Chapter 5
“Will that be all, Your Grace?”
Evander did not look up from the letter he was drafting.
The Bow Street runner’s first report had arrived that afternoon, and it contained nothing. No sightings of Richard in the northern counties. No record of a young couple matching their descriptions at any coaching inn between London and York. Four months of silence, and the silence was winning.
“Leave the tray,” he said.
Mrs. Cahill set the dinner tray on the side table. The smell of roasted beef and potatoes reached him, and his stomach tightened with a hunger he had been ignoring since noon. He signed the letter, set it aside, and reached for the next one.
Mrs. Cahill did not leave.
Evander raised his eyes. The housekeeper stood with her hands clasped, her expression arranged into the careful neutrality that meant she had something to say and was deciding how to say it.
“What is it?”
“The Duchess, Your Grace.”
Evander set down his pen. “What about her?”
“She has not eaten today.”
He frowned. “At all?”
“Her Grace has been with Mrs. Bridwell and Lord Thomas since this morning. She refused the breakfast tray. She took no luncheon. She declined tea. I sent Hattie up an hour ago with a plate, and Her Grace asked her to leave it, but when Hattie returned, the food had not been touched.” Mrs. Cahill paused.
“She has been in the nursery all day, Your Grace. She will not leave the child.”
Evander leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked.
He looked at the lamp burning on his desk and the stack of correspondence that would keep him in this room until midnight, and he thought about the woman upstairs who had spent every hour as his wife sitting beside a crib that was not hers, tending a baby that was not hers.
Their marriage was a necessity. That was what he had told her. No children. No future beyond the arrangement. And then the implication, unspoken but clear enough, that she had helped Charlotte disappear.
Evander rubbed his thumb across the bridge of his nose and exhaled.
None of it was wrong. The marriage was born of scandal, not affection. Children had never been part of his plan. And Charlotte’s disappearance had left questions that someone in the Gillies family would have to answer.
But the look on Mary’s face when he said no. That single word, and the way her composure had held for exactly two seconds before something behind her eyes shattered. She had turned away fast enough, but not fast enough.
He had seen it.
Evander pulled the dinner tray toward him and lifted the cover. The beef was still warm. He cut a piece and ate without tasting it.
His father had been a man who destroyed things without noticing. The decanter, the slurred words, the swing that never landed. His father had stumbled through rooms and left wreckage in his wake and woken the next morning with no memory of what he had broken.
Evander had spent his life building walls against that kind of carelessness. Every word measured. Every decision calculated. Control in all things, because the alternative was his father on the study floor with his mouth slack and his son holding him upright.
He was not his father. He did not raise his voice. He did not drink or lose control.
But a man did not need a bottle to do damage. A man could wound with precision and sobriety and never raise his hand at all.
Evander set down his fork.
“Take food to the Duchess now,” he said. “Something light. Soup, bread, whatever she’ll accept. Ensure she eats.”
“And if she refuses again, Your Grace?”
“Alert me.” His voice was steady. “I will not have my duchess fainting from hunger under this roof.”
Mrs. Cahill curtsied and withdrew. The door closed, and the study was quiet again.
Evander stared at the tray in front of him. The beef had gone cold. He pushed it aside and pulled the next letter from the stack, a report from his solicitor regarding the Brightshaw estate’s quarterly accounts.
The tenants in Dorset were three months behind on their rents. The roof of the east wing of the country house needed replacing. The cost of the Bow Street Runners was mounting.
He read the figures. He made his calculations. He wrote his replies in a hand that did not waver.
An hour passed. Mrs. Cahill did not return, which meant Mary had eaten, which meant there was no reason for the tension in his shoulders to ease the way it did when he realized he would not be summoned upstairs.
He signed the last letter and set it on the pile for the morning post. The lamp had burned low. The house was quiet.
Evander rose and crossed to the window. The garden lay in darkness beyond the glass, shapeless and still. His reflection stared back at him, and for a moment, in the dim lamplight, with the shadows carving hollows beneath his cheekbones, he saw his father’s face.
He turned from the window.
On his desk, beside the stack of correspondence, sat Richard’s handkerchief. He had taken to keeping it there, though he could not have said why. A reminder, perhaps. Of what had been lost. Of what was owed.
He picked it up. The linen was soft from years of use, the embroidered R.B.
fading at the corner. Richard had carried this handkerchief since he was sixteen.
Evander had given it to him on his birthday, a small, forgettable gift that Richard had kept for reasons Evander never asked about and Richard never explained.
Now it sat on a duke’s desk in a house that held a baby and a bride and a silence so thick it pressed against the walls.
Evander folded the handkerchief and placed it back beside the lamp. He extinguished the flame and left the study. His footsteps sounded loud in the darkened house as he climbed the staircase.
He passed the nursery. The door was ajar. Inside, a single candle burned, and Mrs. Bridwell sat in the rocking chair, her chin on her chest, dozing. Tommy slept in the crib. The room smelled of milk and beeswax.
Mary was not there. She had gone to her own rooms, then. She had eaten. She had left the baby to the nursemaid and retired, as any reasonable woman would after a day spent doing the work Evander should have shared.
The corridor stretched ahead of him, dark and quiet. Evander walked past the nursery, past Mary’s chambers, and into his own room. The door clicked shut behind him.
The darkness should have been a relief. Instead, it was filled with things he refused to name. Mary asleep in the armchair with her fingers reaching toward the crib. The way she had whispered “he has Charlotte’s eyes” the first time she held Tommy.
A woman who had not eaten all day because leaving that child’s side was something she could not bring herself to do.
Evander sat on the edge of the bed, pressed his palms against his knees, and waited for his mind to empty.
It did not.