then I took it.”

The silence that followed was worse than any scolding. Her grandmother set down her mending. Very slowly, she removed her spectacles and folded them upon the table. The room seemed to grow smaller. 

“It is gold,” Rosalind said, hating the defensive note in her voice. “Real gold. He has a dozen of such things. We have nothing.”

Her grandmother rose. She did not rise quickly. Age had made sure of that. But when she stood, she seemed taller than the room permitted.

“We have little,” she corrected. “That is not the same as nothing.”

Her grandmother picked up the ring, but not as Rosalind had done. She held it with a strange care, as though it were not a stolen trinket but evidence in some solemn trial.

“There was a time,” she continued, “when the name you come from carried weight.”

Rosalind’s breath caught. Her grandmother never spoke of names. She never spoke of Rosalind’s father except to say he was gone, nor of her mother except with evasions that had long ago hardened into pain. The past, in their cottage, was like a locked cabinet: always present, never opened.

“What name?” Rosalind asked.

Her grandmother’s mouth tightened. “Not today.”

“You always say that.”

“And I shall continue to say it while I think silence safer than speech.”

“Safer from what?”

Her grandmother’s eyes moved over her face, pausing, as others did, upon the unmatched eyes. But unlike others, she did not look curious. She looked afraid.

Then the expression passed.

“Listen to me, Rosalind,” she said. “Poverty is a hard master. It will pinch the stomach, chill the bones, make old gowns shameful, and honest work thankless. It will tempt you every day of your life to believe that because the world has behaved unjustly, you may do the same.”

Rosalind swallowed. Her grandmother stepped closer and laid the ring on the table between them.

“But dishonor is not bread. It will not feed you. It will only teach you to hunger differently.”

The words struck harder than shouting would have done. Rosalind looked at the ring, then at the fire, then at the worn floorboards beneath her boots. Anger rose in her first, hot and ready. She wanted to say that honor was an easy luxury for people with full cupboards. She wanted to say that fine names, if they had ever existed, had done them very little good in this cottage with its smoky hearth and patched blankets.

But her grandmother’s disappointment sat across from her like a living thing, and Rosalind found, to her surprise and resentment, that she could not bear it.

“I helped him,” she muttered. “He would have been caught if not for me.”

“And that gave you the right to rob him?”

“He did not even notice.”

“Then you wronged him twice. Once in the taking, and once in relying upon his trust.”

Rosalind’s cheeks burned.

Her grandmother’s voice softened, which was somehow worse. “You are clever. More clever than is comfortable, perhaps. But cleverness without honor is a poor inheritance, and you, child, have already been robbed of too much inheritance to surrender that one willingly.”

There it was again: the sense of a door opening an inch, showing darkness beyond, then closing before Rosalind could glimpse what lay inside.

“Return it,” her grandmother urged.

Rosalind looked sharply at her. “I do not know where he lives.”

“Then keep it safe until you can.”

“And if I never can?”

Her grandmother’s needle pierced the cloth. “Then keep it not as a prize, but as a reminder.”

That night, Rosalind lay awake beneath a quilt gone thin with age, listening to the cottage settle around her. The wind worried at the shutters. Her grandmother coughed once in the next room, then fell silent. From beneath Rosalind’s pillow came the faint, secret weight of the ring.

She had meant to hide it there in triumph. Instead, she reached under the pillow and closed her fist around it until the engraving pressed into her palm.

Rosalind did not yet understand what name had once carried weight, nor why her grandmother guarded the past as if it were a flame that might either warm or destroy them. But she understood this: she wanted the ring because it was gold, and now she would keep it because it burned. 

So she slipped it onto its chain, tied the chain in a knot, and tucked it deep into the little wooden box where she kept her private treasures: a cracked button of mother-of-pearl, a blue ribbon too faded to wear, a brass key that opened nothing, and three stories she had begun and not finished.

The ring did not belong among them…yet there it stayed.