Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
That night, Elinor was keenly—if not too keenly—aware of Lucien’s attention on her as she taught the children.
She could not afford to get distracted by his presence, by the sheer amusement of seeing his tall, broad frame, nestled in among the small children, but he was just as enamored with her words, it seemed.
Once again, she noticed him scribbling notes on his slate. Like the last time, she was hungry to know. And it was a true hunger, going beyond just a simple curiosity, especially after his first notes.
Starlight in dark, blonde hair … how might that look?
She recalled how that note had lingered in her mind long after she had left Fielding House following the storm, meeting her own reflection in the mirror, trying to figure out if her hair was such a shade, or if Lucien secretly had his attention elsewhere.
It would not need to be a secret, though, if he did.
We must be nothing together, she reminded herself, as a child raised his hand. This is all a mere performance, so our feelings cannot be involved. That way is best. That way, nobody will get hurt.
And Elinor was very, very fine with that …
Even if her eyes kept drawing to Lucien when he was not looking.
“Yes, Georgie?” she asked.
“Lady Elinor—”
“Georgie,” she interrupted gently, “you do not have to formally address me. Here, I am merely Miss Elinor, your tutor.”
“Yes, but Angelica said we have to be respectful of who you are outside of the workhouse.”
“Well …” Elinor leaned forward, her smile turning secretive.
In turn, the children leaned towards her, too.
“Let me let you in on a little secret. Sometimes, respect can be shown most by letting a person be who they are, regardless of titles. And in here, I like to just be Miss Elinor, a woman who adores teaching you everything I know about the world.”
“What about His Grace?” Toby piped up. “Does he like to be called by his name?”
At once, all the children looked towards the duke, and Elinor giggled at how startled he looked at the sudden attention.
She imagined that a room full of curious children was rather different to a ballroom containing the most prominent members of the ton, yet he looked more alarmed than she had ever seen.
“You must ask him yourself,” Elinor told them, fighting back a small laugh.
At once, the children clamored to approach Lucien, their voices forming a chorus of asking.
“All right, all right,” he laughed, having composed quicker than Elinor had expected. “I am the owner of the building, and I am the Duke of Fairmont.”
For a strange moment, Elinor’s heart dropped, until he began to speak again.
“But my name is Lucien Stanton, and if you wish to call me Lucien, you can. After all, I know all of your names—” He frowned. “Or, at least, I am trying to learn them, for there are a lot of you. So, if I know your names, you ought to know mine. I am Lucien, and you can call me as such.”
“Lucien!” Billy cried out, giggling to himself. “It feels like a secret to know a duke’s name.”
“Perhaps it is.” A softer smile played on Lucien’s mouth that Elinor found herself quite attracted to for a moment, before she forcibly yanked her thoughts away from such a concept.
She was not attracted to the duke.
No, definitely not. No, she could not be.
“Really?” Toby’s eyes widened, his focus fixated on Lucien.
“Toby,” Elinor warned, softly.
She did not want to quell the children’s curiosity, but she knew how private Lucien was. He scarcely answered her, let alone these children.
So, to her surprise, Lucien nodded. “You may call me by my name, now that you know it.”
“Can we really?” Toby piped up.
“You can, indeed. I do not mind being like your tutor here, simply a name, a person, rather than any sort of title.”
“All right!” Toby giggled.
Elinor wrangled their attention back by looking towards Georgie. “Did you have a question, Georgie?”
He nodded. “You said about teaching us po … poem … poemtry. I’d like to know when we’ll start that.”
“It’s poetry,” Billy scolded him. “Not poemtry.”
“Well, I don’t know the difference!” Georgie huffed.
Elinor smiled fondly at the two of them. “Well, a poem is the writing itself. You write a poem, but poetry describes the art form.”
“I’m good at art!” Georgie exclaimed proudly.
She gave an amused chuckle at him. “I know you are, I have seen your sketches, and I like them very much.”
“Can I sketch Lucien?” Georgie asked.
“You will have to ask him.” Elinor winked at the little boy before looking to Lucien, who blinked at Georgie.
“You wish to sketch me?”
“Mmhmm! I’m very good at it. Mrs. Neal thinks I can be a painter when I grow up and earn lots and lots of money.”
Elinor’s heart grew heavy in her chest, for she knew artists did not make a great deal of money.
Gently, she pulled his attention away with an answer to his question.
“Poetry shall be something we will delve into shortly,” she assured him. “Do not worry. I have a lot of plans for many lessons to come.”
Her eyes flicked over Lucien, as if wanting to confirm that statement could remain true.
“You are staring at me again.”
Elinor said it without looking up from the slates she was collecting. The children had filed out ten minutes ago, Mrs. Neal shepherding them to their beds, and the schoolroom had settled into the quiet that followed their departure. A quiet that always felt emptier than it should.
Lucien leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “I was not staring. I was observing.”
“There is no difference.”
“There is a considerable difference. Staring implies I have lost control of my faculties. Observing implies purpose.”
Elinor stacked the last slate and turned to face him.
He had shed his coat at some point during the lesson, his shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms, and she could see the ink stain on his fingers from the slate chalk.
A duke with chalk dust on his hands. The image should not have stirred anything in her chest, but it did.
“And what was the purpose of your observation?” she asked.
“I was deciding when to give you this.”
He reached behind the doorframe where his coat hung and produced a slim, leather-bound volume. The binding was a deep blue, the color of a late evening sky, and the edges were gilt. He held it out to her with none of his usual showmanship, no flourish, no smirk. Just the book, offered plainly.
Elinor took it. The leather was soft beneath her fingers, well-made but not ostentatious, and when she opened the cover, her breath caught.
It was a celestial atlas. Hand-drawn star charts filled the pages, each constellation rendered in fine ink with annotations in Latin and English.
She turned to Orion and found the belt stars she had taught the children, each one labeled with its magnitude and position.
The detail was extraordinary, the kind of work that took years and steady hands and a love of precision.
“Lucien.” Her voice came out smaller than she intended. “Where did you find this?”
“A bookseller in Charing Cross. I asked him for the finest atlas of the night sky he had in stock, and he produced this. It was commissioned by a naval officer who died before it was completed, so the final plates were finished by his daughter.” He paused.
“I thought you would appreciate that detail.”
She did. More than she could say. A daughter completing her father’s work. The parallel pressed against something tender in her chest, and she closed the book carefully, her thumb resting on the spine.
“This is too generous,” she said.
“It is a book, Elinor. Not a tiara.”
“A book like this is worth more to me than any tiara.” She looked up at him and found his expression unguarded in a way she rarely saw.
The mask he wore for the ton, the lazy charm and the practiced grin, was absent.
What remained was the man who sat on the floor with orphaned children and took notes on constellations in his own hand.
“Thank you,” she said. “Truly.”
He held her gaze a beat longer than was comfortable, and Elinor was the first to look away. She busied herself with tucking the atlas into her satchel, aware that her fingers were not as steady as she wished them to be.
“There is something else,” Lucien said.
She looked up. “If it is another gift, I will refuse it on principle.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. “It is not a gift. It is a name.” He pushed off the doorframe and walked into the room, his hands sliding into his pockets.
“The workhouse cannot remain Fielding House. Not when it is no longer a workhouse. The children deserve a proper name for what this place is becoming.”
Elinor’s pulse quickened. “What name?”
“Lyra House.”
The word settled between them. Lyra. The constellation of the harp, one of the oldest patterns mapped in the northern sky, home to Vega, one of the brightest stars visible from England.
Elinor had taught the children about it two weeks ago, tracing its shape on a slate with shaking chalk, explaining how ancient astronomers had seen a musician’s instrument in the arrangement of its stars.
“You named it after a constellation,” she breathed.
“I named it after something you taught them.” His voice was quieter now. “This place will outlast both of us, Elinor. Long after the Season ends and our arrangement with it, these children will still live here, and the name above the door will still be something you gave them. Not me. You.”
Elinor’s throat tightened. She pressed her lips together and looked down at the slates stacked in their box, at the chalk dust on the desk, at anything that was not his face, because if she looked at his face, she would have to contend with what was building in her chest, and she was not ready for that.
She was not ready for any of this.
“You should not have done that,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
“Because it makes it harder.”
The admission left her mouth before she could catch it, raw and unvarnished, and she watched his expression shift. The softness did not leave, but recognition entered alongside it. The understanding that she was not speaking about the orphanage, or the atlas, or the name above the door.
Lucien took a step closer. The space between them shrank to something that felt less like a room and more like a held breath.
“Harder,” he repeated.
“To pretend.”
She lifted her eyes to his. In the low light of the schoolroom, his green gaze held a warmth that had no business being there, not for a woman he had struck a bargain with, not for a wallflower who existed in his life only to deflect the ton’s matchmaking.
His hand lifted, and for one reckless, airless moment, she thought he would touch her face.
Instead, he adjusted her spectacles where they had slipped down her nose. His fingertips grazed her temple, feather-light, and Elinor forgot how to breathe.
“Then stop pretending,” he murmured.
The words hung between them. Elinor’s heart hammered against her ribs, and she could feel the heat of his hand still hovering near her face, close enough to feel but no longer touching, as though he had given her the choice of closing the distance or stepping back.
She stepped back.
Not because she wanted to, but because wanting to was precisely the problem.
“I should go,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “It is late, and my stepmother—”
“I know.” He let his hand drop. The mask did not return, not entirely, but something closed behind his eyes. A door she had almost walked through, shutting before she could reach it. “I will see you at Lord Ashbury’s garden party tomorrow evening.”
“You will,” she confirmed.
She gathered her satchel and cloak and walked past him toward the door. At the threshold, she stopped.
“Lyra House,” she said, without turning around. “It is a beautiful name.”
She did not wait for his response. She moved through the corridor, down the staircase with its new railing, and out into the night where her hackney waited.
In the carriage, she opened the celestial atlas to the page on Lyra and pressed her palm flat against the star chart. The ink was cool beneath her fingers. The stars were fixed, immovable, ancient beyond reckoning.
Then stop pretending.
Elinor closed the book and held it against her chest for the entire ride home.