Chapter 6: Dinner with the Viscount

The viscount invited us to dinner the day after the steward was dismissed.

Maud read the card aloud at breakfast and put it down in the marmalade.

"He wants to see your face," she said. "He wants you to see his table and know who owns the county."

"Then we shall go," I said.

The duke looked up from his paper.

"Why?"

"Because every name on the steward's list will be sitting at that table."

He studied me.

I waited for him to forbid it.

"I will come with you," he said. "I will not speak unless you want me to."

"Speak when you like."

"I don't like to speak at the Rooks'," said the duke. "It tends to end in a duel."

Maud cackled, and I went upstairs to find a gown.

Rook Hall was lit in every window.

I had last walked through those doors as a wife, with a trunk, and I walked through them now with my hand on a duke's arm and my chin up.

The great dining room had twenty-four places.

I read the cards while we were shown to them.

The banker who held my father's second mortgage sat across from the mill owner who held the first.

Beside them was the shipping agent, and a judge's brother, and a colonel with a red face and a taste for brandy.

All of them were men my father owed.

Not the old debts, which the duke had burned.

These were new bonds on the Trevanion lands, bought up from my father's small lenders in the week after our betrothal.

All of them were at the viscount's right hand.

Edmund sat three seats down, with Seraphine laughing at his elbow.

He raised his glass to me and did not speak.

The dinner was long and every dish was cold by the time it reached us.

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