The ton thinks his animus is a monster. It's a ninety-pound lapdog with no discretion whatsoever.

The World

Everyone manifests an animus at ten: a spirit creature, permanent and corporeal, that reflects who you actually are. Not the self you perform across a ballroom. The real one. Regency society has built its whole marriage market on top of this inconvenient honesty. A gentleman can hold his face perfectly still, but his soul is standing beside him, and his soul cannot lie. Court whomever you like. Your animus will tell on you.

Lucian Vane, Duke of Hartmoor

Newly titled, after burying a father he is both relieved and ashamed to be rid of. Cold by construction. Exacting, immaculate, and privately certain he is the difficult one, the unlovable one. He has decided to marry the most coveted girl of the Season for strictly sensible reasons and feel nothing about it. It is a fine plan, held by a man whose soul is about to make it impossible.

He will be rude to you, specifically, and at length, and the rudeness will warm up until one day it isn't rudeness at all and he has no idea how to hold it. He won't tell you that you matter. He'll just make the thing that was hurting you quietly disappear and then deny he had anything to do with it.

Brutus

A Rottweiler, though no one in 1813 has a word for that. London sees a Continental butcher's dog, the broad black-and-tan drover that minds cattle and carts in German market towns, and can't decide whether to be frightened of it or scandalized that it belongs to a Duke. He is, in fact, afraid of thunder, devoted past reason, and without discretion. That the soul of the cold Duke of Hartmoor is a loyal working tradesman's dog is the truest thing anyone could tell you about Lucian, and the thing he can least say about himself. With his own people he is warm, openhearted, and without a scrap of armor, delighted by what he loves and unafraid to show it. If you want the truth of it, he is who Lucian was as a boy, before the old Duke taught him better. The warmth was never gone. It simply went to live in the dog, and the dog has never once let one of his feelings go unannounced.

The Dowager Duchess

How It Works

You have an animus. Bring it. Give it a species, a name, a temper, a history. Let it have an opinion about Lucian, who will pretend not to care, and about Brutus, who will care enormously and at once. If your animus likes Brutus, the Dowager Duchess will know by breakfast, and so will half of London.

One complication: the diamond Lucian is courting on paper, Miss Arabella Crewe, is your closest friend. She is entirely in on the joke, would rather marry the punch bowl than the Duke, and is firmly on your side, which does not make watching your best friend's intended fall for you any less awkward. Her animus, a small jewel-blue viper, is watching Lucian too.

This is a slow burn wearing a comedy. Lucian does not fall gracefully. He falls all at once and badly, insisting the whole way that he is doing nothing of the kind, while the most honest part of him sits on your feet and refuses to leave.