Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
“Sit back, William,” Rafe said, planting his feet. “You’ve spent the morning managing the affairs of the realm. Let a man of leisure handle the real heavy lifting.”
“By heavy lifting, do you mean splashing the girls?” William asked, though he moved to the stern where Anne was already settled.
“Ever the critic,” Rafe laughed as the girls joined him.
The Thames in the height of summer was a frantic tapestry of commerce and leisure. William had secured a private wherry that afternoon, large enough to accommodate the family and Rafe without the intrusion of a professional oarsman.
Rafe had declared himself an expert in all things nautical, a claim William suspected was based entirely on a single weekend in Brighton. Even so, he had taken the oars with a grin that suggested he was looking forward to the exertion.
Celia and Felicity had immediately flanked Rafe at the bow. Celia was leaning over the side, her fingers trailing across the water despite Anne’s repeated warnings about its quality.
“Look!” she shouted, pointing at a passing coal barge. “Can we go faster than them? I want to see if we can make a wake that makes them wobble!”
“Oh, yes, Uncle Rafe!” Felicity gushed, which surprised William.
“Your wish is my command, Miss Celia and Lady Felicity,” Rafe replied, winking at William before putting his back into the stroke.
The movement of the boat created a distance between the bow and the stern.
William sat quite close to Anne, their shoulders nearly brushing as the boat swayed.
He inhaled her jasmine and lavender scent on the breeze, tucking a stray hair into her bonnet as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“He is excellent with them,” Anne noted softly, watching Rafe engage the girls in a debate about the speed of a London current.
“He is a distraction,” William corrected, though his voice lacked any real bite. “He has the temperament of a twelve-year-old, which makes him their peer.”
Anne laughed, a sound that carried across the water and reached her eyes. “It is more than that. He allows them to be children. Even Felicity.”
William looked at his daughter. She was currently laughing, and it was not the polite, measured sound she used in drawing rooms. It was a genuine, breathless laugh as Rafe told a particularly tall tale about a sea monster near London Bridge.
“She has been different since the museum,” William admitted. “More… present. Interested in different things. Perhaps even… happy.”
“She felt seen, William,” Anne said, turning her head to look at him. “That is a powerful thing for a girl who has spent her life as a duke’s daughter.”
The sun was warm on his neck, the air surprisingly fresh as they moved farther from the docks.
He looked at Anne, the light catching the strands of hair that had escaped her bonnet once more.
For the first time in years, the crushing weight of his responsibilities, the estates, the titles, the political maneuvering, felt secondary to the simple reality of the woman beside him.
She is a vision.
“I was thinking,” William said, his voice dropping to a register meant only for her ears, “about what you said. About your father and the expeditions.”
“Yes?”
“I should like to make more of them. Not just for the girls, but for us, too. Would you like that, Anne?”
Anne’s hand was resting on the bench between them. William reached out and covered her hand with his. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she turned her palm up, lacing her fingers through his.
His thoughts raced to what he had felt just hours ago as they lay together in his bed.
“I would like that very much,” she whispered. “Perhaps nothing more.”
The girls and Rafe were a world away at the other end of the boat, their voices a low hum against the rhythmic splash of the oars.
Anne felt the weight of his hand over hers and thought quietly to herself, I shall remember this moment for the rest of my life. The sun on the water. The faint creak of the oarlocks. The smell of the river, which ought to be unpleasant and is not, because he is beside me.
She could feel the warm pressure of each of his fingers where they wove through her own.
She did not look at him at once. She feared that if she turned her face to him, she might say something reckless, something that belonged to the candlelight of last night and not to the brightness of a Thames afternoon with the children six feet away.
So she looked at the opposite bank, at the green blur of the trees along Chelsea, and allowed herself to feel what his hand in hers was doing to her.
“William,” she said, as was becoming second nature.
“Mm?”
“If you continue to hold my hand in that manner, our girls will notice.”
“Will they?”
“Felicity notices everything.”
“So I have been told. Celia is just as sharp. Whatever shall we do?”
His thumb brushed the inside of her wrist. A small, deliberate stroke. She thought she might come apart quietly, right there on the bench, from that one small motion.
“I find I do not particularly mind,” he added.
“William.”
“What, Anne?”
She did turn her face to him then.
He was looking at her with an expression she had not seen on him before. It was not the careful, assessing look he wore in drawing rooms. It was not even the look he had worn last night, which had been so heated.
This was something else. It was the look of a man who had decided something in the dark and was finding in the light that he had decided correctly.
“You are being very bold this afternoon, Your Grace,” she teased.
“Am I?”
“Extremely.”
“I was under the impression I had been rather restrained. Given.”
“Given,” she repeated.
“Yes. Given the… circumstances.”
Her cheeks flushed, and she looked down at the bench.
The corner of his mouth quirked up.
I want to kiss the corner of that mouth here, now, in broad daylight, in full view of the Thames and half of London.
She withdrew her hand with some regret, before she did anything of the sort.
“Behave,” she chided playfully. “I find my resolve weakens in your presence.”
“I am behaving.”
“You are not.”
“I assure you I am. You have no idea what I am not doing at present.”
“Your Grace!” Anne laughed.
“Your Grace.”
She could not help but laugh, as she had no idea how funny he was.
She turned her face toward the water so that the girls could not see her blush as she cackled. A gull wheeled overhead, crying. Somewhere behind them, a bargeman was shouting something good-natured and obscene at another bargeman. Rafe was making an elaborate show of rowing the boat at the bow.
“I am rowing in the Venetian manner,” he called out to the girls, which seemed to involve a great deal of splashing and no appreciable increase in speed.
“I love the Venetian manner,” Celia shrieked with delight.
Felicity had tilted her face up to the sun, her bonnet hanging by its ribbons down her back, and was simply sunning herself. Like a cat. Like a child.
“Look at her,” Anne said quietly.
William looked. He was silent for a long moment.
“Yes,” he murmured.
“She has her face in the sun, William. She is going to get freckles, and she does not care.”
“She does not, does she?”
“No.”
He made a small sound. It was not quite a laugh.
Anne glanced at him and saw that his eyes had gone rather bright, and that he was pretending, for her sake and perhaps his own, that they had not. She looked away again, to spare him, and busied herself with the ribbon of her own bonnet.
“Anne,” he said, after a moment. His voice had gone low again, the private register.
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“You know for what.”
She did know. But she did not trust herself to answer.
Instead, she reached out and laid her hand once more over his on the bench between them. She touched him lightly this time, only the tips of her fingers against the back of his, and left it there.
They put in at a small dock below Chelsea, where a meadow ran down nearly to the water and an old willow leaned across the bank as though offering itself expressly for the purpose of shading a picnic.
A hamper had been sent ahead. The footmen had laid out a blanket in the shade, set out the cold things, and retreated to a decent distance as good footmen did, becoming part of the scenery. It was an exquisite spread.
Celia was out of the boat before it had touched the bank.
Rafe swung her up onto the grass as though she weighed nothing, then turned and offered his hand to Felicity with the same exaggerated courtesy he would have shown a queen.
Felicity, to Anne’s quiet delight, accepted it with a perfectly grave curtsey, as though they were at court, and then ruined the effect entirely by bursting into giggles the moment her feet touched the grass.
William handed Anne out himself, his hand closed firmly around hers. He did not let go once when she was standing on the bank. He held her hand a beat longer than was strictly necessary.
She felt it. She was meant to. And she loved it.
“Your Grace,” she muttered under her breath.
“Your Grace,” he muttered under his breath and then released her.
The blanket was an enormous affair of tartan wool, large enough for all of them with room besides.
Anne settled down with her skirts arranged neatly about her.
Celia immediately flung herself full-length on the blanket beside her sister.
Felicity sat more decorously, though her bonnet still hung by its ribbons, and she made no move to put it back on.
“I am starving to death,” Celia groaned.
“Well,” Rafe said, surveying the hamper with the air of a general surveying a campaign. “Let us see what your cook has sent to sustain us in our hour of need.”
“Oh, yes!” Celia clapped her hands together.
“Cold chicken. Excellent. A veal-and-ham pie, which I intend to eat the better part of, so the rest of you are warned. Strawberries. Cream. A quite frankly indecent quantity of lemonade. Miss Celia, might I trouble you to pass me that plate?”
“You may,” Celia said, with great dignity and a smile, and passed it.
William had settled on the blanket next to Anne. Not quite touching her, but close enough that when he reached across her for the salt he did not need, his sleeve brushed her arm, and he did not apologize.
She turned her face away to hide her smile and busied herself with buttering a roll.
The lemonade was very cold and so refreshing. The chicken was very good and moist. Celia gave a lengthy, largely fictional account of a duck she had seen from the boat, and which Rafe interrogated with lawyerly seriousness.
“His family abandoned him,” she explained. “That is why he wanders the waters so sullenly. What do you think, Felicity?”
“I surmise he was a perfectly respectable duck, considering his plight.”
William laughed—a genuine laugh—from the chest. Anne watched him do it and thought to herself again, I shall remember this.
Eventually, she lay back on one elbow in the grass beyond the blanket, a strawberry clutched between her fingers, the sun warm on her shoulders through the muslin of her gown.
William had stretched out his long legs and was leaning back on both hands, his face turned up to the sky.
His hat was off, his hair disheveled. He looked, Anne thought, not like a duke at all.
He looked like a man on a riverbank in summer, with his family around him, and no business anywhere else in the world.
He turned his head and caught her watching him. He did not say anything. He only held her eyes across the small distance of blanket and grass and scattered plates for a long moment, in the dappled green light under the willow. Then he smiled at her—a slow, warm smile meant for her alone.
Anne bit into her strawberry.
Yes, this is happiness.
He looked away again, back up at the leaves, as though nothing at all had passed between them.