Chapter 22
“Look, Your Grace! It is a sparrow!”
Alexander’s quill halted mid-word, ink gathering at the tip in a dark droplet that would ruin the letter if he did not lift it. He lifted it, set it on the stand, and listened.
Emily’s voice was high and bright, echoing through the open study window with a clarity that implied the garden just below. There was something in it that made him pause. Not the words themselves, which were simple, but the quality. The ease.
Emily did not speak with ease. Not in his presence.
Not at meals, where her answers were brief and monosyllabic.
Not in the hallways, where she pressed herself against the wall when he passed, as if trying to take up as little space as possible.
She spoke to him the way one speaks to a magistrate—quietly and with clear relief when the exchange was over.
This voice was different.
“I told you to call me Frances, my dear.” The Duchess’ words followed, drifting up through the window like something carried on a summer current. “And that sparrow is rather enchanting, is it not?”
Alexander’s hand stilled on the desk.
He ought to call her Frances, too.
The thought arrived with considerable discomfort. They had been married for weeks. He had called her “Duchess” and in the privacy of his own mind, nothing at all. And she had offered her name to an eight-year-old girl over a sparrow, and he had never once used it.
Emily’s giggle floated up next. A real giggle—girlish and unguarded, the sound of a child who had forgotten, for a moment, to be careful.
“Where does it live?” Emily asked. “Does it have a nest?”
“I should think so. Up in that tree, perhaps. Do you see? Where the branches are thickest.”
“I see it! I see where it went!”
“Clever girl. You have sharp eyes.”
Alexander set down his quill entirely and pushed back his chair. The letter to his steward—something about fencing on the north pasture or drainage or one of the dozen practical matters that filled his days and kept his mind where it belonged—could wait.
He rose and crossed to the window.
Below, the garden spread in its orderly green expanse, and there, on the gravel path beside the old elm, stood his wife and his ward.
Frances wore what he thought was a pale peach muslin dress though he admitted he was not an expert on fabrics.
The color seemed to affect her skin in a way he preferred not to dwell on.
Her face was angled upward toward the branches, her neck a graceful, elongated line, and her hair shimmered in the afternoon light, giving it a golden hue instead of brown.
Emily stood nearby, almost shoulder to shoulder with her.
Not quite touching, but near enough that the child had chosen to stand there. Had chosen proximity. Had placed herself within the orbit of this woman without being directed to do so.
Alexander watched them peer up into the branches together, speaking over each other in the particular manner of two people who had forgotten that anyone else existed.
“Do you think it has babies?” Emily asked.
“It might. It is the right time of year for it.”
“How many babies do sparrows have?”
“I am not certain. Several, I think. We could look it up in the library later if you like.”
“Yes! Can we look it up now?”
Frances laughed. “Let us watch a little longer first. Perhaps the mother will come back.”
Emily’s hand reached out and found the fabric of Frances’ skirt. Not clutching. Just resting there, her small fingers curled loosely around the muslin as though she needed the contact but did not want to ask for it.
Alexander’s chest did something he refused to name.
She is at ease.
Emily. The child who curtsied to him like a soldier reporting for inspection. The child who had not laughed in his presence until three nights ago and then only once, briefly. The child who kept her hands folded, maintained her rigid posture, and limited her words whenever he entered a room.
That child was standing in his garden with her fingers curled in his wife’s dress, pointing at sparrows, asking about babies, giggling.
This is what she looks like when she is not afraid.
He turned from the window.
The study was quiet. The letter sat unfinished on his desk. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. Everything in this room was ordered, controlled, predictable—the shelves, the ledgers, the correspondence arranged by urgency, the brandy decanter precisely where he had left it.
He thought of the argument.
Two nights ago, Frances was positioned where the firelight illuminated her face. She told him that he treated duty like other men treat alcohol—that he was selfish and had never truly let go of anything.
She is wrong.
He returned to the window despite himself.
She is wrong because she has never carried what I carry.
She has never, at twenty years old, stood in a solicitor’s office and been told that the fortune was gone, the estates mortgaged, the tenants months from eviction.
She has never sat across from her father’s creditors and negotiated terms while her mother wept in the room above and his sister asked when Papa was coming home.
She speaks of love as though it were simple. As though one could simply feel and still function. As though the heart and the mind could work in concert rather than at cross purposes.
She does not know what it is to have no choice.
He braced his hands on the windowsill.
Below, Emily was tugging at Frances’ hand. “Come closer! I want to see if it comes back!”
“All right, all right. But quietly. We must not frighten it.”
They moved together beneath the elm, Emily pulling Frances forward. Frances went willingly. More than willingly. She bent down to Emily’s level, tilting her head to hear something the child was whispering—something too quiet to reach the study window—and then she laughed.
Not the laugh she deployed at dinner parties. Not the measured, musical sound that emerged at precisely the right moment in precisely the right volume to charm a table full of strangers.
This was real. Sudden and bright, startled out of her by whatever Emily had said, and it changed her whole face—opened it, softened it, turned her from a duchess into a woman who was simply happy, in this moment, to be exactly where she was.
“Emily Penford, you are the cleverest creature in this garden,” Frances said. “Cleverer than the sparrow, certainly.”
“Cleverer than you?”
“Far cleverer than me. I would never have noticed that.”
Emily beamed. Alexander could see it from the window—the full, uncomplicated joy of a child who had been praised and believed it.
Good.
He straightened. Clasped his hands behind his back.
This is a good thing. A duchess should know how to conduct herself with a ward. My wife ought to be kind to the child. It is entirely appropriate—desirable, even—that Emily should be comfortable with her.
These are the thoughts of a sensible man managing a household. Nothing more.
He watched Frances straighten and brush a strand of hair from Emily’s forehead. The gesture was absent, instinctive—the gesture of a woman who touched the child without thinking about it because touching her had become natural.
Nothing more.
And yet.
There was something in the way Frances laughed. It produced in him a feeling he could not file neatly under approval or satisfaction. It sat in his chest in the space where those things ought to have been, but it was neither of them. It was warmer. More dangerous. Less controlled.
He frowned at the window.
Stop.
“Shall we go to the library now?” Emily asked. Her hand was still in Frances’. “I want to know how many babies sparrows have.”
“We shall go directly. But first... do you see there? I think the mother has come back.”
“Where?”
“On the lower branch. Just there.”
“I see her! Oh, she is small.”
“She is. But very brave, I think. Sparrows are braver than they look.”
“Like me?”
Frances’ face changed—not dramatically but in the way that Alexander had learned to watch for. A softening around the eyes. A warmth that went deeper than a smile.
“Exactly like you,” she said.
Alexander’s hands tightened on the windowsill.
Two months.
The number passed through his mind with the mechanical rhythm of a clock striking the hour.
Two months. That was the agreement. Two months of marriage performed in public, of domestic life conducted in private, and then—separation.
Separate lives. Separate residences. A marriage that existed on paper and in the eyes of the law and nowhere else.
It had been sensible. It had been rational. It had been the only possible arrangement for two people bound by circumstance rather than choice, and he had proposed it because it was fair, and she had accepted it because she understood that fairness was all either of them could offer.
Two months. Ticking down. Every day is a day closer to the end of this... whatever this is.
He watched Frances take Emily’s hand and turn toward the house, and the child went with her without looking back, chattering about sparrows and nests and babies, and her thin shoulders were loose, and her step was light, and she looked, from this distance, like a child who belonged somewhere.
She is happy.
The thought was simple. And underneath it, something harder pressed upward.
He had not considered this.
When he had agreed—reluctantly, under considerable pressure—to bring Emily to Whitestone House, he had been thinking of practicality. Of his mother’s wishes. Of the Duchess’ arguments which had been passionate and pointed and, he could admit in the privacy of his own mind, not entirely wrong.
He had not thought about what would happen after.
Emily had lost her parents. A carriage accident, swift and brutal, that had taken everything from her in the space of a single afternoon.
She had been moved to the countryside. Given a governess.
Provided for in every material sense. And then she had been brought here, to this house, and introduced to a woman who knelt on marble floors and talked about dragons and offered her Christian name over sparrows.
A woman who would leave.
In a matter of weeks, Frances will no longer be a daily presence in this child’s life.
The thought sat in his chest like a stone swallowed whole.
Emily would wake one morning and find that Frances was not at breakfast. Would not be in the garden.
Would not be bending down to hear whispered secrets or laughing at clever observations about birds.
The woman who had taught her to ask for potatoes and told her she was brave—that woman would simply be gone.
And Emily, who had already learned that people left and did not come back, would learn it again.
Alexander stepped back from the window.
I am still right. About duty. About obligation. About the necessity of structure, order, and control.
I am still right.
But perhaps... perhaps being right is not the same as being wise.
Their voices had faded. They were inside now, heading for the library, and the garden below was empty except for the sparrow which had returned to its branch and sat there, small and brown and entirely unconcerned with the complications of the household beneath it.
He wondered, with unwelcome discomfort, whether he should have considered that earlier.