Chapter 20
“Your Grace, Her Grace is awake and expecting you.”
Frances looked up from the picture book she had been reading aloud to Emily. Mrs. Wells stood in the doorway with her hands clasped before her, and Frances caught the small, knowing smile the housekeeper directed at Emily before smoothing it away.
“Thank you, Mrs. Wells.” Frances closed the book and set it on the side table. She turned to Emily. “Would you like to come with me? The Dowager Duchess is very excited to meet you.”
Emily stood and adjusted her frock skirt.
Alexander had made no move to arrange this introduction.
In the three days since Emily’s arrival, he had appeared at meals, inquired after the child’s well-being, and otherwise continued the business of being a duke with the single-minded focus of a man who believed that proximity to a problem was the same as attending to it.
Frances had waited, given him the opportunity to do the thing himself. He had not taken it, and so she had gone to Mrs. Wells that morning and asked whether the Dowager Duchess was well enough for visitors.
They left the drawing room and made their way toward the staircase.
“Your Grace?”
Frances looked down. Emily’s face was tilted up toward her, and for a moment, the child’s expression was open in a way Frances had not seen before.
“Her Grace wrote often to me.”
“She did?”
Emily nodded. “Sometimes I read the letters myself, and sometimes Miss Bennet did.”
How kind of Margaret to acquaint herself with the girl before her arrival. Frances suspected that Alexander was unaware of this.
“I have never had a grandmother, Your Grace.”
The words were soft, and Frances stopped walking. She turned and reached down and took Emily’s small hand in hers.
“Now you do,” she said.
Emily’s fingers clenched around hers, tighter than Frances expected from such a small hand. They paused in the quiet hallway then Frances gave her hand a gentle squeeze, and they kept walking.
They reached Margaret’s door. Frances knocked, and the voice that answered was warm and immediate.
“Come in, come in!”
Frances opened the door and stepped through, Emily’s hand still in hers.
Margaret was propped against her pillows with a shawl around her shoulders and her silver-threaded hair brushed back from a face that was already bright with expectation. The moment her eyes met Emily’s, something changed in that face that Frances could only describe as blooming.
“Oh,” Margaret breathed. “Oh, my dear child. There you are.”
With a bright smile, Emily stepped forward and into Margaret’s embrace. She reached for the bedside table where a small porcelain dish sat filled with sugarplums. She lifted it and held it toward Emily.
“Would you like one? I had Cook make them especially for you. I always think introductions go better with something sweet, don’t you?”
Emily selected a sugarplum and put it in her mouth. Frances could see the bridge that Margaret had built with Emily through her letters, and this now felt more like a reunion than an introduction.
“Is it good?” Margaret asked.
She nodded.
“Excellent. Take another. I insist. Mrs. Wells will tell you I am not to have more than two myself, so someone must eat them, or they shall go to waste, and that would be a terrible shame.”
Emily took another while Margaret patted the edge of the bed. “Come, sit beside me. I want to hear everything about your trip to Whitestone Hall and how you have found it thus far.”
Emily told her everything while Frances watched from her chair beside the bed. Margaret sighed after Emily’s tale and glanced at Frances.
“A wonderful age she has.” She turned back to Emily. “I remember being eight. I had a ginger cat named Biscuit who used to sleep on my pillow and steal my breakfast. Do you like cats?”
Emily’s eyes widened. “I do not know, Your Grace. I have never had one.”
“Never had a cat? Well, that is something we must remedy. Every child should have a cat. Or a dog. Or both, if the house is large enough, and this house is certainly large enough.”
“Truly?”
“Of course, my dear.” Margaret adjusted the shawl that was draped about her shoulder. “Now, tell me, what do you like to read?”
“Stories. About knights. And...” Emily stopped. Her gaze dropped to her lap.
“And?” Margaret prompted.
“Dragons,” Emily said, very quietly, as though the admission might be judged.
“Dragons!” Margaret pressed a hand to her chest. “My absolute favorite. When Alexander was a boy, he used to make me read him the same story about a dragon every single night. Every night, without fail, for three months. I knew every word by heart. I could recite it in my sleep.”
Emily looked up, and Frances leaned forward. “The Duke liked dragons?” they asked in unison.
“He was utterly mad for them. He built one out of the table linens once. It took up the entire nursery. The housekeeper at the time—not Mrs. Wells, the one before her—nearly fainted when she saw it.”
Frances’s chest ached. What must have happened to change Alexander like this?
“Now then.” Margaret reached for the sugarplum dish and set it on the bed between them with an air of conspiracy. “Have another. And tell me—what is your very favorite story?”
Emily took a third sugarplum. She chewed it slowly. “There is one about a princess. She rescues herself.”
Margaret’s gaze moved to Frances. The look that passed between them needed no words.
“That,” Margaret said, turning back to Emily, “sounds like the very best kind of story.”
The minutes passed. Frances watched. She asked about Emily’s lessons. She asked about her favorite foods. She asked whether she had ever been to the seaside, and when Emily said she had not, Margaret declared this a travesty of the highest order and said they had to arrange it at once.
At one point, Margaret asked her if she could keep a secret.
Emily nodded.
“When I was a girl,” Margaret said, leaning in, “I climbed out of my bedroom window and onto the roof because I wanted to see the stars without the glass in the way. My mother did not discover it for three weeks, and when she did, she was so horrified she could not speak for a full minute. A full minute of silence from my mother. It was glorious.”
Emily’s eyes went wide. “You climbed on the roof?”
“I did. It was not terribly high. And the stars were magnificent.”
“Were you frightened?”
“Terribly. But I did it anyway, and I have never regretted it.” Margaret smiled. “Sometimes the best things are frightening at first.”
Emily was quiet for a moment. Then she said, so softly that Frances barely caught it, “May I call you Grandmama?”
Margaret’s hand went to her mouth. Her eyes filled, bright and sudden, and she blinked hard and reached for Emily’s hand and held it between both of hers.
“My darling girl,” she said, “I would like nothing better.”
Frances looked down at her hands in her lap. Her vision blurred, but she blinked it clear and kept her breathing steady. She made no sound because this moment belonged to the two of them, and she would not interrupt it for anything.
They stayed a bit longer. Margaret told Emily about the watercolor on the wall—painted by a woman the Benevolent Society had supported years ago.
Emily asked if she could look at it more closely, and Margaret told her to take it down if she wanted which Emily did not do but clearly wanted to.
She stood in front of it instead, studying the painted garden with the focused attention of a child who was starting to feel safe enough to be curious.
Frances rose from her chair. “We should let you rest.”
“Must you?” Margaret looked genuinely disappointed. “I have been resting for years. I am quite tired of it.”
“We shall come again tomorrow,” Frances said. “I promise.”
“Tomorrow,” Margaret repeated. She looked at Emily, who had turned from the watercolor. “And you, my dear. You must bring me one of your books. I want to hear about this princess who rescues herself.”
Emily nodded. Then she leaned forward and kissed Margaret’s cheek. Margaret closed her eyes. Her hand came up and rested, briefly, on Emily’s dark hair.
When Emily stepped back, she opened her eyes and turned to Frances, and her expression had changed. It was still warm and bright but with something deeper underneath it.
She reached for Frances’ hand and held it.
“I am so pleased you came into my son’s life,” she said. “So very pleased.”
The guilt was there. Frances felt it press against her ribs. She held Margaret’s thin fingers and smiled, and the smile was not false, but it was not the whole truth either, and the space between those two things was where she lived these days.
“Thank you, Margaret,” she said. “That means a great deal.”
Margaret squeezed her hand once, firmly, and let go.
As they left, Frances kept Margaret’s words with her like a stone in her pocket.
She did not know how she felt about Alexander, nor did she understand what to make of a man who built walls around everything he loved and then, in moments of vulnerability, let them crack just enough for the light to shine through.
She knew only that something in this house was shifting.
And that, she thought as Emily’s hand tightened in hers, is the most unsettling thing of all.
“How difficult is it to find one little chit across England?”
The words came through the closed study door, muffled but unmistakable, and Frances’s step faltered for half a beat before she caught herself. Emily’s small hand was in hers.
Eleanor.
She kept walking. Her grip on Emily’s hand stayed gentle and steady, and she filed the words away in the place where she kept things she intended to address later, which was becoming rather crowded.
“Are you hungry?” Frances asked, glancing down.
Emily looked up at her with those serious brown eyes. She gave a small, considered nod.
“Good. Because Madame Beaumont has made something that smelled extraordinary when I passed the kitchen earlier, and I should hate to eat it alone.”