Chapter 17 #2
“Well, to be honest, Mrs. Wells told me.” Margaret’s eyes moved briefly to the Duke and back with the particular amusement of a mother who knows her son better than he knows himself. “The flowers. The cushions. The curtains drawn wider. I have been hearing reports.”
“I hope I have not overstepped.”
“Overstepped?” Margaret laughed, a sound like paper rustling. “My dear girl, this house has needed someone to overstep in it for ten years. Alexander keeps everything so tightly ordered that the walls themselves are afraid to crack.”
Frances bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. Behind her, she heard the Duke shift his weight.
“Tell me about this charity school,” Margaret said. “Eleanor has told me quite a bit, but I want to hear more about it from you.”
“St. Thomas’?” Frances sat forward slightly. “It is a school for children in the East End. They come from working families—laborers, dock workers, seamstresses. Many of them would have no education at all without it.”
“And you teach there?”
“Not exactly. I help where I can. Reading, mostly. Some arithmetic. The children are extraordinary: determined and bright, far more so than anyone gives them credit for.”
Margaret’s eyes had begun to shine. “I used to do similar work. Years ago, before my health confined me to these rooms. I supported a society for gentlewomen who had fallen on hard times—widows, mostly. We provided education for their daughters.”
“The Whitestone Ladies’ Benevolent Society,” Frances said. “I have heard of it.”
Margaret’s face lit up. “You have?”
“Eleanor spoke of it. She said you founded it.”
“I did. It was my proudest undertaking.” Margaret’s hand tightened on Frances’. “And now here you are, doing the very same sort of work. In a different way, perhaps, but the same impulse. The same heart.”
The same heart. The words settled in Frances’s chest with a weight that surprised her.
She looked at this woman—frail, confined, bright-eyed—and thought of the Duke in his study with his ledgers, his discipline, and his rigid, unbreachable walls, and she could not reconcile the two.
How had this warm, open, generous woman produced a man who treated emotion as a structural weakness?
“There is a boy,” Frances said. “Timothy. Eight years old. He could not read a single word when he first came. Now, he is working through full sentences. He arrives early every morning to practice.”
“Every morning?”
“Without fail.”
Margaret pressed her free hand to her chest. “Oh, what a child.”
“He is remarkable.”
“And Alexander?” Margaret turned her gaze past Frances to where the Duke stood. “My son accompanied you to the school, I understand?”
Frances turned slightly. The Duke was standing with his hands behind his back and an expression she could not read.
She had been trying to read it for the past thirty minutes.
It was not the blank composure he wore in public.
It was something else—something that looked, if she were being fanciful, like a man watching something he had not expected to see.
Is that surprise? Or something else?
“He did,” Frances said. “He was very good with the children.”
“Was he?” Margaret’s eyebrows rose. She looked at her son as though he had just performed an unexpected trick. “Alexander?”
“A little girl asked him to help her with her letters,” Frances said. “He knelt on the floor beside her and drew them in chalk.”
Margaret pressed both hands to her chest now. “Alexander? On the floor?”
The Duke cleared his throat. “It seemed the most practical position from which to reach the slate.”
“Oh, my days, you on the floor?” Margaret repeated, and her eyes were shining, and Frances caught the barest trace of color rising along the Duke’s jaw. It was, she decided, the most human she had ever looked.
“He was very patient with her,” Frances added because she was enjoying this and saw no reason to stop.
“I shall need a moment to recover from this intelligence,” Margaret said. She looked between them—Frances in her chair, Alexander behind her—and her expression softened into something that was both tender and knowing. “You are good for him.”
The guilt arrived swiftly. Sharp and cold, cutting through the warmth of the conversation like a draught through an open window. Frances felt her smile tighten and forced it to hold.
We are lying to her. This kind, generous woman, and we are lying to her face.
She managed a reply—something about being glad, something about the house and how happy she was to be here—and it came out sounding natural enough even though it tasted like ash.
The conversation continued. Margaret asked about Lavinia and Tristan. She asked about Frances’ music, her languages, and her reading. She wanted to know everything, and she listened to the answers with the focused attention of a woman starved for company, drinking them in like water.
Nearly an hour had passed when Margaret reached for Frances’ hand again.
“You have brought such light into this house already,” she said. Her voice was quieter now, touched by fatigue, but the warmth in it had not dimmed. “I can see why Alexander chose you.”
Frances’s chest ached. She held the older woman’s hand and smiled and said nothing because anything she said would be another lie, and she had told enough of them for one afternoon.
Then Margaret turned to her son, and her expression changed.
“Now that you are settled, Alexander,” she said, “I believe it is time to bring the child home to live with us.”
The room went still. Frances’ smile froze on her face. The words moved through her mind slowly, each one landing separately, as though they were arriving by post rather than in a sentence.
The child.
What child?
She turned to look at the Duke. His face had gone completely blank.