“Say, just what made you become interested in this?” Hattie was eyeing The History of the Peloponnesian War in Annabelle’s lap.
She studiously avoided glancing at the dancing letters. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I had a choice in the matter. My father taught me ancient Greek as soon as I could read, and the wars in Messenia were his specialty.”
“Was he an Oxford man?”
“No, he went to Durham. He was a third son, so he became a clergyman. He mostly taught himself.”
“If only they had educated women sooner,” Hattie said, “there would be fewer books about carnage, and more about romance and beautiful things.”
“But there’s plenty of romance in these books. Take Helen of Troy—Menelaus launched a thousand ships to win her back.”
Hattie pursed her lips. “Personally, I always found a thousand ships a little excessive. And Menelaus and Paris fought over Helen like dogs over a bone; no one asked her what she wanted. Even her obsession with Paris was compelled by a poisoned arrow—what’s romantic about that?”
“Passion,” Annabelle said, “Eros’s arrows are infused with passion.”
“Oh, passion, poison,” Hattie said, “either makes people addle-brained.”
She had a point. The ancient Greeks had considered passion a form of madness that infected the blood, and these days, it still inspired elopements and illegal duels and lurid novels. It could even lead a perfectly sensible vicar’s daughter astray.
“Plato was romantic, though,” Hattie said. “Did he not say our soul was split in two before birth, and that we spend our life searching for our other half to feel whole again?”
“Yes, he did say that.”
And he had found the whole notion ridiculous, which was why his play about soulmates was a satire. Annabelle kept that to herself, for there was a dreamy glow on Hattie’s face that she did not have the heart to wipe away.
“How I look forward to meeting my lost half,” Hattie sighed. “Catriona, what does your soulmate look like? Catriona?”
Catriona surfaced from her book, blinking slowly like a startled owl. “My soulmate?”
“Your other half,” Hattie prompted. “Your ideal husband.”
Catriona blew out a breath. “Why, I’m not sure.”
“But a woman must know what she desires in a man!”
“I suppose he would have to be a scholar,” Catriona said, “so he would let me do my research.”
“Ah.” Hattie nodded. “A progressive gentleman, then.”
“Indeed. How about yours?” Catriona asked quickly.
“Young,” Hattie said. “He must be young, and titled, and he must be blond. That rich, dark-gold color of an old Roman coin.”
“That’s . . . quite specific,” Catriona said.
“He will sit for my paintings,” Hattie said, “and I can hardly have a grandfatherly Sir Galahad, can I? Think, have you ever seen a knight in shining armor who wasn’t young and fair?”
Annabelle bit back a snort. Small village girls talked about knights and princes. Then again, for a girl like Hattie, knights and princes weren’t just creatures from a fairy tale, they came to dine with her parents in St. James. And if one of them married Hattie, he would shelter and indulge her, because at the end of the day, he would have to answer to Julien Greenfield.
Even she might consider marriage under such circumstances—being well treated, with an army of staff at her command to look after the household. As it was, soulmate or not, marriage would mean an endless cycle of scrubbing, mending, and grafting for a whole family, with the added obligation of letting a man use her body for his pleasure . . . Her fingertips dug into the velvet of the coach seat. What would be worse? Sharing a bed with a man she didn’t care for, or with one who had the power to grind her heart into the dirt?
“Annabelle,” Hattie said, inevitably. “Tell us about your soulmate.”
“He seems occupied elsewhere, doesn’t he? It’s just as well that I mean to rely on my own half.”
She evaded Hattie’s disapproving eyes by glancing out the window again. A village was drifting past. Honey-colored stone cottages lined the street, looking edible with the snow icing roofs and chimney tops. A few fat pigs trundled along the pavement. The duke took care of his tenants, at least.
By the gods. “Is that Claremont?” She touched a finger to the cold windowpane.
Hattie leaned forward. “Why, it is. What a lovely house.”
House and lovely did not describe the structure that had moved into view in the far distance. Claremont rose from the soil like an enchanted rock, huge, intricately carved, and implacable. Sprawled against a gently rising slope, it oversaw the land for miles like a ruler on a throne. It was utterly, frighteningly magnificent.
* * *
The clop-clop-clop of the horses’ hooves seemed to die away unheard in the vastness of the cobblestoned courtyard. But a lone figure was waiting at the bottom of the gray limestone stairs leading to the main house. Peregrin Devereux. He was bleary-eyed and his cravat was rumpled, but he had a firm grip when he helped them out of the carriage.
“Utterly splendid to have you here, ladies,” he said, tucking a blushing Catriona’s hand into the crook of his one arm and Aunty Greenfield’s into the other as he led them up the stairs. “The gentlemen have eagerly awaited your arrival.”
The entrance hall of Claremont rose three dizzying stories high beneath a domed glass ceiling. Statues adorned the balustrades of the upper floors. The marble slabs on the floor were arranged in black and white squares like a giant chessboard. Apt, for a man known as one of the queen’s favorite strategists.
Annabelle took a deep breath and straightened her spine. All perfectly normal. She would make it through a weekend here. She knew how to pick up her knives and forks in the right order and how to curtsy to whom. She was proficient in French, Latin, and Greek; could sing and play the piano; and could converse about the history of Orient and Occident. Her antiquity-mad father and her maternal great-grandmother had seen to that; with Gallic determination, her petite grand-mère had passed on Bourbon etiquette to her descendants all the way to the vicarage. It had made Annabelle an oddity in Kent, awfully overeducated, as she had told Hattie. Who knew that it would now help her to avoid the worst pitfalls in a ducal palace?
Lord Devereux led them to a cluster of servants at the bottom of the grand staircase.
“We are about to be snowed in,” he said, “so I suggest we go for a ride around the gardens within the hour.”