The Duke's Wildflower

The morning air smelled of rain and horses, and Lady Eleanor Ashford decided that was the finest combination known to man.

She was already in the saddle before the stable boy had finished rubbing sleep from his eyes.

Ajax, her black stallion, tossed his head and stamped… restless, ready, the only creature in the Ashford household that matched her energy before seven in the morning.

“Easy,” she murmured, not because he needed calming, but because she did.

She dug her heels in, and they were gone.

The grounds of Ashford Manor stretched wide and green in the early grey light, dew still clinging to the grass, the city of London barely stirring beyond the iron gates.

Out here, with the wind pulling at her hair and Ajax’s hooves thundering beneath her, Eleanor did not have to be a duke’s daughter. She did not have to be anything at all.

She rode astride, the way she always had, the way her mother had screamed at her not to until she lost her voice, and then her life, and Eleanor had kept riding because there was nothing left to stop her.

That had been eleven years ago.

She was twenty-two now, and London had opinions about that too.

She returned to the house with mud on her boots and color in her cheeks, and nearly collided with her sister in the entrance hall.

“You were out again.” Cecily didn’t look up from the book in her hands.

She was the second-eldest, eighteen and already the picture of everything a young lady was supposed to be... soft-spoken, well-read, with a smile that never showed too much.

“Evidently,” Eleanor said, pulling off her gloves.

“Father’s been asking for you.”

“Father is always asking for me.”

Cecily finally looked up. Her eyes dropped to Eleanor’s boots, then back up. “You rode astride again.”

“I always ride astride.”

“The Pembrokes were on their morning walk. Along the east path.”

Eleanor handed her gloves to the waiting footman without blinking. “I hope I gave them something interesting to discuss over breakfast.”

Cecily sighed the particular sigh she had perfected over twenty-two years of being Eleanor’s sister… long, quiet, resigned.

“One day you’ll care.”

“One day pigs will wear waistcoats.” Eleanor started up the stairs. “I’ll believe both when I see them.”

The Ashford household was, by most accounts, a remarkable one.

The Duke of Ashford, Richard Ashford, was a man of quiet authority and enormous patience... patience that had been tested daily for two decades by his eldest daughter and showed no signs of breaking.

He had four children. Eleanor was first. Then Cecily. Then Rosalind, who was sixteen and had inherited their mother’s beauty and their father’s silence in equal measure. And finally, William... fourteen, loud, and the only person in the family who could keep up with Eleanor on horseback.

They were a good family. A respected family. A family that appeared, from the outside, entirely composed.

From the inside, it was a different matter.

Eleanor found her father in his study, standing at the window with his hands behind his back, watching the garden.

She knocked on the open door. “You wanted me.”

He turned. Richard Ashford was fifty-three, silver at the temples, with the kind of face that had once been handsome and had settled into something better... dignified.

He looked at his eldest daughter... mud-streaked, bright-eyed, utterly unrepentant... and something in his expression shifted between exasperation and something that might have been pride, if he’d allowed himself it.

“Close the door,” he said.

She did.

“Sit down.”

She sat, though she tucked one leg beneath her in the chair in a way that would have given their late mother a heart attack.

Her father looked at her for a long moment. Then he moved to his desk and picked up an envelope... ivory, sealed with wax, the kind that meant something official and therefore almost certainly unpleasant.

“Lady Hargrove’s winter ball,” he said. “We’ve been invited. All of us.”

“Wonderful,” Eleanor said. “I’ll send our regrets.”

“You will not.”

“Father...”

“Eleanor.” His voice was not loud. It never was. That was how she knew he meant it.

“You are twenty-two years old. You have refused four suitors in the past year alone. You have not attended a single social event since the Carlisle dinner in March, where you told Lord Whitmore that his opinions on women’s education belonged in the previous century.”

“They did.”

“That is not the point.”

“Then what is the point?”

He set the envelope down and looked at her steadily.

“The point is that you are my daughter. And I will not watch you close every door in London before you’ve had the chance to decide which ones you actually want open.”

Eleanor said nothing. That was the thing about her father... he had a way of saying things that made arguments feel small.

“One evening,” he said. “That is all I am asking.”

She looked at the envelope. Then at him. “One evening.”

“One.”

“And if I find it intolerable?”

“Then you will endure it gracefully, and we will speak no more of it for a month.”

She unfolded herself from the chair. “Fine. One evening. But I’m choosing my own gown.”

“Heaven help us all,” her father said quietly, and she was fairly certain he was smiling before she turned away.

Cecily was delighted. Rosalind was nervous. William thought the entire affair sounded boring and said so loudly at dinner, which earned him a look from his father and a kick under the table from Eleanor that she denied immediately.

“You’re going to behave,” Cecily told Eleanor over dessert, the way one might tell a storm to settle.

“I always behave.”

William snorted into his pudding.

“I behave,” Eleanor repeated, pointing her spoon at him, “in the ways that matter.”

“Name one way that matters,” Rosalind said, and then looked faintly alarmed that she’d said it aloud.

Eleanor considered this genuinely. “I have never once been late to breakfast.”

“You came to breakfast in riding clothes last Tuesday,” Cecily said.

“I was present. That’s the point.”

Her father did not look up from his plate, but the corner of his mouth moved.

The week before the ball was the kind of London week that reminded Eleanor why she preferred the countryside... grey and damp, the streets thick with carriages and social calls and women in pairs whispering behind gloved hands.

She went out twice. Once to the bookshop on Regent Street, where she spent an hour arguing pleasantly with the owner about whether Byron was overrated... he thought yes, she thought the question itself was overrated... and once to the park with William, who rode beside her with the easy confidence of a boy who’d been taught to ride by his sister and therefore had no idea there were rules about it.

“Are you going to do something terrible at the ball?” he asked, quite conversationally.

“I’m going to stand in a room and breathe. Whether society considers that terrible is their concern.”

William thought about this.

“Margaret Forsythe said you told her mother that corsets were an invention of men who were afraid of women taking a full breath.”

“I stand by that.”

“She was horrified.”

“Most people are horrified by the truth. It passes.”

William grinned. He had their father’s eyes and Eleanor’s complete disregard for what anyone thought of him, and she considered him the best of all of them for it.

“What if you meet someone?” he said, the grin turning dangerous. “At the ball.”

“I meet people constantly. I find most of them deeply average.”

“Someone not average.”

Eleanor looked at him. He was fourteen and already insufferable. She blamed herself entirely.

“Ride faster,” she said, and kicked Ajax into a gallop before he could say another word.

The night before the ball, Eleanor sat at her dressing table long after the house had gone quiet.

The gown was hanging on the wardrobe door… deep blue silk, her choice, the one Cecily had called bold and Rosalind had called beautiful, and her father had looked at and said nothing, which meant he approved and didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

She looked at her reflection. Blue eyes. Red hair, still loose from the evening.

It had not worked.

She picked up her brush and pulled it through her hair in long, slow strokes and thought about nothing in particular, the way the park had smelled this morning, the argument about Byron.

She set the brush down as she looked at her reflection a moment longer.

Then she blew out the candle and went to bed.