Chapter 21
“Might I have a word?”
Frances waited until Miss Bennet had taken Emily upstairs, until the dining room had been cleared and the footmen had retreated, and the house had settled into its evening quiet.
Then she found him in the hallway outside the dining room, already moving toward his study.
The Duke stopped and turned. “Of course.”
They walked quietly to his study. He held the door open. She entered. The fire burned low, the brandy decanter sat untouched on the side table, and the room smelled of ink and leather with a stillness unique to spaces where only one person spent time.
Frances did not sit. She clasped her hands before her and faced him.
“I heard you this evening,” she said. “Through the study door when Emily and I were passing on our way to dinner.”
Something shifted behind his eyes. “What did you hear?”
“‘How difficult is it to find one little chit across England?’” She held his gaze. “You were speaking of Eleanor.”
It was not a question. She watched the confirmation move through his expression—a tightening of the jaw, a slight narrowing of the eyes—before he crossed to his desk and stood behind it, as though the furniture between them was a necessary fortification.
“Yes,” he said.
“You told me at breakfast that you did not wish to discuss her. That she had made her choice and was living with the consequences.” Frances tilted her head. “And yet you have men searching for her.”
“The two are not contradictory.”
“They are entirely contradictory.”
“She is my sister. Whatever choices she has made, I have a responsibility to know where she is.”
“To know where she is?” Frances repeated. “To prevent her marriage?”
The silence that followed answered the question more honestly than he would have.
Frances drew a breath. “What have they found?”
The Duke’s hands rested on the desk. His fingers pressed flat against the surface, and she watched the knuckles whiten before he spoke. “My men reported locating her in Cumberland. Near Penrith. Close to the Scottish border.”
Cumberland.
“When?”
“Four days ago.” His jaw worked. “By the time they reached the inn where she had been staying, she was gone. She and Fraser had left that morning. No one could say in which direction.”
Frances looked at him across the desk. The fire crackled. The clock ticked. And the truth of it settled between them with the quiet inevitability of water finding its level.
“If she was in Cumberland four days ago,” Frances said, “she is in Scotland now.”
He said nothing.
“She has crossed the border. She may already be married. You know this.”
“I know nothing of the sort.”
“You know it.” She took a step closer to the desk. “You knew it before I said it. You knew it when your men sent their report, and you knew it this evening when you were shouting at whoever was on the other side of that conversation.”
“I was not shouting. I never shout.”
“Right. You were speaking with considerable volume through a closed door. I could hear you from the hallway.”
His mouth pressed into a line. “The situation is not resolved.”
“The situation is entirely resolved. Eleanor resolved it. She chose Malcolm Fraser, and she chose Scotland, and she is gone.” Frances held his gaze. “Perhaps it is time to let her go.”
“Let her go.” He repeated it as though testing whether the words were real. “You suggest I simply accept that my sister has thrown away her future, her reputation, her family—”
“I suggest you accept that your sister has chosen her own life.”
“A life with a man who has nothing. No title. No fortune. No prospect of providing for her in the manner she was raised to expect.”
“Eleanor did not want the manner she was raised to expect. She wanted love.”
“Love,” he said it the way another man might say poison. “Love does not pay debts. Love does not maintain estates. Love does not protect a woman’s reputation when society turns its back on her.”
“No,” Frances said. “Love does not do any of those things. But it does something you seem entirely unable to comprehend which is make a person happy.”
“Happiness is temporary.”
“So is everything. That is not an argument against it.”
He pushed away from the desk. The movement was sharp and sudden—the first uncontrolled thing she had seen him do—and he moved to the window, standing with his back to her, his hands clasped behind him, his shoulders forming a stiff line against the dark glass.
“You do not understand what is at stake.”
“I understand perfectly.” Frances followed him. “What is at stake is your pride. You need to control every person and every outcome in your life because if you cannot control it, you cannot bear it.”
He turned. “That is not—”
“You did not send those men because you love Eleanor. You sent them because she left without your permission, and you cannot tolerate that. You cannot tolerate that someone looked at the life you had planned for her and said no.”
“I sent them because she is my responsibility, and I wanted to ensure her safety.”
“She is not your responsibility. She is a grown woman who made a choice. The fact that you disagree with it does not make it yours to undo.”
His eyes were very blue, very close. The firelight caught the sharp line of his cheekbone, and his jaw was set so tightly she could see the muscle working beneath the skin. There was something in his expression that was not anger, not entirely—something rawer, something that looked like it hurt.
Good. Let it hurt. Perhaps then you will understand what you have done to the people who love you.
“You use duty the way other men use drink,” Frances said. “To numb yourself. To avoid feeling anything that might threaten the neat, ordered world you have built. And you dress it up as responsibility, as sacrifice, as nobility—but it is not noble. It is selfish.”
“Selfish?” The word came out quietly. Dangerously quiet.
“Yes. Selfish. Because you would rather drag Eleanor back to a life she hates than admit that your way of living might not be the only one worth choosing. You would rather control her than love her because control is safe and love requires...” She stopped.
Her breath was coming faster than she wanted it to.
“Love requires letting someone go. And you have never once in your life let go of anything.”
The silence that followed was absolute. It filled the study like smoke, pressing into every corner, and Frances’s heart was pounding against her ribs.
Her hands were shaking at her sides, and the Duke was looking at her with an expression she could not read and did not want to read because doing so would mean admitting that she had said too much, gone too far, and meant every single word.
He opened his mouth, but Frances turned and walked out of the study before a single sound left his lips.