Chapter 13
“Yes?”
The knock had been light. Two quick raps, almost apologetic, and Alexander answered without looking up from the letter he was drafting to his steward in Derbyshire.
Two days. He had managed two full days of successful avoidance, moving through his own house with the strategic precision of a general navigating contested ground.
He took his breakfast early. He dined at his club.
He spent his evenings in the study with the door closed and a glass of brandy he did not particularly want but which served as adequate company.
It had been working beautifully.
But then, the door opened, and the Duchess walked in.
Alexander’s quill halted. He set it aside and quickly rose, his chair scraping against the floor.
She stood just inside the doorway in a blue morning dress, her hands clasped before her and her chin tilted at a particular angle—one he was beginning to associate with delivering news he was unlikely to enjoy.
My study. She has come to my study.
This room was his. The one place in Whitestone House that belonged entirely to him, where the ledgers were in order, and the brandy was where he had left it, and no one entered without invitation. It was, in every meaningful sense, the last fortification he possessed.
And she had walked straight through it.
“Your Grace,” she said, “I wish to visit the charity school today.”
He looked at her. She looked back. Her expression was composed, polite, and entirely without apology, as though requesting the use of his afternoon were no different from requesting the salt at dinner.
“The charity school,” he repeated.
“St. Thomas’. We discussed it. You agreed I might continue my work there.”
“I agreed under certain conditions.”
“Yes. That you would accompany me.” She paused. “I am informing you of the visit so that you might do so.”
Alexander studied her face for something—a challenge, perhaps, or a provocation—and found only patience, which was somehow worse. She was not asking permission; she was extending a courtesy, and the distinction was not lost on him.
“When do you wish to leave?” he asked.
“Within the hour if that suits you.”
“It does not particularly suit me. I have correspondence to finish.”
“Then I shall wait.” She turned toward the door. “Or I shall go alone, whichever you prefer.”
“You will not go alone.”
She stopped, and turned back. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are my wife now, and I will accompany you.”
Something passed between them—brief, sharp, not quite hostile—and Alexander felt it settle behind his ribs, in the spot where things he did not want to examine had started piling up with alarming regularity.
“I will be ready in half an hour,” he said.
“How efficient of you.”
She left. The door closed behind her with a soft click that should not have sounded like a victory, and yet somehow did.
Alexander looked at his half-finished letter and decided that the drainage on the south field could wait.
The carriage ride was silent.
This was not the comfortable silence shared by two people at ease with each other but rather a deliberate, weighty silence of two individuals fully aware of each other’s breathing yet choosing not to acknowledge it.
His wife sat opposite him, her hands resting in her lap, her gaze fixed out the window, observing the streets constrict and the buildings draw closer as they traveled east.
Alexander expected the visit to be quick. A brief appearance, a few words with whoever had replaced Fraser, a survey of the premises to ensure nothing objectionable was occurring, and then the carriage home. Thirty minutes, perhaps forty. A duty discharged.
They arrived. The building was modest with the quiet dignity of a place cared for by people who could not afford to care for much else. Alexander helped the Duchess down from the carriage and followed her inside.
What happened next was not what he had prepared for.
The Duchess crossed the threshold of the schoolroom and became someone else entirely.
Not someone else. Someone more. The careful composure she wore through every room of Whitestone House fell away like a coat being shrugged off, and what was underneath it was—he did not have a word for it immediately. Light. The kind of light that drew things toward it.
A small boy was hunched over a battered primer at a desk near the window, his brow furrowed with the effort of someone fighting a losing battle.
The Duchess went to him at once. She knelt.
Her silk dress—pale blue, the same one she had worn to his study not an hour ago—pooled around her on the dusty floor, and she did not so much as glance at it.
“Try again, Timothy.” She leaned close to the book. “Sound it by parts.”
The boy looked up at her then back at the page. “Th—the. The c-c—”
“Take your time.”
“The c-cat. The cat s-sat—”
“Yes. Go on.”
“The cat sat on the—the m-mat!”
His face broke open. The grin was enormous, gap-toothed, incandescent. “I did it, My Lady!”
The Duchess laughed, and it was not the polished laugh she had deployed at their wedding which was polished and well-timed.
This was real. It filled the room and changed it, and Alexander stood in the doorway and watched it happen, feeling something shift beneath his feet that he could not immediately identify.
She is kneeling on a dirty floor in a silk dress, and she does not care.
The other children descended upon her like a flock of sparrows spotting breadcrumbs.
A girl with red hair thrust a slate under her nose.
A boy of about seven tugged at her sleeve and demanded she listen to him count.
Two smaller children simply pressed against her sides, as though proximity alone was sufficient, and the Duchess accommodated all of them with an ease that suggested she had done this many times before.
Her laughter came again, repeatedly, each time catching Alexander off guard.
This is not my world.
He stood at the doorway with his hands clasped behind his back and felt, for the first time he could remember, completely unnecessary.
The schoolroom was modest—wooden desks, chalk dust, a small stove in the corner—and it was warmer and livelier than any room in his house.
The young man who had taken Fraser’s place watched from beside the blackboard with the quiet satisfaction of someone who understood exactly what was happening and was content to let it.
Then something tugged at Alexander’s coat.
He looked down. A girl of perhaps five or six was standing beside him, small and serious, with dark eyes that were studying him with the unblinking directness that only children possessed.
“Do you know how to read, too?” she asked.
Alexander opened his mouth. Closed it again. He was aware, from a distance, that this was the first time in recent memory a question had left him completely without a prepared response.
“I do,” he said.
“Will you help me?” She held up her slate. “I cannot make the letters come out right.”
He looked at the slate then at the child. His eyes shifted across the room to the Duchess, who was helping Timothy with another sentence and had not noticed him. Finally, he returned his gaze to the girl’s upturned face and realized that his knees were bending before his mind had given the command.
He knelt. The floor was hard,; the position was uncomfortable, and his coat was going to be ruined. The girl set her slate on the desk beside them and pointed at a crooked letter that was meant to be a B but was not succeeding.
“Like this,” Alexander said, and took the chalk from her small fingers and drew a B and then guided her hand as she traced over it.
“Again,” she said.
He drew another.
“Again.”
Fifteen minutes passed. The teacher stood at the blackboard, his expression suggesting he was witnessing something unexpected and not entirely certain how to categorize. The Duke of Whitestone, on his knees on a dusty floor, was helping a five-year-old girl learn her letters.
Alexander did not notice the teacher’s expression.
He did not notice the time. He noticed only the girl’s small hand under his and the fierce concentration on her face and the way she said, “I made a B!” with a triumph that was, pound for pound, more genuine than anything he had heard in a ballroom in the last ten years.
It drew Eleanor into his thoughts, and he wondered if this place had the same effect on her as it did on his wife. He recalled how eager she always was to leave the house, and when she would return, Eleanor’s spirits were as high as the clouds.
When he finally looked up, Frances was watching him from across the room.
Their eyes met. She did not look away. Neither did he. And something passed between them that was not argument and was not tension and was not any of the things that had lived in the space between them since the night of the masquerade.
It was something quieter. Something that did not yet have a name.
Alexander looked away first.