Chapter 28
Dearest Alexander,
I am aware that you may be reluctant to hear from me. I regret any pain I have caused you, and I sincerely apologize. However, as you are my brother whom I love dearly, I feel compelled to inform you of an important development.
Malcolm and I are scheduled to marry—a ceremony that will take place in Scotland at a modest church near Gretna Green on the fourteenth of this month.
I extend this invitation to you because you are my family—the sole family I have besides Mama—and I harbor hope that, even at this moment, you might find it within yourself to wish me well.
I fled because I sought to live a life not dictated by others but one I chose. I yearned for love and happiness.
It is my sincere hope that in time you will come to understand this. I hold this hope with all my heart.
Your loving sister,
Eleanor
Alexander lowered the letter.
His jaw was clenched. His hand, the one holding the paper, had gone stiff at his side, the edges of the sheet pressing into his palm. The entrance hall was silent around him, and he stood in its center, feeling the old anger surge.
She ran away because she wanted to live. As though her life before had been a prison.
It is my sincere hope that in time you will come to understand this.
Another demand. Another expectation disguised as affection. She had left him to manage the fallout alone, and now, she wanted his blessing. His forgiveness, offered up like a wedding gif, she had every right to expect.
The fourteenth. Less than a week.
He folded the letter with precise creases and sharp edges. He was still standing there, holding the paper between two fingers, when he heard his name.
“Alexander.”
Frances stood in the hallway. She wore a morning dress of pale blue—simple, unadorned, the kind of thing she chose for days without engagements—and her hair was pinned up in a style that had already begun to loosen at the temples. She held a letter in her hand.
She lifted it. “I received a wedding invitation,” she said, “from Eleanor.”
The words landed between them. Alexander looked at the letter in her hand then at her face. This was the first time they had stood in the same room since last night. Since the library. Since...
He shut the thought down.
“Will you join me in my study?” he asked. “We should discuss this privately.”
Frances nodded. She followed him down the corridor, and neither of them spoke until he opened the study door and stood aside to let her pass.
She entered. He followed and closed the door.
“I will not go,” he said.
Frances turned to face him. She still held Eleanor’s letter. “You have not even—”
“I will not attend my sister’s wedding.” He moved to the desk, put Eleanor’s letter down on the surface, and pressed his fingertips against it as though pinning it in place.
“She disobeyed me. She ignored every convention of decent society. She caused this family considerable difficulty, and I will not now stand in some Scottish church and pretend to sanction it.”
“She is your sister.”
“She was my sister when she fled in the night without a word. She was my sister when the scandal sheets printed her name. She was my sister when I spent three weeks answering questions I should never have been asked.”
“And she is your sister still.”
“That does not entitle her to my approval.”
Frances set her own letter on the edge of his desk. “Eleanor is my friend.”
“I am aware.”
“Friends attend each other’s weddings.”
“Not when those weddings are the result of scandal and defiance.”
“Not every wedding needs your permission, Alexander.”
“She chose this,” he argueed. “She chose to leave. She chose a man with no title, no fortune, no ability to provide for her as she deserves. And I am to simply—what? Applaud?”
“You are to love her.” Frances’ chin lifted. “That is all she has ever asked of you.”
“Love does not require capitulation.”
“No. But it does require showing up.”
He straightened. “I have spent ten years showing up. For this family. For the estate. For Eleanor herself. I have sacrificed—”
“Yes. You have sacrificed a great deal.” Frances took a step closer. “And Eleanor watched you do it, year after year, until she was so terrified of becoming another one of your sacrifices that she ran.”
The words struck something inside him. He did not move. “That is not what happened.”
“That is exactly what happened. She told me so herself, months before she left. She said she could not bear to be another duty on your ledger.”
“She had no right—”
“She had every right. She is a woman, not an entry in your accounts.”
Silence. The air between them was charged with everything: the argument, the kiss, the distance he had put between them, and the distance she had closed by walking into this room and refusing to leave.
“I will not go,” he said again.
Frances looked at him. Her blue eyes held his, and in them he saw something that was not surprise. She had expected this. She had come prepared for it.
“Then I will go alone,” she said.
“Frances—”
“Eleanor is my friend. She is getting married, and she wants the people she loves to be there. I intend to be one of them.” She picked up her letter from his desk. “It is a happy day. I want to be there for it.”
“Frances.”
She did not stop. She crossed to the door, opened it, and walked through without looking back. Her footsteps moved down the corridor, and then they were gone.
Alexander stood behind his desk. Eleanor’s letter lay beneath his fingertips. The study was very quiet.
She will go alone.
He stared at the closed door.
She will go alone, and I will remain here, and that will be the end of it.
His hand curled against the desk. The paper crumpled beneath his fingers.
It did not feel like the end of anything.
Frances went directly to her rooms and rang for Miss Ripley.
The maid appeared within minutes, her cap slightly askew, her expression the careful blankness of a servant who had heard raised voices through the floor.
“I require packing for a journey to Scotland,” Frances said. “We leave in two days.”
Miss Ripley’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “Scotland, Your Grace?”
“We are attending a wedding. I shall need traveling clothes for many days on the road, as well as something suitable for a ceremony. Nothing elaborate.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Shall I begin at once?”
“Please.”
Miss Ripley bobbed and disappeared into the dressing room.
Frances listened to the sounds of wardrobe doors opening, of fabric being lifted and considered, and she sat at her desk and did not think about the study.
Did not think about Alexander’s face when she walked out.
Did not think about his mouth on hers in the library or the way he had avoided her at breakfast.
Focus. There are things to be done.
She found Mrs. Wells in the housekeeper’s parlor.
“I shall be away for several days,” Frances said. “A personal matter. I trust the household will manage perfectly well in my absence.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Mrs. Wells set down her ledger. “Shall I make any particular arrangements?”
“Emily’s routine should continue as normal. Lessons with Miss Bennet in the mornings. Please ensure Emily visits the Dowager Duchess each afternoon—they have an arrangement, and I should not like it disrupted.”
“Very good, Your Grace. And meals?”
“As usual. His Grace will manage.” The words came out flat. Frances did not elaborate.
Mrs. Wells nodded. If she noticed anything amiss, she gave no sign.
Frances found Emily in the library an hour later, curled in the window seat with a picture book open across her knees.
The child looked up when Frances entered, and her face did the thing it always did now.
It brightened. Opened. Became the face of a girl who expected good things from the person walking toward her.
“Frances! Look—this one has maps in it.”
“Maps!” Frances crossed to the window seat and sat beside her. “How wonderful. Where do they lead?”
“Everywhere. There is one of India. And one of Egypt.” Emily turned a page. “Is this where the pyramids are?”
“It is indeed.”
Emily traced a line on the map with her finger. “Will you read to me tonight?”
Frances’s chest tightened. She kept her face easy. “I must tell you something. I am going away for a few days.”
Emily’s hand stilled on the page.
“Only a few days,” Frances said. “I am visiting a friend who is getting married. It is a journey to Scotland, but I shall be back before you know it.”
Emily looked at her. The brightness had not left her face, but something careful had arrived behind it. Right then, she looked like a child who had learned that people who left did not always return.
“You will come back?”
“I will come back.” Frances took her hand. Held it firmly. “I promise you,. I will come back.”
“Will you bring me something?”
“What would you like?”
Emily thought. “A stone from Scotland for my collection.”
“A stone from Scotland. Consider it done.”
The child nodded. She looked down at the map again, and her shoulders lowered, and Frances squeezed her hand once more before releasing it.
“Shall we read the map book together?” Frances asked. “I believe I have time before dinner.”
Emily smiled and shifted closer, Frances put her arm around the child’s thin shoulders and pointed to the map of Egypt, they spent the next hour tracing rivers and naming cities, and Frances did not think about the study or the argument or the man who would not forgive his sister for choosing love.
She did not think about it at all.
Two days later, the entrance hall was busy.
Frances stood beside her trunks—two of them neatly packed, strapped, and labeled for the journey—and checked her list while Graves waited at attention, his posture indicating that the departure of a duchess was an occasion demanding his full professional dignity.
“The letter to my sister has been posted?”
“This morning, Your Grace.”
“And the carriage?”
“Ready at the door. The coachman expects to reach the first posting inn by nightfall.”
“Very good.” Frances folded her list and tucked it into her reticule. “If anything should arise regarding Emily—”
“Miss Bennet and Mrs. Wells have been fully apprised, Your Grace.”
“Thank you, Graves.”
The butler inclined his head. Frances drew on her gloves and was reaching for her traveling cloak when footsteps sounded on the staircase.
She looked up.
Alexander descended. He was dressed for the day, but there were shadows beneath his eyes that had not been there two days ago. His jaw carried the particular set of a man who had been arguing with himself for forty-eight hours and had not yet determined the winner.
He reached the bottom of the stairs.
Their eyes met across the entrance hall. The marble floor stretched between them—five feet, perhaps six—and the air held the same charge it had held in the study and in the library before that and in every room they had occupied together since the night of the storm.
Alexander looked at the trunks. At the open door beyond where the carriage stood ready. At Graves, who had the good sense to find something fascinating about the ceiling. Then back at her.
“I am coming with you,” he said.
Frances went still.
“I will not allow my wife to travel alone on a journey of that distance.” His hands were clasped behind his back. His spine was straight. His face gave nothing away.
Frances looked at him. Her gloves were half-buttoned. Her cloak hung over her arm. The carriage waited. Scotland waited. Eleanor waited.
And Alexander stood at the foot of the stairs with something in his expression that was not apology or surrender but might, if she looked long enough, be the beginning of both.
She did not ask why he had changed his mind. She did not ask what the last two days had cost him or what he had decided or whether this meant he had forgiven Eleanor or simply could not bear to let Frances go alone. She asked none of it.
“The carriage leaves within the hour,” she said.
He nodded once, turned, and took the stairs two at a time.
Frances watched him go. Her heart was hammering beneath her ribs, and her hands were not quite steady inside her half-buttoned gloves, and she could not have said whether what she felt was relief or anticipation or something far more complicated than either.
Scotland. Four days in a carriage. Together.