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London, 1885
A messenger boy ran up the steps to the front door of 1216 Rogue Street and rang the bell. It was a fine townhouse, rented for the Season by an heiress from America. Similar girls and their families were flooding London these days, hoping that all their new American money would buy them an old English title via an impoverished nobleman.
Gossip said that this heiress had done one better, securing the hand of a nobleman from across the ocean. A duke, no less.
You couldn’t expect anything better from new money.
The door eventually opened and a footman spoke to the boy. He took the note the boy handed him, gave him sixpence in return, and took it inside to place it on a silver tray, which he further conveyed to the breakfast room.
Inside, a gentleman of about fifty years, a young man of about twenty-six, and a girl barely twenty years of age enjoyed their breakfast. The footman gave the tray to the oldest gentleman and offered it with a bow. “Mr. Krennic. From the office, I believe.”
Mr. Krennic read the note and rose to his feet, muttering about incompetence. His ward looked up, her eyes guileless. “Why, whatever is the matter, sir?”
“A minor issue of business, my dear,” he said. “Nothing for you to worry your head about. I shouldn’t be long.” He took another look at the note. “I hope I shan’t be long.”
“But the Duke is due to call,” she protested, eyes wide. “I shall be presented to my future lord and master today. What if this issue for business keeps you away all afternoon? However will I get through that meeting without your guidance, sir?”
Krennic’s secretary, sitting at the end of the breakfast table, choked on a bite of toast.
Krennic didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said vaguely, patting her shoulder. “This call is simply a formality. Mr. Rook, if I’m not back, look after her. Make sure she doesn’t do anything - silly.”
“Yes, sir,” said his secretary, and Mr. Krennic exited the room, dabbing his lips free of kipper grease.
Both of the remaining breakfasters listened to the sounds of his exit from the house. Then Mr. Rook looked at the young lady. “What did you do?”
She picked up her spoon and neatly decapitated the soft-boiled egg in its egg cup in front of her. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Jyn. You did something to get him out of here on the morning His Grace is scheduled to arrive.”
She spooned out soft-boiled egg in a meditative fashion. “I may have sent a note to the offices of Erso Industries, requesting that they manufacture some kind of emergency this morning.”
“Not a bad plan,” he allowed. “But the head of the London office is Krennic’s mindless lackey. He’ll get there, Mr. Trouper will tell him it was your idea, and he’ll come right back, probably in a rage.”
“I know,” Jyn said. “That’s why I sent the note to his second in command, promising that if he fulfilled this request to my satisfaction, I would fire Mr. Trouper on my wedding day and promote him.”
Bodhi blinked a few times. “You’re diabolical,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“What’s the point, though? Why do you want Krennic out of the way?”
“I always want Krennic out of the way,” she said. “But this morning, I’d like to get a sense of his royal Dukishness - ”
“He’s not a royal Duke,” Bodhi said. “That’s different.”
“Fine, his noble Dukefulness, without Krennic there, blustering and blathering and not letting me get a word in edgewise. You know the way he does.”
“I do. You don’t think he’ll be suspicious?”
“Please. I’ve been on my very best milk-toast behavior since New York. He thinks I’m completely cowed and utterly thrilled to be a Duchess.”
Bodhi had to agree with that. Jyn had been much more pliable and agreeable lately - suspiciously so, if you’d known her as long as he had. Krennic had known her longer, but hadn’t seemed to notice. “Lord and master might have been a bit much, though,” he suggested delicately.
She considered it. “You think so?”
“Considering the whole reason Krennic dragged you across the ocean and sold you off to a duke was because you’d gotten arrested one too many times at suffrage demonstrations? Yes.”
She shrugged. “Very well. I won’t be too vapid. By the way, I’ve asked the Duke to bring his solicitor with him. You boys can chat about the contract while I pour the tea. Won’t that be fun?”
“How did you - ? Never mind.” Bodhi rubbed his temples. “His solicitor is as sharp as they come. I know what you want, but in order to get it, we’re going to either have to pull a very fast one, or get the Duke on our side.”
She snorted. “How likely is that?”
“Just please don’t do anything rash. We haven’t signed any of the contracts yet and nothing’s been officially announced. He could still call it off.”
“Bodhi,” she said. “I’m getting sold into marriage to a stranger, in a country where I haven’t lived since I was eight. I hate this. But I’m not stupid. This is the only way out from under Krennic’s thumb unless I want to wait until I’m twenty-five, and if I wait that long, I’ll murder him. So I’ll just have to make the best of things.” She drained her tea and set it down. “Besides, if his High and Mighty Grace is unbearable, I can always push him down the stairs or something.”
Bodhi groaned.
Cassian watched the streets of London go by outside the carriage window - cold and grey, crowded and dreary. It was days like these that he missed his homeland so badly his bones ached.
But then, nothing about the past five years was what he’d planned for his life in the preceding twenty-one.
“This is the most logical course of action, Your Grace,” Kay said.
“Yes, I understand.”
“Your grandfather left the estate in considerable debt, as you well know. Anything not entailed is mortgaged to the hilt, and your coffers are positively hemorrhaging cash. You need Miss Erso’s money.”
“Yes,” Cassian said, “I understand all that.”
“You need not see her except to get heirs.”
Usually he liked Kay’s bluntness. He’d hired him after his grandfather’s solicitors had all driven him mad with their toadying and their shilly-shallying and their “mmmm Your Grace may wish to consider"ing. Kay always said what he thought.
But it wasn’t as enjoyable now as it usually was.
"You will have to engage with Krennic,” Kay continued. “He’ll be an in-law of sorts.”
Cassian suppressed a groan. He’d met the man last fall, when he’d been in London to oversee matters at the London office of Erso Industries. He remembered very clearly asking, “But isn’t it your ward’s company?”
And Krennic laughing and saying, “On paper, your Grace, but you know women. She is quite content to let wiser heads prevail.”
From various little asides of that nature, he’d come away with a mental image of a silly, self-involved girl. A brat, actually. “Oh, she’s a little high-spirited,” Krennic had said. “Got in some girlish scrapes back in New York. But she’ll settle down once you get her pregnant.”
Too bad this silly, self-involved brat came with so much money.
The thought of being related, however loosely, to Orson Krennic was enough to make his stomach turn. Still, with offices in New York as well as London, he wouldn’t be here all the time, swanning around and announcing himself as the closest family member of the Duchess of Fest. He’d be doing it in New York, instead.
No society so snobbish as one convinced it didn’t have a class system. Miss Jyn Erso was probably frothing with joy that she would be a duchess.
Once upon a time, he’d dreamed of a wife he loved and children climbing into his lap and demanding stories. Instead, he was going to get a bag of cash and a stranger that he already had no interest in knowing.
At least there would be children, someday.
At the rented townhouse, they were shown into a drawing room containing only Krennic’s secretary, whom Cassian had met before, and two young women. One sat in the corner, sewing, clearly a lady’s maid pressed into service as a chaperone, and the other was his future wife.
Miss Jyn Erso was a small woman, swathed in an elegant brown silk dress with folds and pleats and ruffles and a slightly military look around the shoulders. Her dark hair was pinned up in an elaborate mess of braids and puffs, and her eyes were modestly lowered to the floor as Mr. Rook performed the introductions. She was pretty, he supposed, in a bland kind of way. As if all her edges had been smoothed with sandpaper.
“Is Mr. Krennic not to join us?” Cassian asked after all the rituals were complete. He was a little surprised the man wasn’t here. Especially after sending a note practically ordering him to bring Kay.
“A little matter of business took him away,” Rook said. “He hoped to return in time for your arrival, but it seems he is unavoidably detained.”
Cassian happened to be looking in Miss Erso’s direction when Rook said this, and noticed her lips curving ever so slightly.
“Ah,” he said, watching her closely. “That is too bad.”
The next moment, the expression was gone, and her face was perfectly bland and smooth again. “The weather is lovely, is it not, Your Grace?” she said.
Through the windows, clouds sulked, blocking sunlight and withholding rain.
“Yes, Miss Erso,” he said dutifully. “Lovely.”
Tea was summoned, then poured. One lump or two? Sandwich? He held a plate with an untasted biscuit on his lap and listened to her mouth platitudes about the ocean voyage.
The longer he looked, the more that blandness itched at him. As if there should be more there, and there wasn’t.
“You must be happy to be back home,” he said when the topic of shipboard life was exhausted.
She looked up with eyes as blank as a doll’s. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your guardian tells me you were born in this country,” he said.
Something flickered at the back of her eyes and was gone. “It was many years ago. I have few memories of England.”
“I’m surprised Mr. Krennic did not raise you here.”
“My guardian elected to take me to New York when my parents died, as there were branches of my father’s company in both locations.”
“But you retain your accent,” he said.
“My governess was English,” she said. “And my finishing school teachers … liked it.”
He studied her, trying to work out what the flicker in her eyes and the strange tone in her voice meant. They were very picky about their accents, these English. It wasn’t enough to speak their language fluently and intelligently; you had to have exactly the proper cut-glass accent as well.
She took a sip of tea. “As long as we are on the topic of our childhoods, Your Grace, I hear you were born and raised in Mexico,” she said brightly. “How lovely.”
“Yes, until I was twenty-one. Then my grandfather died and I came to England to assume the dukedom.”
Reluctantly. Angrily. But he was the only male heir left to the moldering wreck of an estate. He felt as if he’d donned a heavy costume five years ago. He thought of it as El Duque, the costume he was obligated to show the world so they would not see Cassian Andor within.
“And do you miss home?” she asked.
He should say something about how England was home now, or had always been. But instead, he said, “Yes.”
She blinked, and for a moment their eyes met. She had lovely eyes, he thought in some surprise. Greenish. Not an emerald, but a hazy green-brown. And there was something behind them. He didn’t know yet what, but they weren’t empty.
She dropped her gaze and hid her eyes and her mysterious something away from him. “And what took your father there?” she asked.
“He was the third son, and something of the black sheep of the family. He traveled a great deal and eventually ended up in Mexico, where he married my mother, who was of an aristocratic family.”
“How romantic. Did he raise you with stories of being an English duke?”
“No, certainly not. He never expected that I would inherit. Indeed, he died before either of his brothers or any of his nephews.”
Every so often it hit him, the missing of his papa. It had been twenty years, but there was still a tender scar on his heart.
But that was not to be revealed to this woman, so he said, “I have him to thank for my excellent French and English.”
"Mr. Krennic tells me you mean to take elocution lessons,” Miss Erso said brightly.
Cassian paused mid-sip, then set his teacup down. “Does he?”
“Yes.”
Krennic had mentioned it once, in a jovial tone. I have a capital idea for you, old boy! Cassian had longed to punch him, but contented himself with rejecting it firmly.
“He is mistaken,” he said, with all the coldness of El Duque at his frostiest. “My voice is my voice. I see no need to make it more palatable for anyone who does not already find it so.”
She cocked her head, and although her face remained maddeningly expressionless, he could suddenly tell there were gears whirring away behind those greenish eyes. “I see,” was all she said.
Was she regretting that she would have a husband without the perfectly proper high class English accent? Well, she could regret it all she wanted. She didn’t have to listen to him any more than necessary.
She looked away, selecting a slice of cake with the care of a general selecting her next target. “So tell me,” she said. “How did you and my guardian come to know each other?”
“It was through Mr. Tuesso,” he said, gesturing to Kay, who sat by, quietly consuming sandwiches at a prodigious rate. “They encountered each other upon business.” He lifted the biscuit to his lips to take a bite, finally.
“Ah,” Miss Erso said. “And what did Mr. Krennic say to you, Mr. Tuesso? ‘I have a lovely ward for sale’?”
Cassian froze in the middle of his bite. The biscuit sat dry on his tongue as he thought, What did she say?
Across from him, Mr. Rook was staring fixedly into his teacup, as if memorizing the pattern on the china.
It was the first time any of them had spoken directly of the whole reason for this call. Indeed, the whole reason for her presence in the country. It was as if she’d decided to sweep away a polite veil and leave everyone in the room naked and exposed.
Kay, literal as always, said, “No. In fact, he said, 'I hear you are employed by the Duke of Fest. May I beg an introduction?’” He ate another sandwich.
“How very like him,” Miss Erso said, and sipped some tea.
Casssian swallowed the dry biscuit and set the remainder back on his plate. He cleared his throat and attempted to pull up the polite veil again, at least a little. “Mr. Krennic tells me he intends to stay out the social season. I’m sure you will enjoy having the man who raised you so close for a little longer.”
“Mr. Krennic traveled a great deal during my girlhood,” she said. “And of course, I was away at school as well. Truly, I don’t consider him as having raised me.”
He considered her, then decided to keep prodding. “Still, it will be a comfort, won’t it? To have a familiar face nearby as you are getting to know London?”
She set her teacup and saucer down and folded her hands in her lap. “Let me be quite clear,” she said. “I intend for our wedding day to be the last day that I ever acknowledge Orson Krennic, in public or in private. As far as I’m concerned, he might as well drop dead upon leaving the wedding breakfast."
Mr. Rook choked. Kay said, "Hmmm,” and drank tea.
Cassian simply tented his fingers. “Really,” he said.
“Really.”
The veil lay in irretrievable tatters on the floor. Cassian decided to leave it there. “But he has been your guardian for much of your life, hasn’t he? Since the age of - ” He glanced at Kay.
“Eight, sir.”
“Twelve years,” he said. “And yet he is to be nothing to you?”
“He’s already nothing to me,” she said.
“And if I say no?”
“What have you to say about it?”
He raised his brows. “I assumed you were asking permission for this course of action.”
Her eyes went sharp as knives. “No, Your Grace, I was informing you. The only area of doubt is whether you will join me in cutting him dead or not.”
He watched her for another moment, long enough for doubt to creep into those sharp eyes, and then smiled. “I would be delighted.”
She let out her breath and smiled, the first real smile he’d seen on her. It wasn’t the smooth, close-mouthed curve of lips that she’d presented so far. It showed her teeth and brightened her eyes, and he realized that she wasn’t merely mildly pretty. She was beautiful.
“I should inform you that the terms of the contract of marriage do give him power in Erso Industries. Total avoidance may not be possible under those circumstances.”
“Yes, I knew that already.” She glanced at Mr. Rook, who nodded. Of course - he would have been privy to all of Krennic’s discussions on the matter. “Which is why I hoped to speak to you privately before you signed them.”
That little ceremony was scheduled to take place at the solicitors’ offices, tomorrow. Then the official announcement of their engagement and then the circus - it was sure to be a circus - of their wedding. But the contract was the most important element in all this. Her dowry in the millions of pounds, both cash and stocks, the company she’d inherited, and the properties in the United States.
“Would you like to change any of those terms?” he asked, and Kay made a sotto voce noise of protest.
“A few. You know. Silly little female concerns. Like full control over Erso Industries, which I am told is allowable in this country since the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870.”
Kay said with horror, “Full control?”
She ignored him. “Now, the property in the States, I would like to keep in trust for our daughters and younger sons. You are welcome to the remainder of my dowry, Your Grace. I think that’s only fair. Any profit that Erso Industries brings me after my marriage, however, will remain mine and my children’s.”
Cassian considered the terms of the contract that he’d pored over with Kay. Like everything else, Erso Industries was to be his, “under the guidance of Orson Krennic.” But the dowry would be quite enough, with the cash to address the immediate needs and the stocks to remain a source of income.
So he said, “That will be quite sufficient.”
“Your Grace,” Kay said.
“I will be very busy running the dukedom,” Cassian told him. “The needed repairs on the tenant farms alone will take at least three years, not to mention the churches, the vicarages, and the schools. And you know what a state the country house is in. I have no desire to maintain connections with Krennic, any more than my fiancee does.”
Kay groaned. “But the contract - ”
“I have every faith in your ability to slip in a clever clause or two that will escape Krennic’s notice.”
“As to that,” Mr. Rook said, “I have a few ideas already.” He glanced at Kay. “I don’t suppose you have the contract with you?”
“Of course I do,” Kay said a little sulkily. “Just as Mr. Krennic requested in his note.”
Cassian raised his brows. “I don’t think that note was from Mr. Krennic. Was it, Miss Erso?”
She smiled and took the last sandwich from the tray.
Kay frowned for a moment, then shook his head. “Of course it wasn’t.” He pulled a sheaf of papers out. “I suppose you want to be involved,” he grumbled at Miss Erso.
“Why, what a kind invitation. I should be delighted. Lianna,” she said over her shoulder.
The maid, sitting all but forgotten in the corner, sat upright. “Yes, miss?”
“You can see the front of the house from where you are, can’t you?”
“Yes, miss, I have a fine vantage point. I’ll let you know if Mr. Krennic’s carriage returns.”
“Thank you,” Miss Erso said, clearing the table in between them for the papers that Kay laid down. “Well, gentlemen. Shall we?”
They climbed into the carriage, and it moved down the road, away from 1216. The day was just as dreary, the crowds just as dour as they had been on the way here, but Cassian felt as if a weight was off his shoulders.
Kay said, “Well? Nothing’s signed yet, Your Grace. You can still back out.”
“This is a change,” Cassian said. “I thought you were telling me this is the most logical course of action.”
“That was before I met her,” Kay said in some despair. “The woman is a shark. She will think of nothing but her business, produce utter hellions, and run you ragged. She is a walking scandal.”
“I know.” He smiled.
“So, shall we call it off?”
“By no means. I actually think I’m going to enjoy being married to her.” He thought of her telling him that she didn’t need his permission to cut her guardian off socially, and smiled wider. “I think I’m going to enjoy it very much.”
FINIS