Chapter 9
“We shall stay in town for a few days before departing for the country.”
Alexander said it as he handed her down from the carriage, matter-of-factly, in the same tone he might use to announce the weather.
Frances stepped down onto the pavement in front of Whitestone House and looked up at the facade and thought, not for the first time, that it was an extremely large house for one person to have lived in alone.
“Must we live in the country?” she asked.
He looked at her. The look lasted a moment, and then—she was almost certain she did not imagine it—one corner of his mouth curved upward in something that was not quite a smile and was gone almost before she could be sure it had existed at all.
“It is expected for newlyweds to enjoy time in the country.”
The blush arrived before she could do anything about it. She turned toward the house, hoping her expression showed the composure of a woman who had not just been made to fully feel the meaning of the word ‘newlyweds’ by a man who said it with complete calmness, which was unfair of him.
The front hall was exactly as she remembered it from her visits to Eleanor—high-ceilinged, immaculate, everything arranged with the orderliness that seemed to characterize every inch of the Duke of Whitestone’s existence.
She had always felt a bit oppressive when she visited as a guest. Standing in it now as its owner was a completely different experience and not a more comfortable one.
The house was grand in a way that announced itself—the kind of grandeur that constantly reminded you of the owner’s importance, and by extension, made you feel quite small.
I live here now, she thought, and the thought was so strange that she nearly said it aloud.
The staff had been assembled in the hall, two neat lines of them, and Frances arranged her face into something she hoped was appropriately duchess-like and followed Alexander as he moved along them.
“This is Mrs. Wells, my housekeeper.” A woman of middle age with a kind face and good posture curtsied with the ease of someone who had done so many times and meant it.
“Mr. Graves, my butler.” The butler was tall and serious yet somehow welcoming.
Then the rest of them—maids and footmen and kitchen staff and others whose names and roles Frances absorbed as quickly as she could, which was not as quickly as she would have liked because her mind was still doing something slightly unsteady behind her composed expression.
When they had reached the end of the line, Alexander turned to her.
“Mrs. Wells will attend to whatever you require. She knows the house thoroughly and will answer any questions you have.” He glanced at the housekeeper briefly then back at Frances.
“I have matters to attend to this afternoon. I trust you will find everything in order.”
Frances looked at him.
He looked back at her with the expression of a man who had just said something entirely reasonable and was waiting for confirmation that it had been received as such.
“Of course,” she said because what she actually wanted to say was considerably less suitable for a front hall full of attentive servants.
He gave a brief nod, said something to Graves in a low voice, and walked away. Frances stood in the hall of her new home on her wedding day and watched her husband disappear toward his study, keeping her expression entirely neutral and her chin level.
“Shall I show Your Grace to your chambers?” Mrs. Wells asked. Her voice was gentle which Frances noted with a gratitude she was not going to examine too closely in present company.
Frances turned to the housekeeper and made herself smile. “Please.”
Her rooms were on the first floor, connected to the Duke’s by a shared sitting room that currently had all the warmth of a room that had been prepared for someone rather than lived in.
Everything was fresh and clean and correct and utterly impersonal, and Frances stood in the center of her new bedchamber and looked at the unfamiliar.
Then she thought about her room at Evermere, which was smaller but entirely hers, and felt something in her chest pull in a direction she could not afford to follow just now.
“The Dowager Duchess favored these rooms,” Mrs. Wells offered, from somewhere behind her. “We have done what we could to refresh them. If there is anything Your Grace would like changed—”
“It is lovely,” Frances said. “Thank you, Mrs. Wells. You have been very thorough.”
The housekeeper seemed pleased by this and began a gentle, efficient tour of the rooms—where things were kept, how to ring for what, which maid would be assigned to her.
Frances listened, nodded, filed things away, and tried to feel like a person who lived here, a feat that would require considerably more time than one afternoon.
When Mrs. Wells left her, she did what she always did when she was uncertain—she moved. She explored.
The one introduction that had not yet been made was the Dowager Duchess, and Frances found herself thinking about this as she made her way back towards her own rooms.
Alexander had told her, briefly and without elaboration, that his mother was unwell and that he preferred to wait a few days before the introduction.
Frances had agreed because it seemed the right thing to do, and also because she was slightly nervous about it and an extra few days were not entirely unwelcome.
She is his mother, Frances thought. She may not be pleased about any of this. She may take one look at me and wonder what her son has done.
She changed for dinner with the help of Miss Ripley, her lady’s maid—a quiet, competent young woman who had come with her from Evermere and whose familiar presence was, Frances discovered, considerably more steadying than she would have predicted.
“Will His Grace be joining you for dinner?” Miss Ripley asked with the careful neutrality of someone who was not entirely certain of the answer herself.
“I expect so,” Frances said because it was her wedding day, and what else was one supposed to say?
He did not come to dinner.
She sat at one end of a dining table that was quite too long for a single person and ate a meal that was expertly prepared and entirely wasted on someone who was too distracted to taste it, attended by two footmen who were professionally emotionless and therefore no company at all.
Graves appeared once to ask if everything was to her satisfaction, and Frances told him it was excellent and that she needed nothing further, and she meant it, and she also meant the second part more than the first.
By the time she returned to her rooms, she had made peace, more or less, with the evening. He is busy, she told herself. He has things to attend to. He did say so this afternoon.
She told herself all that in the calm and rational way of a woman who was not, absolutely not, sitting in her bedchamber on her wedding night feeling foolish about the fact that her husband had not come to dinner.
Miss Ripley helped her out of her dress and into her nightdress then took down her hair and brushed it in silence.
Frances sat at the dressing table, looked at herself, and thought that she looked much less like a duchess than her title required at the moment.
She figured that was probably fine since no one was here to notice.
“Will you need anything else, Your Grace?” Miss Ripley asked.
“I rang for tea earlier, I think it is still coming. You may go; I will manage.”
When she was alone, she sat for a moment in the quiet of the room and listened to the house—the distant sounds of it settling around her, unfamiliar and large and nothing at all like Evermere—and she told herself firmly that she was not disappointed and that tomorrow would be easier and that she was going to be perfectly all right.
Then she heard the knock.
She looked up. The tea at last—she had almost forgotten about it. She pushed back the stool, crossed to the door, and pulled it open, already turning back toward the dressing table, then she stopped.
Because it was not the tea.
Alexander stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, his coat gone, his cravat loosened at the throat, looking more like a regular person and less like a duke than she had ever seen him.
Frances froze.