Chapter 11
“Six o’clock, Your Grace?”
The cook stood in the kitchen doorway with a lamp in one hand and a look on her face that suggested she was reconsidering her employment.
Evander had never taken breakfast before half past seven, and the kitchen staff had clearly not expected to find the Duke of Blackholm sitting at the dining table in the gray half-light of dawn, dressed and staring at a plate of toast he had no appetite for.
“Coffee,” Evander said. “And eggs, if it is not too much trouble.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” The cook retreated, and Evander heard her muttering to the scullery maid about early risers and the strange habits of newlyweds.
The bandage beneath his shirt pulled with every movement. Mary’s handiwork. Clean linen wound tight around his triceps, the knot tucked flat against the underside of his arm where the fabric of his coat would hide it.
The cut throbbed in time with his pulse, a low, persistent reminder of Southwark, the alley, and the knife, but the bleeding had stopped overnight, and the wound felt stable enough to survive the morning.
The kitchen was not the problem. The wound was not the problem.
The problem was the woman sleeping two floors above him, and that he had kissed her in this very room six hours ago, and that his mouth still remembered every second of it.
Evander ate his eggs without tasting them, drank his coffee in four long swallows, and was reaching for his coat when footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Light. Unhurried. Mary’s step, which he had learned to recognize despite every effort not to.
She appeared in the dining room doorway.
Her hair was pinned, her dress fresh, and her face composed in the way it had been composed for the past ten days, polished and pleasant and giving nothing away.
Her gaze moved from his face to his left arm, where the sleeve of his coat covered the bandage, and back to his face.
“Good morning,” she said.
Evander stood. The chair scraped. “Good morning.” The words came out stiffer than he intended, clipped at the edges, and he cleared his throat. “I trust you slept well.”
“I did.” Mary crossed to the sideboard and lifted the lid of the serving dish. Her back was to him. “You are up early.”
“Business.” Evander collected his coffee cup and set it on the tray for the kitchen. “I have correspondence that needs attention before the morning post.”
Mary turned. Her eyes found his, and for a moment, the composure slipped, just enough for him to see what lay behind it. A question she was choosing not to ask. A bruise she was choosing not to show.
“Of course,” she said. “Enjoy your morning.”
“And you, yours.” Evander inclined his head, walked past her, and pulled the dining room door shut behind him.
The corridor stretched ahead, dim and empty, and he made it to his study before the tension left his shoulders.
The study door closed. Evander sank into the chair behind his desk and pressed his right palm flat against the surface.
His left arm throbbed. His chest was worse.
The kiss.
Mary’s mouth against his. Her hands on his bare skin.
The sound she had made when his lips found her jaw, soft and involuntary, as though the breath had been pulled from her lungs by something neither of them controlled.
The way her fingers had curled against his chest, not pushing him away but pulling him closer, and the heat of her body against his, and the taste of her, and the moment the kettle screamed and shattered whatever madness had taken hold of him.
I should not have done that.
Four words. Evander had watched the effect of them land on Mary’s face in the firelight, watched the brightness drain from her eyes and the composure slide back into place like a visor being lowered, and he had picked up his coat and thanked her for the bandage and walked away.
Thanked her. As though she had mended a torn hem.
Evander pulled the stack of correspondence toward him and opened the first letter.
The solicitor’s update on the Brightshaw estate.
Rent figures. Maintenance costs. Perfectly legible numbers arranged in perfectly logical columns, and not one of them registered because his mind kept circling back to the kitchen, the candlelight, and the way Mary had said his name.
The pen sat untouched beside the inkwell.
Evander stared at the solicitor’s figures and forced himself to read them.
The Dorset tenants. The east wing roof. Richard’s gambling debts, which the Bow Street runner had traced to three separate establishments, the boxing ring in Southwark among them.
Madame Fontaine’s was next on the list. Another thread to pull, another corner of his brother’s wreckage to sort through.
Richard. That was where his attention belonged. Not on the memory of his wife’s mouth, or the look in her eyes telling him he did not have to lie to her.
A knock at the study door pulled him back.
“Dr. Kreutzer has arrived, Your Grace,” Harding announced.
“You will hold still, please.”
Dr. Kreutzer was a compact, silver-haired man with wire spectacles and the brisk efficiency of someone who had stitched soldiers together on battlefields and found civilian patients charmingly fragile by comparison.
Evander sat in the leather chair beside the study window with his shirt removed and his left arm extended while the physician examined Mary’s bandage.
“Hmm.” Kreutzer unwound the linen with careful fingers and studied the cut beneath. “It is clean and well-dressed. Pressure applied in exactly the right place.” He glanced over his spectacles at Evander. “Your own work?”
“My wife’s.”
“Then your wife has steadier hands than several surgeons I have trained with.” Kreutzer laid out his instruments on a cloth beside the chair: needle, silk thread, a small bottle of tincture. “The wound itself is shallow but long. There is no damage to the deeper tissue. You were fortunate.”
“I am aware.”
“How did it happen?”
“A fall.”
Kreutzer threaded the needle without looking up. “A fall. Of course. I see many knife wounds from falls. Very common in Mayfair. The cobblestones are especially sharp this time of year.”
Evander said nothing. Kreutzer smiled and pinched the edges of the wound together.
“This will sting.”
It did more than sting. The needle pierced the skin at the edge of the cut, and Evander gripped the arm of the chair with his right hand and kept his breathing even while Kreutzer drew the thread through.
The physician worked with a speed and precision that came from decades of practice, each stitch placed with the same measured interval, the thread pulled taut but not tight.
“Your wife’s binding saved you considerable blood loss,” Kreutzer said between stitches.
“The pad was placed directly over the deepest section of the wound, and the wrapping maintained even pressure throughout. Most people panic and wrap too loosely, or they tourniquet the limb and cause worse problems.” Another stitch. “She knew what she was doing.”
“She is a capable woman.”
“Evidently.” Kreutzer tied off the final stitch and cut the thread.
“Twelve stitches. Keep it clean and dry. I will leave a salve for the inflammation. Change the dressing each morning, and send for me if you see any redness spreading beyond the edges of the wound.” He began repacking his bag. “And Your Grace?”
“Yes.”
“Next time you fall, try to land on something other than a blade.”
Evander pulled his shirt over his head and buttoned his cuffs while Kreutzer left the salve and a roll of fresh linen on the desk.
The physician bowed and departed. The study door clicked shut, and Evander was alone with twelve stitches, a stack of unanswered letters, and the knowledge that Mary had dressed his wound better than a trained surgeon would have expected.
A knock. Harding, with a folded note on a silver tray.
“From Her Grace, Your Grace.”
Evander took the note. Mary’s handwriting was neat and unhurried, the letters formed with the same steadiness she brought to everything.
The coal merchant’s invoice for the quarter was delivered this morning.
The amount exceeds last quarter’s by nearly forty percent.
I reviewed the household accounts with Mrs. Cahill and found that the previous arrangement was negotiated three years ago at a rate that is well above the current market.
I have written to Fenton & Marsh on Cheapside, who supply several houses on this street at a better rate, and requested a quote.
I will inform you when it arrives. I have also arranged for a second rocking chair to be delivered to the nursery.
Mrs. Bridwell and I cannot both sit during the evening feedings, and she is too polite to say so.
M.
No mention of the kitchen. No mention of the kiss. No request for permission. She had found a problem, identified a solution, and informed him as a matter of courtesy. The coal merchant, the competing supplier, the rocking chair. Three decisions, all sensible, all made without requiring his input.
“Shall I convey a reply, Your Grace?”
Evander folded the note and set it beside the salve on his desk. “Tell Her Grace that her arrangements are entirely satisfactory.”
Harding bowed and withdrew. Evander looked at the note, folded on his desk, the single M. hidden inside. He opened his next letter and buried the note under the correspondence, where it could stop distracting him.
It did not stop distracting him.
A capable woman. That was what he had called her, and it was true, and it was also the most inadequate description of Mary that anyone had ever spoken aloud.
She was not merely capable. She was the kind of person who arrived in a stranger’s parlor in a wedding dress and demanded to see a baby.
She was the woman who calmed a screaming infant with nothing but the curve of her arm and a smile.
She managed his household without complaint, cared for his nephew without recognition, and cleaned a knife wound at three in the morning without flinching.
And Evander had kissed her, felt the whole careful architecture of his self-control buckle beneath the weight of it, and then apologized as though the kiss were an error in bookkeeping.
The guilt sat heavy in his stomach. Not because the kiss had been wrong.
Because it had been right. Because Mary’s mouth had fit against his with a certainty that terrified him, and the sound she made when his lips moved to her jaw had opened a door inside his chest that he had spent fourteen years nailing shut.
If he kissed her again, he would not stop. If he did not stop, there would be consequences. A child. A family. The kind of life that unmade men when it was lost.
His father’s love for his mother had been a beautiful thing, by all accounts. The old duke had worshipped his wife. And when she died, that worship had curdled into grief, and the grief had fermented into drink, and the drink had poisoned everything it touched for twelve years until it killed him.
Evander would not worship. Evander would not grieve. Evander would keep the walls standing, find his brother, resolve the scandal, and ensure that Mary and Tommy were provided for in every material way that mattered.
Material ways. As though linen and ledgers could replace what he had felt in that kitchen, with her hands on his skin and her breath mingling with his and the whole world narrowing to the space between their bodies.
Evander picked up his pen, opened the next letter, and began to write. His left arm ached. The stitches pulled with every movement. Twelve neat sutures holding the wound together, the same way discipline and routine held everything else together. As long as the stitches held, the wound would heal.
As long as the walls held, the rest would follow.
Evander worked through the morning, the afternoon, and into the evening. He did not leave his study, and he did not go upstairs, and when Harding knocked to announce dinner, Evander told him to send his apologies to the Duchess and have a tray brought to the study instead.
Avoiding her was cowardice. Evander knew that. Cowardice was also the only strategy he had left.