Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
August had been searching for a book for the better part of twenty minutes when his hand brushed against a slim volume wedged between Gibbon and a collection of sermons. He pulled it free and found himself holding Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.
The book fell open in his hands, and a folded piece of paper slipped free and drifted to the floor.
He bent to retrieve it, his mind still half on the Roman Empire and half on the meeting with his solicitor that afternoon. The paper unfolded as he picked it up, and his eyes caught on the first line before he could stop himself.
My dearest E.,
I find myself thinking of you at the most inopportune moments.
This morning, I was reviewing the accounts and found my thoughts wandering to the way your eyes light when you speak of the children.
Yesterday, I passed the milliner’s shop and imagined how the green ribbons in the window would suit you.
I am become a fool, I think, but I find I do not mind it as much as I ought.
The hours we spend together are too few, and yet each one leaves me wanting more.
I know this is dangerous territory. I know the risks we both take.
But when I am with you, all sensible thought abandons me, and I can think only of how your hand feels in mine, how your laugh sounds when you think no one is listening.
Tell me you feel it too. Tell me I am not alone in this madness.
Yours, in hope and trepidation,
W.
August read the letter twice. Then a third time because surely, he had misunderstood something. But no, the words remained the same. My dearest E. The children. The green ribbons. The wanting more.
He sank into the nearest chair, the letter still in his hand, the book forgotten on the floor beside him.
Eliza had an admirer. Or had one. The letter was not dated, and there was no way to know when it had been written. Before their marriage, certainly. It had to be before their marriage. Eliza was not the sort of woman to entertain correspondence from another man after she had taken her vows.
Was she?
He looked at the letter again. W. Who the devil was W.?
And why did it matter?
Their marriage was an arrangement. A transaction to save her reputation and provide him with a duchess. They had both been perfectly clear about that from the start. No expectations beyond the public performance. No entanglements of the heart.
He had no right to care who had written her letters before they wed. No right to feel this uncomfortable tightness in his chest at the thought of someone else making her laugh, imagining ribbons for her hair, thinking of her at inopportune moments.
He folded the letter carefully and tucked it back into the book then returned the book to its place on the shelf. His hands, he noticed, were not entirely steady.
This was absurd. He was being absurd. The letter was old history, nothing more. Some suitor from her past who had clearly not succeeded in winning her hand, or she would not have been free to marry him.
And yet.
Tell me you feel it too.
Had she felt it? Had she returned this W.’s affections? Had she wanted more hours together, more stolen moments, more of whatever it was they had shared?
August pressed his palms against his eyes and tried to summon the rational part of his mind. The part that understood that people had pasts, that Eliza was a grown woman who had lived a full life before their marriage, and that he had no claim on her affections beyond what their vows demanded.
“Your Grace, I thought you might require this.”
August looked up from his desk to find Denton standing in the doorway, a cup of coffee balanced on a silver tray. The clock on the mantel showed half past five, and the first gray light of dawn was just beginning to creep through the windows.
“Denton, you are a saint among men.”
“Mrs. Finch said you were up late again, sir. She suggested coffee might be in order.”
August accepted the cup and took a grateful sip. “Please thank her for me, and tell her I shall attempt to sleep at some point before next Tuesday.”
“I shall relay the message, Your Grace.”
Denton withdrew, closing the door with his usual soundless efficiency, and August returned his attention to the ledger spread before him.
The numbers had begun to blur together somewhere around three o’clock, but he persisted, determined to finish reconciling the accounts before the day’s obligations descended upon him.
He reached for the coffee again and happened to glance toward the window.
A figure moved through the gardens below. Small, cloaked, moving with the kind of purpose that suggested a destination firmly in mind.
August set down his cup and crossed to the window, pressing closer to the glass to get a better view. The figure had reached the edge of the formal gardens now and was heading toward the small gate that led to the lane beyond.
He recognized the cloak. Dark blue wool with a slightly frayed hem. He had seen Eliza wearing it just yesterday when she had walked the grounds with Lady Wilhampton.
What in God’s name was she doing outside at this hour?
He watched as she slipped through the gate and disappeared from view, swallowed up by the morning mist that clung to the hedgerows.
For a moment, he simply stood there, coffee forgotten, ledger forgotten, all his carefully organized thoughts scattering like leaves in a wind.
Where was she going?
The question lodged itself in his mind alongside all the others that had been accumulating there since he found the letter.
He told himself not to be ridiculous. Eliza probably could not sleep and had decided to take a walk. Nothing sinister in that. Nothing worth worrying over.
But she had passed through the gate. Had left the grounds entirely. That was not a walk. That was a destination.
The hours we spend together are too few.
August’s jaw tightened. He turned from the window and stared at the ledger on his desk, at the neat columns of figures that had seemed so important just moments before. They looked meaningless now. Trivial.
Where was she going?
And more troubling still, why had she not told him she was leaving at all?