Chapter 23
“Miss Bennet, where is Emily? It is nearly time for dinner.”
Frances stood in the doorway of the nursery, one hand on the frame, scanning the room. The small bed was neatly made. A stack of picture books sat on the nightstand beside the silver music box. The chair by the window was empty.
Miss Bennet looked up from the writing desk where she had been composing a letter. “His Grace came for her not five minutes ago, Your Grace. He said he would take her down himself.”
Frances blinked. “The Duke came for her?”
“Yes, Your Grace. He knocked and asked if Miss Penford was ready for dinner. She went with him directly.”
Frances could not remember the Duke ever fetching Emily for anything.
Meals were structured. Arrivals were timed.
People appeared at their designated places at their designated hours, and the Duke managed his household the way a conductor managed an orchestra—from a distance, with a baton, and without ever picking up an instrument himself.
“Thank you, Miss Bennet.”
She turned and made her way down the corridor, her slippers quiet on the carpet. The staircase stretched below her, candlelight pooling on each step, and she descended at a pace that was neither hurried nor leisurely, driven, in truth, by a curiosity she would not have admitted to under oath.
She reached the dining room. The doors stood open.
The Duke was seated at the head of the table with Emily on his left. He was leaning slightly toward her—not much but enough that the rigid line of his posture had softened—and he was speaking.
“The stones are enormous,” he said. “Each one taller than this room. Taller than the house, some of them. And they were placed there thousands of years ag, by people who had no machines, no engines, nothing but rope and will and extraordinary ingenuity.”
Emily’s eyes were enormous. “Can we visit them someday?”
Something flickered across his face. Brief and unguarded—a look that Frances could not name that hovered between longing and loss.
It was there for just a moment. Then he smiled.
A genuine smile, not the controlled expression he usually showed in compan, but something that reached his eyes and transformed them.
“I should like that very much,” he said.
Frances’ hand tightened on the doorframe.
He would make a good father.
The thought arrived whole and unannounced, and with it came a pain she had not braced for—sharp and deep, lodged somewhere behind her ribs where she could not reach it.
But we will never find out.
She would never give him an heir. She had decided that weeks ago in the quiet of her own room, staring at the ceiling in the dark.
She could not bring a child into a marriage built on obligation.
She could not offer that piece of herself—the most vulnerable, the most permanent—to a man who had told her, plainly and without apology, that this was an arrangement.
That love had no part in it. That their lives would be separate, their union a matter of paper and propriety and nothing more.
He had made that clear from the beginning. She would not forget it simply because he looked gentle in candlelight.
Frances drew a breath, straightened her shoulders, arranged her face into something that would pass for composure, and stepped into the room.
Both heads turned.
Emily’s face lit up. “Frances! Did you know the pyramids are in Egypt? And they are made of stone, and nobody knows exactly how they were built, and there are secret chambers inside—”
The Duke rose to his feet.
The movement was immediate. He stood the instant Frances crossed the threshold and remained standing, his hand resting on the back of his chair, while she crossed to her place and sat. Only then did he lower himself back into his seat.
“Good evening,” she said.
“Good evening.” His gaze held hers for a moment. Neutral. Measured. The warmth she had seen from the doorway was gone, hidden behind the composure he wore around her like a coat buttoned up to the collar.
The echo of their argument lingered between them.
She called him selfish and said he used duty to numb himself.
She walked out of his study before he could reply, and neither of them mentioned it again.
The silence on the topic grew heavier, and they both tiptoed around it like rearranged furniture in a dark room.
“Frances, did you know there are temples in India with carvings of elephants?” Emily’s spoon hung suspended in the air, forgotten. “And the carvings are so detailed you can see the wrinkles on their skin.”
“I did not know that.” Frances turned to her with a smile that required no effort at all. “How wonderful. Are the temples very old?”
“Terribly old. Older than anything in England.” Emily looked at the Duke for confirmation. “Is that right?”
“That is correct,” Alexander said. “Some of them are more than a thousand years old.”
“A thousand!” Emily set down her spoon with a clatter that made the Duke’s jaw tighten by a fraction. “That is older than everything.”
“Not quite everything,” Frances said, “but certainly older than this house. And older than your guardian though sometimes one might wonder.”
The words were out before she could weigh them. She felt her cheeks warm and did not look at the Duke.
A pause. Then, from the head of the table: “I am not yet ancient though I appreciate the comparison.”
Emily giggled. The sound broke across the table like sunlight through cloud, and Frances’s chest eased despite itself.
“I have been thinking,” Frances said, reaching for her water glass. “Emily, have you ever been to Hyde Park?”
Emily’s eyes went wide. “No. Is it very far?”
“An hour’s ride by carriage,” the Duke said. His tone was even. Careful.
“Could we go?” Emily looked between them with the urgency of a child who had just discovered that the world contains more than she had been shown. “Could we go tomorrow?”
Frances looked at the Duke. He looked back.
The space between their gazes was charged with everything they were not saying—the argument, the accusation, the silence that had followed—and underneath all of it, something else.
Something that had to do with the child sitting between them, looking from one face to the other with an eagerness that neither of them could refuse.
“I see no reason why not,” Alexander said.
Emily beamed. She launched into a series of questions—were there ducks? Were there trees to climb? Would there be other children?—and Frances answered each one, and the Duke answered too, his contributions spare but precise, and the meal continued.
The awkwardness did not disappear. It sat between the adults like a third guest, polite and unwelcome.
But Emily filled the spaces between them. She talked about pyramids and elephants and ducks she had not yet seen, and the silence that might have grown teeth was kept at bay by the voice of a child who did not know it needed keeping.
Frances’s gaze drifted to the Duke’s face. Once. Twice. A third time, which she told herself was the last.
He was watching Emily speak, and the hard lines around his mouth had eased again, and the candlelight was doing something unforgivable to the angle of his jaw.
Stop looking at him.
The excursion was a practical matter. Fresh air. Exercise. A child who had spent too many months confined to a single property in the countryside and who would benefit, as any physician would confirm, from open space and direct sunlight.
Alexander had said as much in the carriage when Frances had looked at him with that particular expression—the one that suggested she was reading something in his face that he had not written there—and asked whether he was looking forward to the outing.
“I am fulfilling an obligation,” he had said.
“Of course, you are.” She had turned to the window, and the corner of her mouth had done something he was not going to think about.
They arrived. Hyde Park stretched out before them in the afternoon sunlight—wide green lawns, the shine of the Serpentine visible through the trees, carriages rolling at a gentle pace along the sandy path.
A breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass and a floral aroma that Alexander could not identify and did not bother to.
Emily climbed down from the carriage with the footman’s help and stood on the gravel.
She looked at the park. For a moment, she was very still, her small figure braced against the vastness of it, and Alexander recognized the posture—the careful assessment of a child calculating whether a new place was safe.
Then she ran.
“Come! Come look—there are trees!”
Her voice carried back to them, bright and startling, stripped of every caution she wore inside the walls of Whitestone House.
She was running toward a stand of elms with her arms swinging and her bonnet already sliding sideways, and she looked, from this distance, like any child in any park on any afternoon.
Frances laughed. The sound was sudden and unguarded, and she gathered her skirts in one hand and went after Emily without looking back. The breeze caught the fabric and pressed it against her legs as she moved, and her hair—improperly secured, as it always seemed to be—pulled loose at her temples.
Alexander stood by the carriage. He watched them. The woman in pale muslin and the child in blue, growing smaller against the green.
He followed though he wasn’t quite sure why.
Emily had reached the elms and was standing beneath the largest one with her head tipped back, staring up into the canopy. Frances arrived beside her, slightly breathless, one hand pressed to her bonnet.
“What have you found?” Frances asked.
“The branches go all the way up. Higher than the house.”
“They do indeed.”
“Could a person climb to the top?”
“A person could. Whether a person should is another question entirely.”
“I should like to try.”
“Perhaps when you are a bit taller.”