She Stumbled Into the Grand Duke Among the Orange Trees — And Neither of Them Ever Let Go

I have served Crispin Aldermere, Grand Duke of Ashvern, for 11 years, and in all that time I have kept his secrets with the professional discretion of a man who knows on which side his bread is buttered. I have pressed his tailcoats, polished his boots to a mirror shine, and watched a parade of society’s finest daughters arrange themselves in his line of sight like chess pieces waiting to be moved.

 He noticed none of them, not in the way that matters. I have watched him notice Miss Willa Fenwick, however, and the manner in which it happened is the sort of thing a man carries to his grave with a smile. The evening was Lord and Lady Greystone’s winter ball, candlelight on every surface, crystal dripping from the chandeliers, and the cream of the season packed into rooms that smelled of hothouse roses and overheated ambition.

 His Grace had attended at the particular insistence of his aunt, who believed that a man approaching 34 ought to have found himself a grand duchess by now. He made all the right bows, accepted all the right glasses of champagne, and then slipped away from the noise at the earliest respectable opportunity. I knew where he was going.

He always went to the conservatory. Greystone’s conservatory was a long glass room on the south side of the house, warm and green and entirely ignored by the dancing guests, and His Grace preferred it for its silence. He would stand among the orange trees and the trailing jasmine, hands clasped behind his back, and breathe like a man who had very nearly drowned.

 I followed at a discreet distance because the damp air made linen stick to a gentleman’s shoulders, and it is my job to anticipate. What I did not anticipate was Miss Willa Fenwick. She was, by every conventional assessment, the last person one expected to find alone in a conservatory at half past 10. She was also the sort of woman that society routinely failed to see, small, quietly dressed in pale green that did not compete with the season’s silk and jewels, with dark eyes always slightly too busy reading the room to bother

performing for it. I recalled her dimly standing near the refreshment table with the particular stillness of a woman who has learned that invisibility is its own kind of shelter. She was moving quickly, head down, when she turned the corner around a great pot of orange trees and walked directly into the Duke of Ashworth.

 I saw the whole thing from the doorway. Her foot caught the stone lip of the planter. She caught his arm, both his arms as it happened, fingers closing around his sleeves with the desperate grip of a woman expecting to meet the floor. He caught her in turn, hands closing around her waist, and they stood locked in that absurd posture while three orange blossoms drifted down from the disturbed branches and settled on the shoulder of his tailcoat.

 “Oh,” she said, “Oh dear.” “Indeed,” said his grace. She looked up at him. He looked down at her. Neither of them let go. “You are hiding from the ball,” she said, which was not at all what a young woman was supposed to say to a grand duke whose hands were still about her waist. “I am taking the air,” said his grace, “among the orange trees in the dark.

” She considered him with those busy dark eyes. “I would call that hiding, your grace. I am something of an authority on the subject.” And I watched the corner of my employer’s mouth move, a thing I had not seen in 11 years of pressing his coats. “Then I shall defer entirely to your expertise,” he said.

 In the very next second, a soft collective intake of breath came from behind me, and I turned to find that Lady Ashworth, Mrs. Penwell Crane, and two of their satellites had followed us into the conservatory, champagne glasses in hand, in search of somewhere quieter to continue surveying the evening’s marital prospects.

 They stood in the doorway and looked at the Grand Duke of Ashworth with his hands around a young woman’s waist, and the young woman’s hands on his sleeves, and the orange blossoms on his shoulder. Lady Ashworth’s expression moved through surprise, calculation, and satisfaction with the speed of a woman who has been waiting for precisely this kind of social windfall.

 “Your Grace,” she said with a smile that meant nothing good. Miss Fenwick. His Grace did not release her. I noted that. He could have stepped back cleanly and reduced the whole tableau to nothing. He did not. He stood quite still, regarded Lady Ashworth with the cool gray look that had terrified better women than she, and said nothing at all. Miss Fenwick.

 To her considerable credit, did not dissolve. I watched her take a breath, square her shoulders inside those borrowed hands, and say, with a composure that impressed me, “I beg your pardon. I’m afraid I have quite ruined the Duke’s evening.” A pause. “And his tailcoat.” “On the contrary,” said His Grace, and his voice had something in it that I had not heard before.

 Something dry and warm at once, like sunlight through glass. “You have improved it considerably.” Lady Ashworth and her companions would have that to work with before midnight. By morning, the engagement of the Grand Duke of Ashvern and Miss Willa Fenwick, wallflower, nobody particular, would be the only topic of drawing rooms from Mayfair to Kensington.

 I had a fairly clear sense that His Grace understood this. I also had, watching his face in the green-gold light among the orange trees, a fairly clear sense that he did not mind. The days that followed were not the ordeal I might have expected. There were meetings with solicitors, a visit from his aunt that lasted 2 hours and ended, to the astonishment of the entire household, with her laughing, and a morning call to the Fenwick house in which the Duke sat in a modest parlor with a pot of indifferent tea, and talked with Miss Fenwick for an hour and

three quarters about, as best I could gather from the hallway, the cultivation of orange trees, the migratory habits of certain birds, and whether Lord Greystone’s conservatory was structurally sound. He came out of that parlor with orange blossoms still faintly in the air around him, and a look on his face that I recognized from the conservatory, that of a man who has found somewhere to breathe.

 He told me that evening, while I pressed his coat for the morning, that he had been going to the conservatory for 3 years to escape the noise, and that in 3 years it had never once worked until someone walked into him and knocked the orange blossoms loose. “She said,” he added, “that she had been avoiding the refreshment table since half past eight because a matron kept trying to introduce her to a man who collected beetles, and the conservatory was the only part of the house where beetles seemed un-clea.” He paused. “She was not

embarrassed by the incident. No, your grace,” I said. “She was annoyed by Lady Ashworth.” “Understandably, your grace, but she said” and here he stopped, and I kept my eyes on the coat because there are moments when a man needs to speak into the air and not at another face. “She said she didn’t, in the end, object to the outcome.

” I smoothed the lapel, turned the coat on the press, and said nothing, which is one of the primary skills of my profession. “Neither do I,” said the Duke of Ashvern. And in 11 years of service, I had never heard him say anything that surprised me less. Two days after that, he called at the Fenwick house again. He carried no hothouse roses and no jewel case.

 He carried, of all things, a small orange tree in a clay pot, begged from Lord Greystone’s bewildered gardener, and he would not let the footman touch it. I waited in the hallway, and the parlor door was not quite shut, and a valet’s hearing is professionally excellent. “Before you speak,” I heard Miss Fenwick say, “I must ask you something, and I must have the truth.

 Is this honor, your grace? Because if you are offering for me to balance Lady Ashworth’s arithmetic, I would rather be talked about than rescued.” There was a silence in which I confess I held my breath. “Lady Ashworth,” said the Duke of Ashvern, “could not compel me to take a breakfast I did not want, Miss Fenwick, let alone a wife.

 I have stood in that conservatory three winters running trying to learn how to breathe. You managed it in under a minute. Then lower. I am not here because we were seen. I am here because I should like to be seen by you for the rest of my life. I did not hear her answer in words. I heard a small sound that might have been a laugh and might have been something nearer tears.

 And when the door opened a quarter of an hour later, the little orange tree stood on the parlor table and Miss Fenwick’s hand rested on Miss Grace’s arm as though it had grown there. The engagement was announced on a Tuesday. Miss Fenwick wore pale blue to the dinner at which it was confirmed and she sat at the Grand Duke’s right hand and I watched him lean toward her once during the fish course and say something very quietly and watched her cover her mouth with her napkin and laugh.

 And I thought that Lady Ashworth, who had undoubtedly imagined herself the author of this arrangement, could take whatever credit she liked. The orange blossoms had done the real work. A man who dresses another man for his wedding morning sees a great many things. And what I saw on that morning was simple. A duke who stood at the window of his dressing room and looked out over the frost on the park below and was not, for once in 11 years, composing himself to face the day.

 He was simply standing there calm and easy in the manner of a man who has nothing to brace against because where he is going is exactly where he wants to be. I handed him his gloves. He put them on. He turned from the window. “Right,” said the Grand Duke of Ashworth. And I, who had watched him stand unmoved through a hundred evenings of silk and calculation and the world’s most eligible daughters arranged just so, I understood at last that it had taken one woman not looking for him, not performing for him, only turning a corner in the dark among the

orange trees to find him precisely where he was. That is the whole of the story. That is also, in my professional estimation, exactly how it ought to have gone.