Chapter 11
Alexander groaned and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
His head felt as if someone had filled it with lead during the night, and his eyes stung with the rawness that came from lying awake for hours staring at the ceiling.
He had not slept. Or rather, he had slept in the way of a man who closed his eyes and opened them again after an indeterminate amount of time, having gained nothing but a sore neck and the growing suspicion that his pillow was plotting against him.
He walked toward the breakfast room and told himself, with the same firm authority he applied to estate management and parliamentary correspondence, that he was perfectly well.
He was not perfectly well.
I have never had trouble sleeping. Not once—not through the inheritance of a near-bankrupt dukedom at twenty, not through his father’s death, not through the rebuilding of every estate and every alliance and every reputation that had been left in ruins.
He had always been a man who put his head on the pillow and slept because sleeping was the efficient thing to do, and Alexander Moonwell was, above all things, efficient.
And then one little chit had walked into his life and set fire to all of it.
He had not meant to insult her. That was the thing that kept turning over in his mind as he moved through the hallway, his footsteps measured, his jaw tight. He had been stating a fact. The purpose of a marriage—any marriage but certainly a marriage of convenience—was to produce an heir.
That was not an opinion but the core structure of the institution, the reason it existed, and why titles, estates, and bloodlines persisted from one generation to the next.
He had spoken plainly because he believed straightforward speech was a kindness, and she looked at him as if he had said something monstrous.
“Is that all I am to you? A vessel for your heir?”
The memory of her voice, shaking just enough for him to hear it, landed somewhere behind his ribs where it had no business being.
He reached the doorway to the breakfast room and stopped.
The Duchess was already seated at the table. She was spreading cream cheese on a scone, her hair was pinned neatly, and her pale blue morning dress was in place. She was sitting in his breakfast room as if she had been there for years, and he was the one arriving late for something.
She looked up.
Their eyes met across the length of the table, and the effect of it ran through him like a hand pressed to his chest. Her gaze held his for a moment—clear, blue, completely unreadable—and then she looked down and continued spreading cream cheese on her scone.
She did not greet him. She did not acknowledge him. She simply returned to her breakfast as though the doorway were empty.
Alexander stood there for a beat longer than was dignified, and then he walked to his chair and sat.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning.” She did not look up.
He gestured to the footman for coffee, observed it being served, then picked up his cup and took a sip. The silence between them was tense with sharp edges.
She asked me to come to breakfast. She specifically asked me to come to breakfast, and now, she is pretending I am part of the furniture.
He set down his cup. “You slept well, I trust.”
“Adequately.” She took a bite of her scone, chewed, and swallowed. Her posture was flawless. “And you?”
“Well enough.”
“How pleasant for you.”
The footman placed a plate of eggs and toast in front of him and stepped back with the professional invisibility of someone who had judged the atmospheric conditions and decided that maintaining distance was wise.
Alexander focused on his breakfast as did the Duchess.
Several minutes went by, during which only the clinking of cutlery and the ticking of the clock could be heard.
Alexander realized this was not the conversation she had called him for and that she was making him wait intentionally.
He knew he was letting it bother him which meant she was succeeding.
He took a breath.
“You wished to speak to me,” he said. “I believe that was the purpose of this breakfast.”
She set down her knife. “I did. Have you heard anything of Eleanor?”
The name landed on the table between them as if something had been dropped.
Alexander’s jaw tightened. “I do not wish to discuss Eleanor.”
“She is my friend.”
“And she is my sister, and I do not wish to discuss her.”
“Has Mr. Holt sent word? Is she safe, at least?”
“I said I do not wish to discuss her.” He kept his voice even. Perfectly even. “She made her choice. She is living with the consequences. That is the end of the matter.”
The Duchess looked at him across the table. Her eyes were very blue and entirely too perceptive for half past nine in the morning. “She made her choice because she was in love.”
“She made her choice because she was reckless.”
“Is there no room in your mind for both?”
“When recklessness leads a woman to elope with a schoolmaster in the middle of the night, abandoning her family and her reputation and every advantage her birth afforded her, no. There is no space for such actions.”
“And if she is happy?”
“Happiness is not a strategy. It is a feeling, and feelings change. Duty does not.”
The Duchess picked up her teacup, held it for a moment without drinking, and set it down again. “You speak of duty as though it is the only thing worth living for.”
“I speak of duty as the only thing that can be relied upon.”
“That is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”
“It is the truth. Love is inconstant. Duty endures. One builds a life on what endures.”
“One builds a prison on what endures if there is nothing else inside it.”
He looked at her. Her chin was raised, her shoulders were squared, and she was not backing down. The part of him that admired this—which was a larger part than he was comfortable admitting—was at war with the part of him that just wanted her to agree, so he could finish his eggs in peace.
“We are not going to agree on this,” he said.
“No,” she affirmed. “We are not.”
The silence that followed was different from the one that had preceded it. Thinner. More charged. He could feel the conversation tilting toward something, the way one could feel a carriage beginning to lean before the wheel actually left the road.
The Duchess set her teacup down with a small click. “Then perhaps we should discuss the terms of this marriage instead of arguing about your sister’s.”
“Do you wish to discuss the terms?”
“You proposed rules last night. Or you began to before the conversation became... unpleasant.” Her gaze did not waver. “I have rules of my own.”
Alexander leaned back in his chair and studied her. She was sitting across from him with the composed bearing of a woman conducting a negotiation, and he found himself, against every rational instinct he possessed, curious. “Very well. You may begin.”
“I do not want an heir.”
Alexander’s hand stilled around his coffee cup. He felt the words settle, felt them meet the argument he had made the night before and sit there, unanswered.
“This is not a marriage of love,” the Duchess continued, and her voice did not shake at all this time, which he noticed. “You said so yourself. It is a marriage of convenience. And if it is only convenience, then I see no reason to bring a child into it.”
She is not wrong.
The thought arrived before he could stop it which was deeply unwelcome. He set down his cup.
“An heir is not merely a personal matter,” he argued. “It is a responsibility to the title, to the estate, to everyone who depends upon—”
“Then find another way to meet that responsibility. I will not bear a child for the sake of a name.”
He looked at her. She held his gaze with the firm resolve of someone who had thought this through and was not going to be swayed, and her mouth’s set was the same as it had been in the garden the night of the masquerade, in her sister’s drawing room when he had proposed, and in her bedchamber last night when she had pointed him toward the door.
She meant it. She would continue to mean it tomorrow, the day after, and probably for the foreseeable future of their acquaintance.
“Very well,” he said. “If that is your position, I will not press the matter.”
Something moved across her face—surprise, perhaps, that he had conceded. She covered it quickly. “Thank you.”
“I have a condition of my own, however.” He reached for the toast rack and selected a piece with rather more deliberation than the task required. “If this marriage is to be one of convenience, as you say, then there is no reason for us to be in each other’s company more than the situation demands.”
Her hand paused on her teacup. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that we shall appear together for formal occasions. Dinners. Balls. Social engagements where the absence of a duchess would be remarked upon.” He looked at her steadily. “Beyond that, we need not trouble each other.”
The Duchess stared at him for a moment that was one beat too long. Then she lifted her chin. “That suits me perfectly.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
They looked at each other across the breakfast table, and Alexander became aware, with a clarity he did not want, of how the morning light highlighted the side of her face. The curve of her jaw. The small, stubborn line between her brows that appeared when she was holding something back.
He looked away and applied butter to his toast.
“There is one more thing,” the Duchess said.
He glanced up.
“I wish to continue my charity work at St. Thomas’, the school where Eleanor and I taught,” she said it with the air of someone stating a fact rather than making a reques, which he recognized as a strategy she employed when she expected resistance.
“The children depend upon our visits. I will not abandon them simply because my circumstances have changed.”
Alexander set down his knife. The school.
Malcolm Fraser’s school. The place where Eleanor had met the man she eloped with, where she had spent her afternoons teaching letters to children of the working poor and falling in love with a man who had nothing to offer her except principles and good intentions.
“No,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That school is the reason that my sister...” He stopped himself. He pressed his lips together and regathered the sentence. “I am not inclined to encourage a continued association with that establishment.”
“The school did not cause Eleanor to elope. This was her personal decision. The school is a place where children learn to read, nothing more.”
“It is also a place where young women of rank find themselves in compromising associations with unsuitable men.”
“I am already married,” she said. “To a duke. Whom precisely do you imagine I might find there who could compromise me further?”
Alexander opened his mouth and closed it again.
A handsome young teacher. A man of letters, idealistic and warm, the kind of man who speaks of poetry and justice and the betterment of mankind. The kind of man who looks at a woman and sees her rather than her title.
The way Malcolm Fraser looked at Eleanor.
He pushed the thought away with considerable force.
“If you must go,” he said, and the words came out more tightly than he had intended, “then I will accompany you.”
“You?”
“It would be proper. A duchess does not travel unescorted to the East End of London.”
“I have been traveling there unescorted for two years.”
“You were not a duchess then.”
She looked at him with an expression that suggested she was weighing the value of continuing the argument against the value of securing the thing she actually wanted. He watched the calculation happen behind her eyes and found it, despite everything, slightly impressive.
“Fine,” she said. “You may accompany me.”
“I was not asking for your permission.”
“And yet here we are.”
Their eyes met, and something passed between them that was neither agreement nor hostility and was far more dangerous than either—a current beneath the surface of the conversation that Alexander felt in his chest and deliberately chose not to acknowledge.
He looked down at his plate.
This is manageable. We have established terms. We will keep our distance. We will fulfill our public obligations and otherwise occupy ourselves separately. It is a perfectly rational arrangement, and it will serve us both well.
He picked up his coffee and drank. When he set it down, his wife was watching him again, and her expression was one he could not read, one that was neither cold nor warm but something between the two that he could not locate on any map he possessed.
“Two months,” he said.
She frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
“If after two months, you find the arrangement unsatisfactory...” He chose his words carefully. “… we may begin living separate lives entirely. Different residences, different schedules. Separate in all but legal fact.”
The Duchess remained very still. She looked at him across the remnants of their breakfast—the cream cheese, the cold toast, and the coffee cooling in its cup—and her blue eyes were bright and unblinking.
Alexander felt, with a certainty he could not explain, that whatever she said next was going to matter much more than it should.
“Two months,” she repeated.
“If you wish.”
She held his gaze for one more moment. Then she set down her napkin, pushed back her chair, and rose from the table with the composed grace of a woman who had said everything she intended to say and was finished.
“I cannot wait,” she said.
She turned and walked out of the breakfast room without looking back, and Alexander sat alone at the table, listening to the sound of her footsteps retreating down the hallway until they were gone.
He picked up his coffee, found it cold, and set it down again.
This was not the sort of marriage he had planned to have.