Chapter 20 #2
They reached the dining room. The table had been set for three — a smaller arrangement than the spacious, echoing length Frances had grown accustomed to, and she suspected Mrs. Wells’ influence.
The chairs were arranged at one end, close enough for conversation, close enough to suggest a family might sit there rather than three strangers occupying opposite ends of a battleground.
Frances pulled out Emily’s chair and helped her up. The child’s feet did not quite reach the floor. A footman had placed a cushion on the seat, and Frances adjusted it, tucking it behind Emily’s back.
“There. Better?”
Another nod.
Frances took her own seat and was arranging her napkin when the Duke walked in.
He moved to his chair with the brisk efficiency of a man who had been interrupted from something and intended to return to it as soon as possible.
His jaw was set. His gaze swept the table—the smaller arrangement, the three place settings, the child sitting very straight in her cushioned chair—and something passed across his face that Frances could not read before it was gone.
He sat.
“Good evening,” Frances said.
“Good evening.”
Emily said nothing. Her hands were in her lap, her eyes on her plate.
The first course arrived. A consommé, clear and fragrant, served in delicate bowls that Emily regarded with the wariness of someone who had been taught that fine china was for looking at, not eating from.
Frances picked up her spoon. Emily watched her then picked up her own and copied the motion with painstaking care.
“Emily,” Frances said, after the child had managed three careful spoonfuls, “what was the countryside like where you were staying? Was it very green?”
A pause. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Frances,” she corrected gently. “You may call me Frances if you like. At least at dinner. I think ‘Your Grace’ is rather a lot of syllables between courses.”
The smallest shift in Emily’s posture. Not quite a loosening but not a tightening, either. “It was very green,” she said. “There were sheep.”
“Sheep! How many?”
“I did not count them. Miss Bennet said there were too many to count.”
“That is a great many sheep,” Frances agreed. “Did they make a terrible racket?”
“Only in the mornings.” Emily’s spoon paused above her bowl. “They were loudest when it rained.”
“Sheep generally are. They have strong opinions about the weather.”
Something moved at the corner of Emily’s mouth. Frances pressed on.
“And what about watercolors? Miss Bennet tells me you are a great painter.”
“I like drawing and painting flowers.” The words came out quietly, but they came. “Miss Bennet taught me how to sketch a rose.”
“Roses are quite lovely.”
“I like painting the stories I read, too.” Emily set down her spoon and looked at Frances with an expression that held, beneath its caution, a flicker of real feeling. “There was one about a girl who sailed across the sea in a boat she built herself.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“She had a dog.” Emily’s voice grew fractionally stronger. “The dog was the navigator.”
Frances smiled. “As all the best dogs are.”
“His name was Captain.”
“Of course, it was.”
“I have the drawing. Would you like to see it after dinner?”
“I would love nothing more, my dear.
The second course arrived—roast chicken, potatoes, green beans arranged with Madame Beaumont’s characteristic precision. Emily eyed the potatoes with visible interest. They were at the center of the table, just beyond comfortable reach.
Emily leaned forward. Her small arm stretched across the tablecloth, fingers reaching for the serving dish, and her fork slipped from her other hand and clattered toward the middle of the table.
Frances reached for it.
So did Alexander.
Their hands met over the fallen fork. His fingers brushed the back of hers—warm, solid, startlingly close—and the contact went through Frances like a current, sharp and immediate, and she pulled her hand back as though the silver had burned her.
The Duke retrieved the fork. He set it beside Emily’s plate without comment, and Frances busied herself with her napkin and told herself that the heat climbing her neck was the fault of the fire, which the maid had built up too high, and nothing else.
It is nothing. It is a fork. People touch hands over forks every day.
People who were not married to men they were supposed to be keeping at a sensible distance and did not, generally speaking, feel it in their chest when it happened.
She turned to Emily. “When you would like something from across the table,” she said, keeping her voice easy, “you need only ask. Like this—would you pass the potatoes, please?”
Emily looked at her. Then at Alexander, who was holding the dish.
“Would you pass the potatoes?” Emily asked. “Please.”
The Duke passed them. His hand was steady. His expression was neutral. Frances served a portion onto Emily’s plate and showed her how to hold the serving spoon, and if her own fingers were not entirely steady, she trusted no one was looking closely enough to notice.
She was wrong.
She could feel him watching. Not staring—the Duke did not stare,.
but his attention rested on them, on her and Emily, with a quality that Frances recognized because she had felt it before in the schoolroom and in the carriage afterward.
It was the particular attention of a man who was seeing something he had not expected to see.
“Captain was not his real name,” Emily said suddenly.
Frances looked at her. “No?”
“His real name was Mr. Bumble. But the girl said that was not a proper name for a navigator, so she promoted him.”
Emily’s mouth curved, and then she laughed.
Frances looked at the Duke.
His face had gone soft.
There was no other way to describe it. The firm lines, the set jaw, the meticulous blankness he wore like armor—all of it had disappeared, and what remained was something Frances had never seen on him before.
He was looking at Emily with an expression that was almost gentle.
Almost curious. As if the child’s laugh had broken through the layers of discipline, duty, and composure to reveal something beneath that he had forgotten was there.
That is not the face of a man who feels nothing.
Frances’s chest tightened. She looked down at her plate.
This does not matter. None of this matters. In less than two months, you will be gone from this table and this house and this man, and Emily will be...
She stopped the thought before it could finish.
She looked up again, meaning to turn her attention back to Emily and the potatoes and the safe, manageable business of dinner.
But her gaze found Alexander first.
He was still watching them, and the gentleness had not left his face.
Look away. You must look away.
She did. Eventually.
It took longer than it should have.