Chapter 29 #2
“Have you traveled, sir?” Will asked. He had pulled a chair over to their table uninvited, the way people did in places like this, where chairs were for anyone and conversation was currency. “To the Continent, perhaps?”
“Italy,” Alexander said. “Some years ago.”
“Italy! Were there ruins?”
“A great many.”
“I always wanted to see ruins. Proper ones. Old stones with stories in them.”
“They are... remarkable.” The word was inadequate.
He searched for something better, and to his surprise, he found he wanted to try.
“There is a temple in Rome—the Pantheon—with a hole in the roof. Open to the sky. When it rains, the water falls straight through to the marble floor, and a drain built into the stone carries it away. It was built two thousand years ago, and it still functions perfectly.”
Will leaned forward. “Two thousand years! And the drain still works?”
“Without fail.”
“Now that,” Will said, slapping his knee, “is engineering.”
“Do they have the pyramids in Italy?” the boy asked from the floor.
“The pyramids are in Egypt,” Alexander said. “But there is one in Rome. Smaller. It was built as a tomb.”
“A tomb!” The boy’s eyes went wide. “Is there a body inside?”
“I believe so.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Only from the outside.”
“I should like to see the inside,” the boy said with the absolute certainty of a child who saw no obstacle between himself and Egypt.
Frances caught Alexander’s eye. Her mouth was curved. Her eyes were warm, and the look she gave him was not the guarded gaze of the carriage. It was something else. Something that said: You see? This is not so difficult.
He held her gaze for a moment then he turned back to the sailor.
“Tell me about the storms,” he said. “At sea. Were they very fierce?”
Will launched into a tale about a typhoon off the coast of Ceylon that nearly capsized his ship. The father interrupted with corrections. The mother contradicted both of them. The eldest daughter asked practical questions about navigation. The boy on the floor asked if there were sharks.
Alexander sat in the middle of it and let the noise wash over him.
The food arrived, and he ate without paying attention to what was on his plate, because the conversation kept pulling him back.
Frances was asking about the spice trade.
Will was explaining the difference between cinnamon and cassia.
The father was telling a story about his brother’s first day home, when he had tried to cook a curry and nearly set the kitchen on fire.
The room was loud. The ale was middling. The bench was uncomfortable. And Alexander was... He searched for the word and was startled by what he found.
Happy.
Not the satisfaction of a ledger balanced or an estate well-managed.
Not the grim pleasure of duty fulfilled.
Something lighter than that. Something that asked nothing of him, required no performance, and simply existed because he was here in this room with these people, listening to a story about a curry that caught fire.
Frances was laughing at something the mother had said, and her face was flushed, and her eyes were bright, and she looked, in this moment, exactly as she had looked in the garden with Emily. Open. Unguarded. Present.
She has been like this the entire time. This is who she is—not the careful duchess, not the woman measuring every word across my breakfast table. This.
He looked at her across the scarred table, and she looked back, and for a moment, the argument vanished.
The kiss disappeared. The silence, the avoidance, and the two months ticking down like a clock neither of them could stop—all of it fell away.
What was left was simply this: two people in a crowded room, sharing a meal, sharing a moment, sharing something that suspiciously looked like the start of understanding.
Frances turned back to the family as the conversation moved forward.
Alexander finished his ale and ordered another, and when Will asked him whether Italian wine was truly as good as they said, he honestly replied that it was.
The table then erupted into a debate about wine versus ale that lasted through the final course.
They left an hour later. The family wished them well on their journey. The boy made Frances promise to wave if she ever saw him bowling in his lane. Will shook Alexander’s hand with a grip that had hauled rigging in monsoons and seemed none the worse for it.
The carriage was waiting. The coachman opened the door. Frances climbed in, Alexander followed, the door closed, and the noise of the tavern fell away into the quiet creak of wheels and harness.
Frances settled against the squabs. Her cheeks were still pink. Her eyes still carried that brightness.
“That was unexpected,” she said.
“Which part?”
“All of it.” She smoothed her skirt. “You told them about your travels.”
“They asked.”
“You volunteered. Enthusiastically, one might say.”
“I would not say enthusiastically.”
“You used the word ‘remarkable.’ Twice.”
“The Pantheon is a remarkable building.”
“It is.” The warmth had not left her face. “You enjoyed yourself.”
It was not a question. He thought about denying it. Thought about retreating into the silence that had served him so reliably during the first half of the journey. Thought about saying something about obligation, passing time, or the need for civil conversation in public.
“Yes,” he said.
Frances smiled. She turned to the window. The carriage moved north. The hedgerows resumed their steady green procession beyond the glass. Alexander watched her profile against the fading afternoon light, and the warmth in his chest did not dissipate.
Happiness can sometimes be found in simple moments—in a crowded tavern with no title on the door and no expectation of anything but the pleasure of being present.
The thought turned itself over, and with it came another that was impossible to dismiss.
Is this what Eleanor chose?
Not the scandal. Not the defiance. Not the running and the border and the fury he had wrapped around himself like armor for weeks.
This. The warmth of a room full of strangers. The sound of someone laughing because they meant it. The particular joy of being seen—not as a duke or a duchess or a name in Debrett’s but as a person, sitting at a table, eating bread, telling stories about temples and storms.
Is this what she wanted? This ordinary, unremarkable, extraordinary thing?