Chapter 81 - Eighty One
The setting sun cast long shadows across the garden pavilion where Anne sat with her mother. The air was still and warm, but the atmosphere between the two women was cold and brittle.
"What!" Augusta said, the porcelain teacup clattering against its saucer as she dropped it on the table in shock. She stared at her daughter as if she was saying something strange. Anne had just come home from her failed matchmaking meeting, and instead of getting angry at her father for setting her up with someone like Weston, she was now making the most audacious and shocking demand Augusta had ever heard.
"You want to be set up with Duke Philip?" Augusta repeated, her voice a mixture of disbelief and alarm.
Anne took a slow, deliberate sip of her own tea, her expression perfectly calm. "Why not?" she asked, a cool challenge in her eyes.
"Of course you can’t!" Augusta replied, her composure starting to fray. "Anne, Duke Philip is..."
"I know who he is," Anne interrupted, her voice smooth and confident. "He is Duke Eric’s older brother. He is the official successor to the great Carson Textile Establishment. That means he is above Eric in both status and power. Eric has his own little dukedom in Elinburgh, but Philip has all of Kaulder, the ancestral seat of their family." She paused and took another sip of tea, a thoughtful, calculating look on her face. "That is the kind of man I want, Mama."
"And what are you thinking of doing?" Augusta asked, her mind reeling.
Anne dropped her cup, leaned forward, and held her mother’s gaze, her eyes now burning with a new, cold ambition.
"Something much better than what you are thinking, Mama," she said. She smiled, a sharp, knowing expression that made her mother feel a chill despite the warm day. She then relaxed back in her seat.