Duke of Rookwood’s Aunt Seated the ‘Wrong’ Lady Beside Him at Every Dinner — She Knew What She Did

“You have put me beside the companion again,” said the Duke of Rockwood low, bending to his aunt’s ear before the dinner gong. “The whole table of eligible beauties you collected at such expense, and you seat me beside Miss Polk.” “Did I?” said the dowager, all innocence, smoothing her black silk. “How careless of me. Do sit, Lysander.

You are blocking the soup.” He sat. He always sat, for one did not argue with the dowager Duchess of Rockwood in her own borrowed dining room before two dozen guests. One merely endured her as one endured weather. And there on his right, exactly where she had been placed the night before and the night before that, was Araminta Polk, companion to old Lady Fruin, dressed in the same gray gown she had worn since the house party began.

Her gloves mended at one finger, her eyes fixed with great concentration on the arrangement of her cutlery, as though she would rather be anywhere on Earth than seated beside the most sought-after bachelor in three counties. The Duke of Rockwood knew precisely what his aunt was about. He had come to the country to escape exactly this, the mothers, the daughters, the endless soft siege of a man with 30,000 a year and no wife.

His aunt had promised him a quiet fortnight’s shooting. Instead, she had filled her friends’ house with marriageable young women, and then, with the straightest of faces, kept seating beside him the one woman at the table no mother in England would have put forward, a poor relation, a paid companion, a nobody. He found, against all expectation, that he was grateful.

“Miss Polk,” he said, “we meet again. My aunt’s seating chart appears to have a defect.” “It does, your grace,” Araminta agreed gravely, and at last looked up. Her eyes, he noticed, were a clear and steady hazel, and there was something at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile, but knew where one was kept. I have tried to mention it to her.

She says the placards must have got muddled in the draught. There is no draught. There is never any draught, your grace, on the nights I am seated beside you. It is a most particular draught. It troubles no one else. He surprised himself by laughing, a short, real laugh, the first the house party had got out of him, and down the table the dowager duchess did not look up from her soup, though the corner of her own mouth twitched in a manner her great nephew would have found highly suspicious had he troubled to look.

He did not look. He was occupied. For here was the thing he had not expected, the thing his cunning old aunt had perhaps expected all along. Araminta Poll was the only person at that interminable table who did not want anything from him. The Bootys wanted a coronet. Their mothers wanted a settlement. The gentlemen wanted his interest or his horses or his ear for some scheme.

And Miss Poll, who had nothing and could hope for nothing, wanted only to get decently through dinner without dropping a fork. And so she spoke to him as one human creature to another, plainly, dryly, with a quick, clear mind she made no attempt to dim. And the Duke of Rookwood, who had been bored for the better part of a decade, found himself leaning toward her over the soup like a man toward a fire.

“You think the placards muddled?” he said. “I think my aunt a schemer.” “Oh, certainly she is a schemer,” said Araminta. “But you must not blame her too harshly, your grace. She is fond of you and the fond do scheme. It is only the indifferent who leave us to ourselves.” She buttered a roll with great composure.

I should not refine upon it, however. She cannot mean anything by seating you beside me. I have no fortune, no family worth the name, and a gown that has been turned twice. I am the safest woman in this room, the one woman your aunt may be quite sure you will never look at. That is very likely why she does it. To give you a rest from being hunted.

The Duke of Rockwood looked at her then, really looked at the turned gray gown and the mended glove and the clearer unbothered eyes, and felt the floor of his certainty shift very slightly beneath him. “And if I did look,” he said, Araminta Polk set down her roll. For just a moment the dryness left her, and something more guarded moved behind the steady hazel.

The look of a woman who had long ago decided not to want things she could not have, and did not thank him for unsettling the arrangement. “Then I should think you very unkind, your grace,” she said quietly, “to amuse yourself with the only woman here who cannot afford to be amused. Now, Lady Fruin is signaling that she wants her shawl, and I must go and be useful, which is what I am for.

” And she rose and went and left him with his soup and the donning disagreeable suspicion that he had behaved like every other careless great man she had ever served. He thought about her all the next day, which annoyed him. He told himself it was nothing, the idle interest of a jaded man in a novelty, and to prove it he resolved to pay her no particular attention at all.

He kept the resolution precisely until the soup, when he found himself watching her across the candlelight as she sat among the great folk, neither cowed by them nor reaching for them, doing the small invisible work of a companion, passing Lady Fruin and drops, retrieving a dropped fan with a quiet word, deflecting a sharp old dowager’s rudeness with a gentleness that left the dowager somehow ashamed without ever knowing why.

No one at that table thanked her. No one looked at her. She was furniture to them, useful and unseen, and she bore it with a dignity so complete that it was not endurance at all, but a kind of sovereignty. And the Duke of Rockwood, watching, found that he could look at nothing else. That night a young buck of the party, deep in his wine, made some loud careless jest about the companion in the turned gown, and the table tittered, and Araminta Polk only lowered her eyes and went on with her dinner as though she

had not heard. But the Duke of Rockwood had heard. He set down his glass and remarked, into the laughter, in a voice of perfect ducal frost, that he had found Miss Polk’s conversation the most rewarding at the table this fortnight, and that he pitied any man too dull to discover the same. The laughter died.

The young buck went scarlet. And Araminta lifted her startled hazel eyes to his across the candles, and for one unguarded instant the careful companion was gone, and only the woman remained, looking at him as though no one in a very long while had stood between her and a cruelty. His aunt, at the head of the table, said nothing whatever, and smiled into her wine.

He told himself it was the novelty. He told himself a man grown weary of flattery would naturally find plain dealing refreshing, as a man sick of marzipan craves bread. But when the dinner gong rang the following evening, and he came down and found, of course, Miss Polk seated at his right hand in her gray gown, the draw having struck again, he felt something leap in him that had nothing whatever to do with bread.

Miss Polk. Your Grace. She did not quite meet his eye. I asked your aunt to move me. She was unaccountably deaf. I asked her not to, said the Duke of Rockwood. That brought her head up. I have been a fool, he went on, low, under the clatter of the table, for once not caring who watched the Duke of Rockwood lean toward a paid companion.

You said I should be unkind to amuse myself with you. You were right, and I am ashamed. So, I shall not amuse myself. I shall be entirely in earnest, which I have not been with a living soul in 10 years, and you may make of it what you will. He paused. I find I do not want a rest from being hunted, Miss Polk.

I find I want to stop running. I had not known the difference until a poor relation in a turned gown declined to flatter me over the soup. Araminta Polk had gone very still. Your Grace, she said, and her voice was not quite steady. You must not. People will hear. They will say cruel things of me, chiefly.

A companion who sets her cap at a duke is the lowest creature in any drawing room, and I have only my good name, and it is the single thing I own outright. Then I shall give them nothing cruel to say, he answered, for I shall not flirt, nor whisper, nor lean. He sat back, deliberately putting a foot of polished mahogany between them, and spoke at an ordinary, audible, perfectly proper distance.

I shall court you, Miss Polk, in the daylight, before my aunt and Lady Froon and the whole gossiping pack of them, plainly and honorably, as a man courts a woman he means to marry. There is nothing cruel in that. There is nothing they can make small of. Let them say the Duke of Rockwood lost his heart at his aunt’s dinner table.

It is only the truth, and I find I do not mind it in the least. Down the table at last, the Dowager Duchess of Rookwood looked up from her plate. She caught her great nephew’s eye, and she caught the white-faced wonder on the face of the companion beside him, and she permitted herself very slightly the smile she had been saving all fortnight.

“Lysander,” she called sweetly down the length of the candlelit table, silver and porcelain gleaming between them, a painted fan idle at her wrist, “do stop muttering at poor Miss Polk and let her eat. Though I confess,” and here her old eyes twinkled wicked and fond, “I cannot think how the placards keep getting so muddled.

It is almost as if Providence has a hand in it.” “It is not Providence, Aunt,” said the Duke of Rookwood, “and we both know it. But I shall forgive you the scheming, for I think it the only truly kind thing anyone has done me in a decade.” He turned back to Araminta, and his voice gentled. “She saw what I was too proud and too tired to see.

She kept setting the right woman beside me until I had the wit to notice. I am very slow, Miss Polk. You will have to be patient with me. But I should like the chance to be patient with, if you will allow it, for 40 years or so in the daylight, before everyone, with nothing hidden and nothing to be ashamed of.

” Araminta Polk looked from the Duke to the twinkling old Dowager and back again, and the careful armor she had worn for years, the dryness, the not wanting, the safety of the woman no one looked at, cracked clean across. And what came through it was not a companion’s composure at all, but a young woman’s whole, unguarded heart.

“I have been seated beside you four nights running,” she said, and a laugh broke through the brightness in her eyes, “and told myself each one that it meant nothing, because nothing was the only thing it could safely mean. “And now you say in front of everyone.” She pressed her mended glove briefly to her lips, gathering herself.

“Your grace, Lysander, if you are in earnest, if you truly mean to do this thing in the daylight where no one can call it shameful, “I am in earnest. I have never been more so.” “Then yes.” Said Araminta Polk. “Then yes, and yes, and I shall be very glad to be patient with you for 40 years, and I shall never once let you forget that it was your aunt who managed the whole of it over the soup.

” The Dowager Duchess of Rookwood raised her wine glass an inch to no one in particular and drank. They were married before the leaves had fully turned in the village church near the house where she had only a companion and was now to be a duchess. The mothers and the beauties had gone home long since defeated by a drought they never did understand.

And the Duke of Rookwood, who had come to the country to escape being chosen, found that the only choosing that had ever mattered was the one his shrewd old aunt had quietly made for him four nights running by candlelight until he had the sense to make it his own. He told his aunt as much the morning of the wedding taking her dry old hand in both of his.

“You knew.” He said, “From the first placard you knew.” “Of course I knew.” Said the Dowager Duchess of Rookwood, patting his cheek as she had when he was as a boy. “I have buried a husband and watched a great many marriages, Lysander, and I will tell you the whole secret of the business, for it is short. The right woman is almost never the one they push at you.

She is the one already in the room asking you for nothing whom you have not the wit to see.” Her eyes were bright. “I only kept seating her where you could not help but look. The looking, my dear, you managed entirely on your own. And a very great deal better, in the end, than I had any right to hope. He kissed her hand and went to be married and was, to the end of a long and astonished life, exactly as happy as his aunt had always known the overlooked Miss Polk would make him.