Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“You should get some sleep, Your Grace. You have not left this study in two days,” the butler, Harrison, said.
Theodore didn’t look up from the ledger, though the ink on the page had long since blurred into a charcoal haze. The candles on his desk had burned down to stubs, weeping wax onto the mahogany surface. He leaned back, the leather chair creaking under his weight, and finally rubbed his eyes.
“There is much to be done, Harrison,” Theodore replied, his voice raspy from disuse. “I am aware of how long I have been in my study. I was present for both days.”
Harrison, who had been Theodore's butler for over twenty years and had therefore developed a considerable tolerance for this particular brand of response, clasped his hands behind his back and waited.
Theodore turned a page.
“You are going to say something else?” Theodore asked.
“I was simply waiting to see if Your Grace required anything further before I closed up for the night.”
“I do not.”
The butler didn't move. He remained by the door, his hands clasped behind his back. “If I may be so bold, Your Grace, I believe I might be overstepping, but it seems you are stressing yourself to avoid a different kind of transition entirely.”
Theodore’s hand stilled. “And what would that be?”
“The Duchess, sir. She has set the table for luncheon two days in a row. It has not gone unnoticed by the staff that you seem to be treating this study as a fortress.”
A flicker of guilt pricked at Theodore’s chest, but he masked it with a wave of his hand. “I have simply been lost in work. She is a woman of sense, I’m sure she understands that the management of an estate of this magnitude takes time.”
“I wondered,” Harrison continued. “Whether Your Grace was perhaps finding reasons to be elsewhere, and whether that was intentional.”
The study was very quiet. The fire had burned low. “You may close up for the night, Harrison,” Theodore said.
“Of course, Your Grace.” Harrison moved toward the door. He reached the door and paused, one hand on the frame.
“The Duchess has been making changes to the household,” he said.
“Small ones, thus far. She has reorganized the morning schedule for the upstairs staff, which Mrs. Holt says is considerably more efficient than what we had before. She has been corresponding with the estate manager about the two tenant disputes that have been unresolved since spring. I must say that she looks tired lately. Not well rested.” He paused.
“She met the last of the indoor staff this afternoon. All fifty-three of them. They all whisper that she is very pleasant. Very nice.” He inclined his head once more. “Goodnight, Your Grace.”
With that, Harrison closed the door quietly behind him.
Theodore was still. He sat in his study for a long moment. The ledger was still in front of him, but he was not reading it. He was looking at the fire, which had burned down to almost nothing.
He thought about Emily on the staircase that night, with her hair half down and her dressing gown, and the particular expression she had worn when she said they needed to talk. He thought about his gaze dropping to her mouth and the fact that he had not been able to stop it.
How — even up to that very moment — he had not figured out why he did that, and he was troubled by the fact that Emily might have noticed too.
Had she eaten?
The thought arrived before he had decided to think it. He looked at the door. He looked at the letter. He looked back at the door.
Had she eaten dinner? Had she taken any time to rest?
Why had Harrison said she looked tired? How tired?
Tired in the way everyone was tired at the end of a long day, or tired in the way that meant something had been going on that nobody had told him about, because he had been in this study for two days and had made it quite clear that he did not want to be disturbed?
He had told Harrison he did not want to know what the duchess had been up to.
He was now very much wanting to know what the duchess had been up to.
He pushed back from the desk.
There was no point trying to work. The ledger in front of him had been the same one for the last forty minutes, which meant he had not actually been reading it, and that the last forty minutes had been an elaborate performance of working for an audience of nobody.
He was alone in his study, and he had not absorbed a single word since Harrison had mentioned Emily.
He stood. He rolled down his sleeves. He looked at the stack of correspondence on his desk, acknowledging that it would still be there in the morning and that this was, in fact, fine.
He snuffed the remaining candles, plunging the room into a velvet darkness, and made his way to the door.
The hallway was silent, lit only by the faint, silver glow of the moon spilling through the high windows. He was halfway to the master wing when a movement near the shadow of the nursery door caught his eye. It was the small, stumbling figure of a child.
Theodore slowed his pace, his brow furrowed. His eyes widened when he saw that it was Frederick, roaming the hallway all alone.
He was in his nightshirt, barefoot, moving along the wall with one hand trailing it as though he needed the support, his head down and his shoulders rounded.
Even from this distance, Theodore could see the slight unsteadiness of him, the small hitching breaths that meant he had been crying for long enough that the crying had gone quiet.
Theodore crossed the corridor.
“Frederick?” Theodore called out softly, his voice echoing in the stillness.
The boy jumped, spinning around. “What is it?” he asked. Not loudly. Just for the two of them in the dark corridor. “What has happened?”
Frederick looked at him. His mouth pressed together. He shook his head once.
“Frederick?”
“Emily...” the boy whispered, his voice cracking. “I want Emily.”
Theodore looked at him. At the flush in his cheeks and the too-bright eyes and the way he was holding himself with the careful stillness of a child whose body was not feeling the way a body should feel.
He reached out and placed the back of his hand against Frederick's forehead.
The boy was burning.
Theodore did not say anything. He simply straightened and picked Frederick up.
Frederick immediately made a sound of protest. “Emily,” he said again, more urgently this time, squirming slightly in Theodore's arms. “I want Emily.”
“I know you do,” Theodore said. He adjusted his hold, settling the boy against his chest. “She will come. But right now, you are going back to bed, and I am taking you.”
“Emily,” Frederick repeated, looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes.
Theodore looked down the corridor in both directions before he stood, scooping the boy into his arms. Frederick was far lighter than he expected, a fragile weight that made Theodore’s chest tighten with a sudden protectiveness.
He strode toward the nursery wing, his hand finding the embroidered bell pull near the landing.
He gave it a sharp, authoritative yank that he knew would ring a frantic summons in the servants' hall below.
Gently, he set the boy down on his bed and pulled the covers over him.
Minutes later, the hurried footsteps of the housekeeper, Mrs. Holt, echoed in the corridor. She arrived breathless, adjusting her cap. “Your Grace! I didn't expect you to be...”
“Why was he wandering the halls alone, Mrs. Holt?” Theodore’s voice was like flint, cold and sparking with an anger he didn't fully understand. “The boy is unwell. Severely so.”
Mrs. Holt winced, her hands twisting in her apron. “He had been feeling better before he went to bed, Your Grace. Her Grace and Peggy, her maid, had stayed with him until he fell into a deep sleep. We thought the fever had broken.”
“He was unwell before he went to bed?” Theodore asked. “And he was left alone?”
“He had improved. His temperature had come down, and he seemed to be settling —”
Theodore felt a sharp pang of something that felt dangerously like hurt. “So everyone in this house knew the boy was unwell,” Theodore said. “Except me?”
The housekeeper looked down at her shoes, unable to meet his gaze.
“Shall I fetch the Duchess, Your Grace?” Mrs. Holt asked tentatively. “She only went to her chambers an hour ago.”
“No,” Theodore said firmly, his hold on Frederick tightening as the boy let out a soft, pained moan. “Let her sleep. Bring me a basin of cool water and several clean cloths. Immediately, and a carafe of fresh water. I shall stay with him for the night.”
“You, Your Grace?” Mrs. Holt looked stunned. “But the staff can —”
“I said I would take care of him,” Theodore snapped. “Go. Now.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” she said. “Right away.”
Mrs. Holt arrived within four minutes with the basin, cloths, and a small pot of something that smelled strongly of eucalyptus, which she set on the bedside table, with instructions that Theodore absorbed with focused attention.
“Thank you,” Theodore said when she was finished. “You may go now.
Mrs. Holt hesitated, but curtsied and made her way out of the room. Theodore looked at the basin. He looked at the clothes. He looked at Frederick.
Frederick looked back at him.
“Right,” Theodore said.
He sat on the edge of the small bed, looking down at the damp cloth in his hand as if it were a complex piece of military machinery.
He had navigated the halls of Parliament and negotiated land disputes with the most stubborn lords in the country, but he had never been responsible for the maintenance of a six-year-old.
He carefully pressed the cool cloth to Frederick’s forehead. The boy’s eyes fluttered open, glassy with fever, peering up at the tall, imposing man seated on his bed.
“There. That is done.”
Frederick reached up and touched the cloth.
“Leave it,” Theodore said.
Frederick left it, with the expression of someone registering a complaint nonverbally.