Chapter 27
“When can I see Sophia again?”
Emily asked the question before Frances had finished buttering her toast. The child was sitting up very straight in her chair, her feet swinging above the floor, her breakfast largely untouched save for a single bite taken from a piece of bread that now lay abandoned on her plate.
“Soon,” Frances said. “I shall write to my sister today.”
“Today?” Emily’s face brightened. “Could she come here? Or could I go there? Sophia said they have a lake. She said there are fish in it. Real fish, Frances, not painted ones.”
“I should hope they are real. Painted fish would be rather disappointing.”
“She said her father lets her feed them sometimes. With bread. Do fish like bread?”
“I believe they are not particular.”
“Could we bring a book? Sophia said she has not read the one about Captain. I told her she must. I told her the part about the hat, and she said it sounded wonderful. I must take her to the library.”
The library.
The thought arrived without permission. Not the library as it was now—the shelves, the books, the armchair by the fire where she read to Emily each evening.
The library as it had been last night. The storm against the glass.
The lamp burning low. Alexander’s hand at her waist, warm and firm through the muslin, and his fingers sliding into her hair, and his lips. ..
Frances reached for her teacup.
“Frances? Are you listening?”
“Of course, I am. Painted fish. Captain’s hat.”
“I said Sophia has a kitten. His name is Whisper. Is that not the best name you have ever heard?”
“It is an excellent name.”
“Better than Captain?”
“Different. One cannot compare a kitten and a dog. They are entirely separate categories of creature.”
Emily considered this with the gravity it apparently deserved. “I suppose that is fair.”
Frances took a sip of tea. It was too hot.
She set it down and picked up her knife again, and the toast sat before her, half-buttered.
Her hands were steady, her face was composed, and none of it was stopping her mind from returning to the thing she had told it, firmly and repeatedly, to leave alone.
He kissed me. And then he left.
She had not allowed herself to hope for a declaration.
She was not a fool. She knew Alexander well enough by now to understand that declarations were not in his vocabulary—that the distance between what he felt and what he was willing to say was vast enough to lose a person in.
She had not expected him to take her hands and tell her he loved her.
She had not expected poetry or promises or any of the things that happened in the novels.
But she had hoped for something.
A word. A look. Some small acknowledgment over the morning table that what had happened between them was not a door to be shut but a door that had, at last, been opened.
That the careful distance they had maintained for weeks had shifted.
That the kiss had meant something beyond the storm and the lamplight and the particular weakness of a moment that could be blamed on proximity and nothing more.
Instead, he stepped back, said goodnight, and left the room with the composure of a man closing a ledger at the end of a long day’s accounting.
Goodnight.
As though it were simple. As though a person could kiss someone like that and then walk away and sleep soundly and rise the next morning with everything neatly in its place.
Frances glanced at the breakfast room door.
The corridor beyond was empty and silent.
A footman stood at his post near the sideboard, and the clock on the mantel indicated it was a quarter past. The chair at the head of the table—Alexander’s chair—sat exactly where it always did, pulled out at the right angle, its cushion smooth and undisturbed.
He was not coming.
She looked back at her plate. The toast had gone cold.
“Do you think Sophia would like to see Grandmama?” Emily was saying. “Grandmama tells the best stories. Better than books, even. She told me one yesterday about a horse that escaped from a stable and ran all the way to Bath. Can you imagine?”
“That is a very determined horse.”
“Grandmama said it took three days. And when they found it, it was eating roses in someone’s garden.”
“Naturally. One does not travel to Bath without stopping for roses.”
Emily giggled. Frances smiled at the sound and glanced again at the door.
Stop it. He is not coming; you knew he would not, and looking at the door will not change it.
The disappointment was nothing new. It settled into her chest like water pooling in low ground—quietly, filling the spaces that were already there.
Next to it, sharper, sat something older.
Something she recognized from drawing rooms and ballrooms and every morning she had ever spent waiting for someone to choose her yet watching them pick someone else instead.
This is precisely what you warned yourself against. On the terrace. In the dark. Every single time you told yourself not to hope.
She had warned herself. She had been cautious. She had built her walls, measured her distances, and plainly told Lavinia that she would not lose her heart to a man who never offered his.
And then he had kissed her, and every wall she had ever built had come down like paper in rain.
“Frances?”
She turned back to Emily. The child was watching her with those brown eyes, too perceptive, and Frances arranged her face into something warm and present, entirely focused on the person who deserved her attention.
“I have an idea,” Frances said. She set down her knife. “Would you like to spend the morning with your grandmama? I believe she mentioned wanting to hear the rest of that story about the princess.”
Emily’s whole body changed. She sat up straighter—impossibly straighter, given that she had already been sitting like a small soldier—and her eyes went wide and bright with the uncomplicated joy of a child who had been offered exactly the thing she wanted most.
“May I really?”
“You may really.”
“Now?”
“After you finish your breakfast.”
Emily looked at her plate. Looked at Frances. Picked up her bread, took an enormous bite, chewed twice, and swallowed. “Finished.”
Frances laughed. The sound surprised her. It was genuine—pulled out of her by Emily’s eagerness—and it unlocked something in her chest that had been tight since she woke.
“That,” she said, “was not precisely what I meant.”
“You said finish. I finished.”
“You inhaled it.”
“Inhaling is finishing. Just faster.”
Frances looked at this child—this small, serious, brave child who had lost everything and found her way back to laughter—and the ache in her chest was not about Alexander.
Not entirely. It was about the morning and the empty chair and the way Emily’s hand reached for hers across the table as naturally as breathing.
She took it. Squeezed it.
“Come, then,” she said. “Let us not keep your grandmama waiting.”
Emily slid from her chair and took Frances’s hand, and they walked together toward the door. Frances did not look back at the empty chair. She did not need to.
She already knew it would be there.
“The Harker cottage is the worst of them, Your Grace. The east wall wants repainting, and the roof will not survive another winter.”
Alexander walked the path along the lower boundary with his bailiff by his side, the morning air sharp against his face. The ground was soft from last night’s rain, and their boots made twin tracks in the mud as they moved between the tenant properties that lined the southern edge of the estate.
“And the others?”
“The Pritchard place needs new window frames. Damp has got into the sills. And the drainage on the lower fields—that is the greater concern, Your Grace. The ditches have silted up. If we do not clear them before autumn, the whole eastern pasture will flood.”
“Have you an estimate for the work?”
“Forty pounds for the cottages. Another sixty for the drainage if we can get the labor before harvest.”
“Do it. All of it. Start with the Harker roof.”
The bailiff nodded. He made a mark in the leather notebook he carried and moved on to the next item—a fence line that wanted replacing, a gate hinge that had rusted through—and Alexander listened and asked the right questions and gave the right instructions, and none of it required him to think about the library.
He had left the house before breakfast. The corridors had been quiet, the servants only just beginning their rounds, the light through the windows thin and gray with early morning.
He had dressed without ringing for his valet, pulled on his boots in the hallway, and gone out through the side entrance that led directly to the grounds.
There are matters requiring my attention. A duke does not neglect his estate.
This was true. The bailiff’s report confirmed it. The cottages did need repair. The drainage did need attention. These were genuine responsibilities that demanded his presence and his decisions, and he had fulfilled them with the thoroughness that had kept Whitestone solvent for a decade.
It was also true that he had timed his departure to avoid the breakfast room.
“The fence along the north pasture, Your Grace—shall I have it replaced entirely, or will a repair suffice?”
“Replace it. A repair will only hold until the first hard frost.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
They continued walking. The bailiff spoke.
Alexander listened attentively. The fields on either side of the path were green and damp, and the sky above was a pale, washed-out blue that often followed a storm.
The air carried the scent of wet earth and grass, quite different from the library at Whitestone House.
Her hand pressed against my chest, her fingers digging into my waistcoat. The way she kissed me back... It was as if she had been waiting for it just as long as I had.
He stopped walking. The bailiff stopped beside him.
“Your Grace?”
“The drainage. You said sixty pounds.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Make it eighty. I want the work done properly. No shortcuts.”
“Of course, Your Grace.”
They resumed walking. Alexander clasped his hands behind his back and fixed his gaze on the path ahead while the bailiff continued his report.
The morning unfolded as mornings do—one practical matter after another, each requiring attention and giving a reason to be outside on the grounds instead of inside at the breakfast table in the same room as his wife.
I am in love with her.
The thought had already been there—sitting in the corner of his mind like a piece of furniture he had been walking around for weeks, refusing to look at directly, pretending it wasn’t taking up space.
He had felt it in the library when she read to Emily.
He had felt it at Evermere when he crossed the drawing room to claim the dance.
He had felt it last night, right before he kissed her, when the lamplight caught her face, and the storm pressed against the glass, and every rational thought he had simply stopped.
I am in love with my wife. I have been for some time.
He knew it now with the kind of clarity that left no room for argument. The way one knew the ground was solid, or the sky was above. It was not a question. It was not an uncertainty he could resolve through further analysis. It was a fact, plain and immovable, and it changed nothing.
Because he also knew this: Frances had made her position plain.
That first morning at the breakfast table, she had looked at him across the cold toast and the silence and said what she said.
She did not want children with him. She had been clear.
She had been direct. She had spoken with the same quiet certainty she brought to everything, and he had heard her, and he had agreed, and the arrangement had been sealed.
She meant it. She has every right to mean it. I have no grounds to revisit the matter simply because I have been foolish enough to fall in love with her.
He thought of Frances with Emily. The patience she brought to every moment.
The way she knelt on marble floors and talked about dragons.
The way Emily reached for her hand without thinking, the way Emily laughed now—really laughed, bright and sudden and unafraid—because Frances had made her safe enough to try.
She is exactly the kind of woman I would want as the mother of my children.
The thought was there before he could stop it.
He closed the door on it.
She does not want that. Not with me. And wanting it does not give me the right to ask.
The sensible course was the one he had already chosen.
Maintain the arrangement. Keep his distance.
Allow the two months to run their course as agreed.
Frances would have her freedom as promised.
And he would have his estate and his duty and the knowledge that he had, at least, done the honorable thing.
The honorable thing.
The words rang hollow even inside his own head.
“Is there anything else, Your Grace?”
Alexander looked at his bailiff. The man stood with his notebook closed, his hat in his hands, his face the patient, neutral face of a servant who had learned long ago that dukes sometimes needed a moment.
“No. That will be all. Thank you.”
The bailiff touched his forelock and turned back toward the lower fields. Alexander watched him go then turned toward the house.
The walk back took ten minutes. He used every one of them to reassemble the things the morning had loosened—the composure, the resolve, the careful architecture of a man who had built his life on the principle that feeling was the enemy of function.
By the time he reached the gravel drive, his stride was measured.
His hands were clasped behind his back, and his jaw was set.
He entered through the main door.
The entrance hall was cool and dim after the brightness outside. His boots were loud against the marble. He pulled off his gloves and was reaching for the study door when Graves appeared at his side.
“Your Grace.” The butler held a silver salver. “The morning’s correspondence.”
Alexander took the stack and sorted through it as he walked toward his study.
He stopped.
One letter sat apart from the others. Not because it had been placed separately but because the penmanship was arresting.
He had seen it on a thousand notes left on breakfast trays, on letters sent from school, on the margins of books where she scribbled her thoughts because she could never keep them to herself.
It was from Eleanor.