Chapter 33
“Do you actually want that?” Eleanor pressed on. “Separate lives. Separate everything. Is that truly what you want?”
Alexander set down his teacup. The kitchen was warm, and Eleanor stood at the table with her arms crossed and that particular tilt to her chin that meant she had no intention of letting this go.
“It is what was agreed,” he said.
“That is not what I asked.”
“No,” he said. “It is not what I want.”
Eleanor’s arms uncrossed. She leaned forward. “Then why on earth did you tell me—”
“Because it is the truth of the arrangement, Eleanor. What I want is irrelevant when the other party has made her wishes clear.”
“Her wishes.” Eleanor pulled out a chair and sat. “What wishes? What has she said?”
Alexander’s jaw tightened. He thought of the breakfast table at Whitestone.
Weeks ago. A lifetime ago. Frances’ voice telling him she did not want children.
Not with him. Not within this arrangement.
The words had landed like stones in water, and he had agreed because what else was there to do when a woman you had married under false pretenses told you plainly that she did not want your future?
“She does not wish to build a family with me,” he said. “She was direct about it. I will not dishonor that by pretending otherwise.”
“Alexander.” Eleanor reached across the table. Her hand covered his. “That was weeks ago. Things have changed. You have changed. I have watched you with her these past two days, the way you look at each other, the way you—”
“Eleanor.”
“You are in love with her.”
The words hung in the kitchen like smoke. He did not deny them. He could not. The denial would have been a lie so transparent that even his own sister, who had known him for twenty years and seen him dissemble with the best of them, would have laughed.
“What Frances wants,” he said, “has not changed. She has given me no indication—”
“People change their minds.” Eleanor squeezed his hand. “People change their hearts. You changed yours about Malcolm. About this wedding. About love itself if I am not mistaken.”
He looked at their joined hands on the table. His sister’s fingers.
Perhaps she might.
The thought emerged before he could halt it. Fragile and perilous, it was the kind of hope a man held in his chest like a lit match close to dry kindling—one wrong breath and everything could ignite.
He did not say it aloud. He could not. Voicing it would make it real, and real things could be broken.
“I should find Frances,” he said. He pulled his hand free and stood. “We had planned to discuss the route north.”
Eleanor watched him go. He felt her gaze on his back all the way to the door.
He found her in their bedchamber. She was standing at the window with her back to the door, her hair pinned up, and her traveling dress already fastened.
Not the morning dress she wore yesterday.
Not the soft muslin she had slept beside him in.
The dark blue pelisse lay across the bed.
Her trunk sat open on the floor, half-packed.
Something cold moved through him.
“Frances.”
She turned. Her face was… displeased. That was the only word for it.
The warmth that had lived in her features for days, that had bloomed in the tavern and softened in the church and glowed in the candlelight of their shared bed—all of it was gone.
Her blue eyes met his and gave him nothing.
The gaze of a woman looking at a stranger.
“I have been thinking,” she said. “About Scotland.”
“As have I.” He stepped into the room. “I spoke with the coachman this morning. He suggests we travel north through—”
“We should return to London.”
He stopped. “I beg your pardon?”
“London.” She turned back to the window. Her hands were clasped before her—tight, the knuckles white. “We should go back. Immediately.”
“But you said yes.” The words came out sharper than he intended. “Last night. You said yes to Scotland.”
“I have changed my mind.”
“Why?”
She did not look at him. “Emily needs us. We have been gone for more than a week already. It is not fair to leave her so long.”
The excuse landed between them, thin as paper. Emily was well cared for. They both knew it. Miss Bennet was there. Mrs. Wells. His mother. An entire household designed to function in their absence.
“Frances.” He took another step forward. “If something has happened, if I have done something—”
“You have done nothing.” She picked up the pelisse from the bed and folded it over her arm. “I simply think it is time we returned.”
Her voice was even. Composed. The voice she used at dinner parties and formal calls, the one that held everyone at a distance so measured it could have been drawn with a compass.
What happened? What changed between last night and this morning?
Last night, she had smiled at him in the dark. Last night, she had said yes with a softness that had made his chest ache. And now, she stood before him with her trunk half-packed and her eyes like glass, and he could not understand.
“Very well,” he said.
She looked at him then. It was brief but enough of him to catch a shadow in the depths. Then she turned back to the trunk.
“I shall inform the coachman,” Alexander said.
“Thank you.”
He stood in the doorway for a moment longer. The distance between them felt immense. He wanted to cross it. Wanted to take her by the shoulders and ask what had stolen the warmth from her face and the light from her eyes. Wanted to say, Tell me what I have done, and I will undo it.
He did not. She had not asked him to. And a man did not force his way past a door that had been deliberately closed.
He turned and walked away. The cottage was quiet behind him. Scotland stretched green and wild beyond the windows, and they would not see any of it. The lochs, the Highlands, and the week that might have been—all of it dissolving like mist in the morning sun.
She has changed her mind. About Scotland. About staying.
About me.
Four days of silence stretched like a wire between them.
Four days of Frances sitting across from him in the carriage with a book open in her lap and her eyes never meeting his.
She spoke briefly and politely when addressed.
She thanked him when he handed her down from the carriage.
She said goodnight at each inn with a nod and a closed door.
Alexander arranged separate rooms. He did not ask whether she wished it.
He simply told the innkeepers—one room for the duchess, one for himself—and watched her disappear upstairs without looking back.
Each night, he lay alone in unfamiliar beds and stared at unfamiliar ceilings and tried to understand what had broken.
He could not.
By the time the carriage turned onto the London road on the fourth morning, the space between them felt permanent.
Whitestone House loomed before them in the late afternoon light. The carriage came to a stop. Alexander stepped down and offered his hand. Frances took it with her gloved fingers and immediately let go.
“I will not be staying,” she said.
He went still.
“Lavinia has invited me to Evermere.” Frances adjusted her gloves. She was looking at the front steps. At the door. At anything that was not his face. “I should go stay with her.”
“How long?” he asked.
“Several days. Perhaps a week.”
“Frances—”
“The carriage is waiting.” She nodded toward the second vehicle—the one that had carried Miss Ripley and the trunks. It sat with the horses still in harness. Already arranged. She had planned this before they arrived.
He stood on the gravel drive and watched her gather her things. Watched Graves open the door and direct the footmen. Watched Miss Ripley climb into the carriage with a small trunk and a hatbox and the particular expression of a maid who knew better than to ask questions.
Frances halted at the carriage door. For a moment, she turned, her eyes locking with his across the drive. There was a depth in that glance—something raw and hurt she quickly masked before he could recognize it. She then stepped inside. The door shut behind her. The coachman clicked his tongue.
Alexander stood in the doorway and watched the carriage until it turned the corner and disappeared.
The house was quiet behind him. The entrance hall stretched cool and dim. And her absense pressed against him with a weight that made it difficult to draw air.
She is gone.
He went to his study. Sat at his desk. Pulled the estate ledger toward him and opened it to the page he had marked before Scotland. The numbers swam. He closed it.
She was gone, and he could not ask her why because she never gave him the chance.
Emily knew.
Children always knew. They could not explain it, could not name the thing that had shifted in the air around them, but they felt it the way animals felt storms: in the bones, in the blood, in the particular quality of silence that meant something was wrong.
She came to him that first evening. Quiet and smaller than usual, somehow, as though she had drawn into herself, pulled her edges inward for protection. She sat beside him on the settee in the drawing room, saying nothing. Her hand found his. Her fingers curled around two of his, and she held on.
The second evening. The same. Her small body pressed against his side while he pretended to read and she pretended to look at her picture book. Neither of them turned a page.
The third evening, she asked, “Is Frances coming back?”
The question was quiet. Careful. The voice of a child who had asked this question before and received answers she did not want.
Alexander looked at her. She was eight years old with large brown eyes that seemed too big for her face. She carried the quiet stillness of a girl who had already learned that the people she loved could vanish.
“I do not know,” he said.
Emily’s hand tightened around his fingers. She nodded once and said nothing more.
Alexander closed his eyes. But then he opened them at the sound of Graves clearing his throat from the doorway. “Yes?”
“Her Grace has called for you,” he announced.
Alexander nodded and stood up then headed to his mother’s chambers.
“Sit down, Alexander,” she said the minute he walked in.
Margaret sat in a chair by the hearth, her shawl drawn around her shoulders, her eyes sharp and clear in the lamplight.
“Tell me what happened in Scotland.”
“Eleanor is married. The ceremony was—”
“Not Eleanor.” Margaret’s hand rose. One finger pointed at him. “Frances. Tell me about Frances.”
His jaw set. “She has gone to Evermere. To her sister.”
“I am aware of where she has gone. I am asking why.”
“She said she needed time.”
“Time for what?”
“She did not specify.”
Margaret looked at him. The look lasted long enough to become uncomfortable. Then she leaned forward.
“You have mistaken restraint for strength,” she said. “For years. You have told yourself that holding everything at arm’s length is the same as being strong, and it is not. It never has been.”
“Mother—”
“I watched your father do the same thing. Not with discipline, his failing was the opposite, but with honesty. He could never say what he felt plainly, and it cost him. It cost us both.” Her eyes did not waver. “Do not make his mistake with different armor.”
“I have no idea what you are suggesting I—”
“You love her.”
The words dropped into the room like a stone into still water.
“If you want her to come back,” Margaret continued, “you must stop speaking to her as though she is an entry in your ledger. She is not an arrangement, Alexander. She is not a duty, an obligation, or a problem to be managed. She is your wife.”
“I know she is my wife.”
“Then speak to her as one. Speak to her as your beloved. Because that is what she is, whether you have said it or not.”
The denial rose to his lips. The same denial he had given himself for weeks: in the library, in the carriage, in the dark beside her sleeping form. The arrangement was clear. The terms were set. Feeling is the enemy of function.
The words died. They simply stopped. Midway between his chest and his mouth, they lost their strength and fell silent, leaving behind a vast emptiness pressing against his ribs with such force that it made the room tilt.
He loved her entirely. All of her: her patience, her warmth, the way she knelt on marble floors for a child who was not hers, the way she laughed in taverns with strangers, and the way she looked at him across crowded rooms as if he were the only person worth noticing.
Perhaps I have loved her since the garden. Since the masquerade. Since she stood in the moonlight with her mask in her hand and her face turned up to mine, and I thought—there. That one. Her.
He had been too afraid of the word to admit it.