Chapter 18
Whitestone has a child?
Frances stared at the Duke. Her hands remained clasped around Margaret’s, and her smile stayed on her face while deep beneath those expressions, her mind raced and made a loud noise she could not let surface. Not here. Not in front of this kind woman who believed her son had married for love.
The silence stretched between them. Frances waited for an explanation—a clarification, a reassurance, anything at all—and nothing came.
The Duke’s face had gone perfectly, completely blank.
The same face he wore to dinner parties and parliamentary debates and every other occasion where feeling was a liability.
He stood behind her chair like a man carved from the same stone as his house, and he said nothing.
Margaret, apparently, did not notice.
“She is such a dear little thing,” the Dowager Duchess continued, her voice soft with affection. “I do worry about her, out there in the countryside with only a governess for company. A child needs a family.”
Frances managed to arrange her expression into something that resembled calm interest rather than the controlled panic it actually was. “Indeed, she does.”
“I believe Mother needs her rest now,” the Duke said. His voice was even. Measured. As though they had been discussing table linens. “We should leave.”
Margaret turned to Frances and took both her hands, pressing them warmly. “You must come again soon, my dear. Tomorrow, if you can manage it. I have so enjoyed this.”
“As have I.” Frances squeezed the older woman’s fingers and smiled, and the smile held, and the composure held, and everything held because she was not going to fall apart in front of a woman whose only crime was loving her son and trusting his choices. “I shall come tomorrow. I promise.”
“Wonderful.” Margaret released her hands with a final pat. “And perhaps next time, you will play for me? Alexander tells me you are a gifted musician.”
Alexander tells you things, does he? How fascinating, given that he tells me nothing at all.
“I would be delighted,” Frances said.
She rose from her chair. The Duke was already at the door, holding it open with the efficiency of a man eager to be on the other side as quickly as possible. Frances crossed the room, her skirts whispering against the carpet, and stepped through the doorway without glancing at him.
The door closed behind them.
The hallway was empty. Quiet. Frances counted to three in her head because three seemed like a reasonable number and because anything less would have been reckless and anything more would have been cowardice.
She turned on him.
“What child?”
The words came out low. Controlled. She had intended them that way because they were standing in an open hallway, and anyone might walk past, and she was not going to give this house another thing to whisper about. Alexander’s jaw tightened. He glanced left then right, assessing the hallway.
“Not here,” he said.
He turned and walked. Not toward her rooms, Margaret’s, or any of the other places in the house where they had engaged in careful, measured interactions over the past week.
Instead, he headed to his study—his last refuge.
The room with the closed door, the brandy decanter, and the ledgers that never caught him off guard.
Frances followed. Her pulse was very loud in her own ears.
They reached the study. He opened the door, stood aside, and she walked through it, chin level, hands clasped, the last remnants of her composure held together by nothing more than habit and spite.
The door closed. The click of the latch was very final.
Frances’s composure broke.
“You have a child?” She turned to face him, and the words came out sharper than she had planned which was not a concern because she was no longer planning.
“All this time—through the wedding, through every breakfast and every dinner and every interminable conversation about duty and arrangements and terms—and you never once thought to mention that there was a child?”
“She is not my child.”
“That is not the point!”
“It is precisely the point.” The Duke moved into the room.
Not toward her. Toward the window where he stood with his back to her and his hands clasped behind him and his shoulders set in the rigid line that meant he was bracing for something.
“Emily is my ward. Her parents died last year in a carriage accident. They were distant relatives and close family friends. I assumed guardianship as a matter of duty.”
Duty. Of course. Everything is duty.
“I arranged for her to stay with a governess in the countryside,” the Duke continued. He did not turn from the window. “A respectable woman. Well-qualified. Emily receives an excellent education, proper meals, and appropriate supervision. She has everything she needs.”
“Everything except a home.” Frances heard her own voice harden. “Everything except people who love her.”
“I have provided for her material needs and her education,” he rguedsaid. “What more could a child require?”
Frances stared at him.
What more could a child require?
She remembered herself at age eight. She pictured the house shrinking around them, room by room, as her father’s debts consumed everything.
She thought of Lavinia—seventeen, barely older than a child—sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of bills and a face trying hard not to show fear.
She recalled the night she woke from a nightmare and went searching for her father, only to find Lavinia asleep in a chair just outside her door because Lavinia had known she would come looking and had wanted to be the one she found.
“Affection,” Frances said. “Attention. A sense that she belongs somewhere. That someone in this world chose her, not out of obligation but because they wanted her.”
“Sentiment.”
“Humanity.”
His jaw worked. “I am not equipped —”
“You are not willing. There is a difference.”
“You presume to know what I am willing to do?”
“I presume nothing.” She took a step closer.
“I have watched you run this household like a military campaign. Every meal planned. Every hour accounted for. Every person in their proper place, doing their proper duty, and heaven forbid anyone step outside the lines you have drawn.” Another step.
“And somewhere in the countryside, a little girl is sitting in a house that is not hers with a woman who is paid to care for her, wondering why nobody cares for her.”
“You do not know what she is wondering.”
“I know what any child would wonder. I know because I have been that child.”
The words fell between them before she could weigh them. She had not meant to say it. She had not meant to give him that—that piece of herself, that particular truth that she kept folded and tucked away where it could not be examined in daylight.
The Duke said nothing. His gaze was on her, and for a moment, the room was very quiet.
Frances drew a breath. She held it. She let it go.
“Children need more than money and protection,” she said. “They need to be seen. They need to know that someone will come when they call. That someone cares whether they are frightened or lonely or sad.” She held his gaze. “The same is true for adults.”
Something flickered across his face. She could not identify it. It appeared for a moment—vulnerable and unprotected and almost hard to look at—and then he turned his head, and it was gone. He was now staring at the bookshelf as if the spines held the answer to something she had not even asked.
The silence stretched. Frances’ heart was beating hard, and her hands were trembling, just slightly, from the force of everything she had said and everything she had not.
She was too close now. Close enough that if he turned, they would be separated by barely two feet of carpet and a great deal of unacknowledged feeling.
“Your mother is right,” she said. Her anger had not gone—it was still there, hot and bright beneath her ribs—but it had changed shape. It was softer now. Steadier. “Emily should come live with us here at Whitestone.”
The Duke turned his head. “That is not—”
“I will not hear any arguments.”
“You have not yet heard the argument.”
“I do not need to hear it. I already know what it will be. It will involve practicality and logistics and the disruption to household order, and none of it will matter because that child deserves a proper home.” She lifted her chin. “Not to be hidden away like some shameful secret.”
“I am not hiding her.”
“What would you call it?”
“Providing appropriate care at a suitable distance.”
“That is hiding her with a better vocabulary.”
His mouth pressed into a thin line. He was looking at her with an expression she had seen before—the look of a man who was losing a battle and knew it yet was not ready to surrender.
His hands remained clasped behind his back, but his knuckles had turned white. She could see it from where she stood.
“You would take responsibility for a child who is not yours?” he asked.
The question was quiet. Stripped of argument. There was something in it that sounded almost like genuine curiosity—as though the concept itself was foreign, a thing he had heard described but never witnessed.
“Of course,” Frances said. “Unlike some,” she added and held his gaze, “I understand that duty without love is an empty thing.”
The words landed. She watched them land.
She watched them move through him—across his face, through the set of his shoulders, down into whatever he kept locked behind that careful, disciplined composure.
The room was very still. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked once, twice, three times, and neither of them moved.
Say something. Argue with me. Tell me I am wrong. Tell me I am sentimental and naive and that I do not understand how the world works.
He did not say any of those things.
“Very well,” the Duke said. One nod, brief and final. “I will make the arrangements.”
Frances released a breath she had not known she was holding. The relief was immediate and physical—a loosening in her chest, a softening in her hands. She had won. She had actually won. Against the Duke of Whitestone in his own study on a matter he had clearly considered closed.
Emily is coming home.
“Thank you,” she said, and she meant it which surprised her because she had not expected gratitude to be among the things she felt in this room today.
She turned toward the door. Her hand was on the handle when something made her look back.
The Duke was standing by the window with his hands at his sides and his face turned half away from her, and there was something in his expression that she had never seen before.
It was neither composure nor control. It was not the blank, impenetrable mask he wore into every room, conversation, and moment of his meticulously ordered life.
It was something beneath all of that. Something that looked, in the half-second before he caught her watching and locked it away again, very much like a man who was afraid.
Not of her. Not of the argument. Of something older and deeper and closer to the bone. He straightened. The mask returned. His hands went behind his back.
“Was there something else?” he asked.
“No,” Frances said. “Nothing else.”
She opened the door, stepped through, pulled it closed behind her, and stood in the hallway, her hand still on the handle, her heart beating unevenly, a single, persistent thought turning itself over in her mind.
There is more to him. There is more to all of this.