How to Marry a Duke (A Cinderella Society 2)

“Through a technicality.”

Charlie’s feet thumped to the floor as she sat up suddenly, spine straight as a sword. “Does she think you’re not good enough for her?” she demanded, affronted on his behalf.

He had to smile. “No, she doesn’t think that.” But he did. He knew it to be true. The things he’d done. The things he’d seen. He didn’t regret them if they had kept his family safe, but they weren’t for her. She deserved better.

“Well, good,” Charlie muttered, mollified but not convinced. “How was the ball aside from all of the violence?” she added, and he knew it was as close to an apology as she would get today. “Was it dreadful?”

“Entirely,” he said. Well, not entirely. Not the part where he’d met Meg. “There was a plate of sheep’s eyeballs at breakfast.”

She shuddered. “No wonder you punched someone. I miss toasted cheese. Meat pies. Actual food.”

“I’ll tell the cook to make you both.”

“That’s why you’re my favorite brother.”

“Oi,” Colin protested. “I’m your twin.”

“And you wear so much scent now I start sneezing when I get within three feet of you.”

“It’s from one of the best London shops!”

She didn’t look convinced. “You smell like roses.”

“And frankincense,” Colin corrected with his charming lopsided grin. “The expensive kind.”

Charlie just shook her head. “I worry about you.”

“I’m not the one going feral.”

“I’m not feral!” She paused. “Mostly. I’m wearing lace gloves, aren’t I?” They followed her gaze to her gloves, now lying in a heap on the rug. “Well, I was.”

Dougal ruffled her hair, couldn’t help it even though she was too old to have her hair mussed. If they’d been born to this world, she would already be on the Marriage Market, waltzing with handsy fortune hunters and avoiding tosspots like Eaton. If she wanted to hide out in the country until she was eighty years, Dougal had absolutely no problem with that.

“Never mind,” he said. “But let’s all try to avoid debutantes and fruit assaults during dinner.”

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t see how tonight will be any different just because you have guests.”

Dougal sighed. She was right.

Dinner was going to be a disaster.

Dinner was exactlyas entertaining as Meg had hoped.

Eventually.

After tea, she had abandoned her cases of clothes being unpacked by a maid in favor of finding the collection the Duke of Pendleton had sent her to catalogue. She found rows of busts on pedestals, gleaming white marble with perfectly carved curls and dangerous mouths. She often wondered if classical statues had once been painted, perhaps with black eyes and blue dresses and darkened slashes for eyebrows. It seemed a shame to have such potential wasted. She’d mentioned it to the duke once and he was both intrigued and horrified, as though she meant to attack his statues with her oil paints.

These particular busts sat between portraits of the duchy’s ancestors. It was a disconcerting number of eyeballs in one place, it had to be said. It would take several weeks to sketch this hall alone and she needed to be back to her uncle’s house when the cottage rents were due. She put that worry aside for the moment.

As with Pendleton, the previous duke housed the majority of his collection in the library. The upper floor was for the books overlooking the balcony to statues and cases of artifacts below. His preference for classical antiquities explained Pendleton’s interest. But there were also flints, iron buckles, an Anglo-Saxon crystal egg, all of which Meg was familiar with, having visited Little Barrow so often. There was a reason Pendleton had built a house there and started a festival of antiquities.

It would take considerable time to draw it all. She would focus on the pieces she knew would interest her godfather the most. Finding hidden treasure would be a feat in itself, never mind before a herd of hunters who knew what they were about.

She tried not to panic. She could figure this out. She would attack it not as a treasure hunt, but as an art mystery. She would inspect the murals and the way they fit over the walls, in the corners, along boarded up windows. The type of paints used. The perspective of the subjects would tell her where the walls slanted or changed and what century they were painted in.

If she could convince the grizzled hidebound farmers in her village to try the “cursed and newfangled” Norfolk system of crops, she could do this.

Theoretically.