Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The path to his mother’s dower house was lined with bare winter branches. Greyson dismounted at the gate and handed his reins to a waiting groom. The air smelled of frost and old roses, the remnants of gardens his mother once tended herself.
He straightened his coat and stepped toward the small, elegant house. It had been built for light, with wide windows and pale stone, but Greyson always felt a heaviness settle over him the closer he came.
The door opened before he reached it.
Mrs. Atherton, his mother’s housekeeper of nearly thirty years, beamed at him as though he were still a boy arriving home from lessons.
“Your Grace!” she said, dipping into a curtsy. “How very good to see you.”
Greyson managed a polite nod. “Mrs. Atherton.”
She ushered him inside with warm efficiency, speaking as she led him down the short corridor. “Her ladyship will be pleased you’ve come. She is in her chamber. I told her you might visit soon.”
Greyson did not answer that. Mrs. Atherton meant well, but his mother had not truly reacted to his presence in a very long time.
He removed his gloves, tucking them into his coat. “How is she today?”
Mrs. Atherton hesitated. It was a brief, polite pause before the truth.
“She is… all right,” she said with a forced brightness. “More restless than usual, perhaps. She has been fretting about… oh, what was it? Ah.” The housekeeper clicked her tongue. “The lace on her handkerchiefs. She keeps picking at the frays.”
Greyson blinked. “Her handkerchiefs.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Atherton said, smiling apologetically. “She spent half an hour examining them one by one. I remember how she used to say that she cannot possibly go visiting unless the lace is repaired properly.”
Greyson’s chest tightened into an old ache, knife-sharp and familiar.
His mother had not been well since his brother’s death, and her mind had retreated to small, delicate fixations like lace, garden tools arranged by height and curtains she insisted were hung crooked even when they were not.
But that was back when she would leave her room.
“I see,” he said quietly.
Mrs. Atherton’s smile softened. “It is a small worry, Your Grace. But she clings to what she can.”
Greyson nodded. He understood. His mother lived in a world held together by threads, which were thin, fragile and always threatening to snap. Mrs. Atherton stepped aside and gestured toward the end of the corridor. “She is in her room. I’ve just given her tea.”
Greyson inhaled slowly, bracing himself.
“Thank you,” he said.
Then he walked toward the room where his mother sat surrounded by light she no longer saw and memories she could not bear to let go. He hovered outside the door, then knocked, although he knew there would be no answer. There hadn’t been in months.
He exhaled, turned the handle, and stepped into the room.
His mother sat in her usual chair by the tall window, her form small and fragile against the pale light.
Her hair, once dark and glossy, was now streaked through with silver.
Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and there was a handkerchief crumpled between her fingers.
She stared out at the garden… at nothing.
Her eyes did not shift when he entered.
Greyson closed the door quietly behind him. “Mother.”
There was no reply. Not even the flicker of a blink.
He approached slowly, as though his presence might startle her, though he had never known her to startle anymore. He stopped a few feet from her chair, with his hands clasped behind his back.
“How are you feeling today?” he asked softly.
Silence replied instead of her.
He nodded to himself. “Not well, I suppose. Mrs. Atherton says you were concerned about your handkerchiefs.”
He waited pointlessly.
“She says the lace is fraying unevenly.” His voice gentled. “I shall have them all replaced. The entire set.”
Still no response. His mother’s eyes remained fixed on some distant point in the frost-coated garden.
Greyson inhaled, feeling the breath tight in his chest. He tried again. “I visited Jasper yesterday. He asked after you.” He paused. “He always asks.”
All he heard was silence.
He shifted his weight, swallowing. “He and Matilda are well. The baby is walking now. I know you would be pleased about that.”
His voice cracked so faintly he doubted anyone else would have heard it. But he did.
He circled to the other side of her chair so he could see her face. She did not track him. Her gaze stayed on the glass, distant and empty. The reflection of the garden flickered across her eyes.
Greyson lowered himself into the chair opposite hers. This was his ritual, the one he had perfected over long, difficult months.
“And…” He hesitated, unsure why this felt harder to say. “I have news.”
He inhaled deeply, but there was no flicker of anything in his mother’s posture.
“A… marriage proposal.” His tone grew stiff. “A woman.” That part felt ridiculous to add, but he didn’t know how to handle this conversation. “Miss Hazel Thorne.”
He waited for something: a blink, a shift, a breath. He got nothing.
Greyson swallowed again. “You would like her. She is… respectable. Proper.” He cleared his throat. “Practical. Sensible.”
He imagined his mother answering, imagined the soft hum she once gave when he told her something she approved of. He filled the silence as he always did.
“Yes,” he murmured, as though responding to her imagined voice. “I am certain she will do well as duchess. She is… steady.”
A pause.
“No,” he said quietly, “it was not planned. But it is necessary.”
He let the weight of that truth settle on the air between them. His mother’s fingers twitched faintly around her handkerchief. It was the only movement she had made.
Greyson leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
“I will ensure she is comfortable,” he said softly. “This will be a marriage of convenience. Nothing more.”
He forced his voice steady.
“I can promise her that. And keep that promise.”
Greyson let his gaze settle on her empty expression, and unbidden, the memory rose, soft and sharp all at once.
Her last good day.
It had been nearly two months ago. They had been growing rarer even then, drifting farther apart like small islands swallowed by fog, but that day had been clear and bright.
She had been sitting in this same room, with sunlight warming her shoulders. And when he walked in, she had looked up at him. Her eyes had sharpened with recognition, and her face brightened with a smile so warm he had felt it pierce him like an arrow released from the past.
He had frozen in the doorway, stunned by the sudden return of her.
“Oh, my darling boy,” she had said, holding out her hand as though he were still ten and home from lessons. “Come here.”
He had gone to her without breathing.
Her fingers had been gentle as she reached up and cupped his cheek. “You look tired,” she had murmured, with a thumb brushing along his jaw in the affectionate way she had always done before the world had stolen her away. “You work too hard.”
He had closed his eyes, just for a moment, leaning into the touch he’d thought he’d lost forever.
“How handsome you’ve become,” she had whispered, her voice brimming with pride. “Just like your brother.”
He had swallowed the ache that rose at the mention. And for one precious hour, she had spoken to him lovingly and with all the familiarity of the mother who raised him. They had walked in the garden. She had linked her arm through his. She had laughed, even.
He remembered her laughter most of all: light, melodic, like something delicate fluttering back to life. And then… the fog had come back. It started taking her back slowly, but by evening, she was gone again, lost to the quiet, unreachable world where she had been living ever since.
Greyson blinked back into the present, the memory settling around him like ash. His mother was still sitting there alive and breathing, but unreachable. Now, she was merely the shell of the one person in the world he allowed himself to love.
Greyson sat with her in the stillness for several minutes more, letting the sound of her breathing anchor him. Her gaze never shifted from the garden, not for him, not for anything.
“You remember what the Thornhill balls used to be like,” he said gently, trying to hold onto something familiar. “The invitations. The flowers. The orchestra in the west hall…”
Her fingers tightened around her handkerchief. It was no more than a twitch, but enough to make him pause.
Encouraged, he went on. “Perhaps, if you are feeling stronger, Mrs. Atherton could help you prepare for my wedding ball. A new gown and your pearls.” His voice grew quieter. “And you could attend.”
He didn’t believe it. Not for a single moment. But saying it aloud placed it in the air like a fragile offering, a hope too delicate to hold but too painful to keep buried.
His mother did not move. But Greyson found himself desperately wishing that she could hear him, that she could come back just long enough to see him wed, even in formality, even in indifference, even in the hollow shape of a marriage he did not want and did not seek.
He leaned forward carefully and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Her skin was cool. As he pulled back, she did not react. Not a tilt of her head, not a flicker of her eyes, nothing revealed that she was there in the room with him.
Greyson swallowed hard, forcing down the ache that rose in his throat.
“I will visit again soon,” he said softly. “Rest, Mother.”
He stood, put his gloves back on with precise, practiced movements, and walked to the door. He paused only once, with his hand on the frame, looking back at the woman he loved more fiercely than anyone, yet who no longer seemed to know him.
“Goodbye,” he whispered.
Then he left the room, closing the door gently behind him, carrying both hope and grief like twin weights across his shoulders.