Chapter 12
“You should have seen him!” Isadora exclaimed, her silk morning dress rustling as she paced the length of the blue drawing room like a caged lioness. “Brooding, domineering, utterly insufferable! He spoke as though I had no right to an opinion in my own household.”
Charlotte bit back a smile from her position beside the fire, where Christmas garlands wound around the marble mantelpiece cast dancing shadows in the flickering candlelight.
Her traveling dress was still creased from the journey from London, but her dark eyes sparkled with the sort of mischievous interest that had made her invaluable as a confidante during their years navigating the treacherous waters of the ton.
“And you told him otherwise, naturally,” Charlotte replied, reaching for her teacup with movements that spoke of barely contained amusement.
“Of course I did!” Isadora threw up her hands, sending the Christmas holly arrangement on the side table trembling with the force of her gesture. “He thinks me presumptuous—me! As though having opinions about the welfare of a child in my care were some sort of revolutionary act.”
She paused in her pacing to stare out the tall windows at the snow-covered grounds, where evergreen boughs had been arranged along the garden paths like nature’s own Christmas decorations.
The winter landscape should have been beautiful, but all she could see was the rigid perfection that seemed to govern every aspect of life at Rothwell Abbey.
“And yet, Charlotte...” Her voice faltered as she remembered the moment his eyes had locked with hers in that charged schoolroom confrontation, sharp and unyielding yet somehow hungry. “I fear I must admit… He is not entirely what I expected.”
Charlotte’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline with the sort of knowing expression that had always made Isadora slightly uncomfortable. “Not what you expected? Or far more than you expected?”
“Do not tease me,” Isadora said sharply, though she could feel heat rising in her cheeks despite the December chill that seemed permanently settled in the Abbey’s ancient stones. “He is impossible. Utterly impossible. And yet—”
“And yet,” Charlotte finished with a grin that was pure mischief, “you cannot stop thinking about him.”
Isadora sank into the chair opposite her friend with movements that spoke of bone-deep exhaustion, burying her face in her hands while Charlotte’s knowing laughter filled the room with warmth that had nothing to do with the blazing fire.
“You are incorrigible,” Isadora muttered through her fingers, though she couldn’t entirely suppress the smile that tugged at her lips. “This entire situation is rather... complicated.”
“Complicated how?” Charlotte leaned forward with the sort of avid curiosity that had made her the ton’s most accomplished gatherer of interesting gossip.
“Come now, my dear friend, you cannot possibly leave me hanging after such a tantalizing confession. What exactly has the Dangerous Duke done to capture your attention so thoroughly?”
Isadora lifted her head to study her friend’s face, noting the genuine concern that lurked beneath Charlotte’s habitual levity.
They had known each other since childhood, had weathered the storms of three London seasons together, had shared secrets that would have scandalized their mothers and delighted their enemies.
“He caught me,” she said quietly, the words escaping before wisdom could stop them.
“On our wedding day, I slipped on the church steps, and he caught me. For just a moment, I was pressed against his chest, close enough to see that his scar isn’t a single clean line but a network of smaller marks, as though whatever blade marked him had caught and torn rather than slicing cleanly. ”
Charlotte leaned forward slightly.
“And?” she prompted gently.
“And I felt... safe. Protected. As though nothing in the world could harm me while his arms were around me.” Isadora’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper, as though speaking the words too loudly might somehow make them more real, more dangerous.
“It was the most ridiculous thing, Charlotte. I barely knew the man, had spoken to him perhaps three times in my entire life, yet in that moment I felt more secure than I had in years.”
“Security is not such a terrible thing to find in a husband,” Charlotte observed mildly.
“But it wasn’t just security,” Isadora continued, her pacing resuming with renewed agitation. “It was the way he looked at me, as though he were seeing me clearly for the first time. Not as an ornament to be acquired or a problem to be solved, but as... as a woman. As someone worth catching.”
She moved to the window again, pressing her palm against the cold glass while Christmas lights twinkled in the village below like earthbound stars.
“Do you know what it’s like, Charlotte, to spend years being evaluated like livestock at market?
To have your worth calculated in terms of dowry and connections and breeding potential?
Father paraded me before eligible gentlemen like I was a prize mare, and they all looked at me with the same calculating expression—wondering whether I would prove a good investment. ”
“But Edmund doesn’t look at you that way?”
The use of his given name sent an odd flutter through Isadora’s chest, though she couldn’t say why.
“No. He looks at me like... like I’m a puzzle he can’t quite solve.
Sometimes I catch him watching me with this expression of complete bewilderment, as though he can’t understand why I’m not behaving according to his expectations. ”
Charlotte laughed, the sound bright and warm in the austere chamber. “How deliciously refreshing for you both. I cannot imagine anything more tedious than a husband who thought he had you completely figured out.”
“There’s nothing refreshing about living with a man who alternately ignores you and glowers at you depending on his mood,” Isadora protested, though her voice lacked conviction.
“Yesterday evening, I played the pianoforte in the drawing room. I thought myself alone, but when I finished, he was standing in the doorway. For just a moment, before he remembered to be stern and forbidding, he looked...”
She trailed off, searching for words to describe the expression that had transformed Edmund’s features from forbidding to achingly human.
“Yes?” Charlotte prompted.
“Hungry,” Isadora said finally. “As though he’d been starved for something beautiful and had forgotten what it felt like to want such things. But then his walls came back up, and he was all cold politeness and formal distance again.”
“Fascinating,” Charlotte murmured, settling back in her chair with the expression of someone who had just been presented with a particularly intriguing mathematical theorem. “And how did this glimpse of vulnerability make you feel?”
The question forced Isadora to examine emotions she had been determinedly avoiding since her arrival at the Abbey.
Because the truth was that Edmund’s momentary loss of control had affected her far more than was wise or safe or remotely appropriate for a marriage that was supposed to be purely practical.
“Interested,” she admitted reluctantly. “Which is terrifying, because I married him for sensible reasons, not to complicate my life with impossible feelings for a man who’s made it clear he has nothing to offer beyond duty and respect.”
“Has he made that clear? Or have you simply assumed it based on his reputation and his rather forbidding manner?”
Before Isadora could form a response, Charlotte was continuing with the sort of gentle persistence that had always made her impossible to deflect when she sensed vulnerability in those she cared about.
“Tell me about this household of his,” she said, her tone carefully neutral. “What’s it like, living in this ancient fortress with the Dangerous Duke and his mysterious ward?”
Isadora sank back into her chair, grateful for the shift to safer topics.
“Cold,” she said immediately. “Not just the temperature, though Yorkshire in December is brutal enough to freeze one’s thoughts solid.
The servants creep about like they’re afraid of their own shadows, speaking only when spoken to and jumping at unexpected sounds. ”
“And the girl? Lillian, isn’t it?”
“Lillian is...” Isadora paused, considering how to describe the complex emotions that the girl’s situation stirred in her chest. “She’s remarkable, Charlotte. And too smart for the education she is receiving.”
“How so?”
“Mrs. Hale—that’s the governess—has her reading moral tales about virtuous shepherdesses and practicing watercolors of innocent country scenes.
Meanwhile, Lillian is perfectly capable of discussing Paradise Lost and Byron’s political writings with the sort of insight that would shame most university graduates.
” Indignation flared in Isadora’s chest as she remembered the girl’s careful answers, the way Lillian had swallowed her own intelligence to fit into the narrow mold Edmund had constructed around her existence.
“It’s criminal, Charlotte. Absolutely criminal. ”
“And this is why you confronted the Duke?”
“Among other things.” Isadora’s pacing resumed with renewed energy, her silk skirts rustling against the ancient furniture as she moved.
“He treats her like she’s made of spun glass, so fragile that any contact with the real world might shatter her completely.
But she’s not fragile—she’s isolated. There’s a difference. ”
A soft knock at the door interrupted their conversation, and Isadora looked up to see Lillian herself hovering in the doorway with the sort of hesitant posture that suggested she expected to be turned away.
“Forgive me, Your Grace,” the girl said, her voice carefully modulated to avoid giving offense. “I hoped I might join you for tea, if you wouldn’t mind the company.”