The choice should have been obvious.
Yet here she was, at half-past midnight, rising from her bed and reaching for her dressing gown.
“Miss?”
Her maid, Annie, appeared in the doorway connecting their chambers, her face creased with sleep and concern. “Is something amiss?”
Penelope hesitated. Then, with the reckless certainty of someone who had already made her decision regardless of wisdom, she said: “Fetch my cloak. The dark one. And dress yourself warmly.”
Annie’s eyes widened. “Miss Penelope, you cannot mean?—”
“I am going out.” Her voice was steadier than she felt. “And you are coming with me.”
“But miss, it’s the middle of the night! Your mother will?—”
“My mother need never know, provided we are quiet and quick.” Penelope moved to her wardrobe, selecting a simple walking dress. “I require your assistance, Annie. And your discretion.”
The maid opened her mouth as though to protest further, then seemed to recognize the futility of argument. She had been in the Hartwell household long enough to know when Penelope had set her mind to something.
“Very well, miss,” she said with a sigh. “But if we’re caught, I’m telling your mother this was entirely your idea.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
They dressed in hurried silence, Penelope’s fingers fumbling with buttons and laces whilst her pulse hammered an irregular rhythm. This was madness. Utter madness. Sneaking from her home in the dead of night to visit a gentleman’s residence based on nothing more substantial than a cryptic request and her own stubborn curiosity.
Yet she could not stop herself.
Twenty minutes later, they slipped from the servants’ entrance and into the night, where Penelope’s brother-in-law’s carriage waited—procured through a combination of careful planning and shameless bribery of the Thornbury coachman, who owed her several favors.
The journey to Blackmere House passed in anxious silence. Penelope kept her hands clasped tightly in her lap, fighting the urge to demand the driver turn back. Beside her, Annie maintained a disapproving silence that spoke volumes.
When the imposing façade of the Duke’s townhouse came into view, Penelope’s courage nearly failed entirely.
Turn back, the rational part of her mind screamed.This is folly of the highest order.
But the image of the Duke’s face—that barely controlled desperation—steadied her resolve.
The butler who answered her knock looked appropriately scandalized at finding a young lady on the doorstep at such an hour, but he nevertheless showed her and Annie inside with professional discretion. Perhaps, Penelope thought with grim humor, the Duke of Blackmere received midnight female visitors with sufficient regularity that even this was unremarkable.
“His Grace is in his study, miss,” the butler intoned. “If you will follow me.”
They moved through corridors that smelled of beeswax and old books, past portraits of stern-faced ancestors who seemed to judge Penelope’s presence with painted disapproval. The house was quieter than she had expected—no sounds of revelry, no evidence of the scandalous parties she had heard whispered about.
Just silence, heavy and waiting.
The butler stopped before a closed door, knocked once, then opened it without waiting for a response.
“Miss Hartwell, Your Grace.”
He stepped aside, allowing Penelope to enter whilst Annie remained in the corridor with a pointed look that suggested she would be listening for any sounds of distress.
The study was smaller than she had anticipated, lined with books and dominated by a massive desk covered in scattered papers. Candles burned low in their holders, casting wavering shadows across the room.
And there, behind the desk, stood the Duke.
He looked worse than he had at dinner—his cravat was gone entirely, his shirt open at the throat, his hair dishevelled as though he had been running his hands through it repeatedly. He stared at her with an expression somewhere between relief and horror.
“You came,” he said hoarsely. “I did not think... that is, I hoped, but I could not be certain?—”