Chapter 12
“How is His Grace this morning, Mrs. Cahill?”
The question came out steadier than Mary felt. She stood in the morning room with a cup of tea growing cold in her hands, and the housekeeper paused in the doorway with an armful of fresh linens.
“The physician has been and gone, Your Grace. Dr. Kreutzer stitched the wound and reports that His Grace is in good health. No sign of infection.” Mrs. Cahill shifted the linens to her other arm. “His Grace is in his study and has asked not to be disturbed.”
Of course he had. Mary took a sip of cold tea and set the cup down. “Thank you.”
Mrs. Cahill turned to leave, and Mary spoke before she could stop herself.
“Mrs. Cahill.”
“Your Grace?”
Mary ran her finger along the rim of the cup.
The question had been sitting in her chest since the kitchen, since the brandy bottle, since Evander had spoken about his father with the flat, rehearsed distance of a man reciting something he had long since stopped feeling. Or convinced himself he had.
“His Grace mentioned his father last night,” Mary said. “The late duke. And his fondness for brandy.” She met the housekeeper’s eyes. “I would like to understand this family, Mrs. Cahill. I am part of it now, whether His Grace chooses to include me or not.”
Mrs. Cahill set the linens on the hall table. She folded her hands and stood very still for a long moment before stepping into the morning room and pulling the door half-shut behind her.
“It is not my place to say much, Your Grace. His Grace is a private man, and his reasons are his own.” She paused, choosing her words the way one might choose footing on uncertain ground.
“But I will say that this house was not always as you find it. When the late Duchess was alive, it was a different place. A warmer place. But when she passed, the warmth went with her.”
“The drinking began after she died?”
Mrs. Cahill’s hands tightened against each other.
“I will only say that the boys were young when they lost their mother, and the years that followed were not easy ones for either of them.” Her voice dropped.
“His Grace grew up faster than any child should have to. That much is plain to anyone with eyes.”
She reached for the linens, and Mary sensed the door closing. She pressed forward with the question that mattered more.
“And Lord Richard? What can you tell me about him?”
Mrs. Cahill’s expression shifted. Something fond crept into it, tempered by sadness.
“Lord Richard was a sweet boy, open in the way His Grace never was. He laughed easily, made friends easily, felt everything deeply.” She tucked the linens under her arm.
“His Grace shielded him as best he could. Perhaps too well, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.
Lord Richard never quite learned to carry his own weight. I do not say that unkindly.”
“Do you think he loved my sister?”
Mrs. Cahill met her eyes. “I’m afraid I do not know the answer to that, Your Grace.” She curtsied. “I have said more than I should. If you wish to know more, His Grace is the one to ask. When he is ready.”
The housekeeper left, and Mary sat alone in the morning room with her cold tea and the edges of a story she could sense but not yet see. Mrs. Cahill had drawn the curtain back an inch, enough to reveal the shape of something large and painful behind it, then pulled it shut again.
Evander had grown up fast. The drinking had been bad. Richard had been shielded, but not saved. These were outlines, not answers, and the full picture belonged to a man who guarded his past the way he guarded everything else.
But in the kitchen last night, with blood on his shirt and brandy on his breath, Evander had let something slip.
The kiss…
His hand in her hair, his mouth finding hers, the hunger in it that had nothing to do with control and everything to do with a man reaching for something he had trained himself to refuse.
And then, the apology was followed by his retreat.
Mary pressed her palms flat against the table and stood.
Tommy would be awake by now. Tommy needed her, and Tommy was the one thing in this house she understood.
Mary rinsed the cup in the morning room basin and set the cup on the tray. She had been sitting with Mrs. Cahill’s words for the better part of an hour. The corridor outside Evander’s study was quiet.
Mary paused on her way to the staircase, her hand resting against the wallpaper, and listened.
Through the heavy oak door, she could hear the scratch of a pen and the occasional rustle of paper being turned.
Working. Of course he’s working.
The estate ledgers, the Bow Street correspondence, and whatever other crises filled his desk would keep him sealed inside that room until dinner, and dinner would be another exercise in politeness so careful it bruised.
She could knock. She could open the door and ask about his arm, ask if the stitches held, ask if Dr. Kreutzer had been as dry and cutting as his name suggested.
She could stand in the doorway and make him look at her, and then they would both have to acknowledge what had happened in the kitchen.
Yet… the acknowledgment would either open something or close it, and Mary was not sure which possibility frightened her more.
Her hand hovered near the door. Inside, a drawer opened and shut. The pen resumed.
Mary lowered her hand and climbed the stairs.
Mrs. Bridwell met her on the landing with Tommy draped across her shoulder, his face red and unhappy, his fists working the air. “He’s been fussy all afternoon, Your Grace. I think he’s overtired but won’t give in.”
“Stubborn.” Mary took Tommy from the nursemaid’s arms and settled him against her chest. “He gets that from his uncle.”
Mrs. Bridwell smiled. “I was going to say he gets it from you, Your Grace.”
“Go and eat, Mrs. Bridwell. I have him.”
The nursemaid curtsied and disappeared down the servants’ stair. Mary stood on the landing with a fussy baby and the sound of a pen scratching somewhere below her feet, and she began to walk.
Walking settled him faster than rocking in the chair.
She had discovered this two days ago when Tommy’s cries had refused to yield to any of the usual methods, and Mary had picked him up and simply started moving.
Down the corridor, around the landing, past the gallery of portraits where Evander’s ancestors stared down from gilt frames with expressions ranging from stern to disapproving.
Tommy had quieted by the time they reached the end of the hall, and Mary had added walking to her growing catalog of things that worked.
She descended the staircase and turned toward the back of the house, following the servants’ corridor that ran parallel to the kitchens. The floor here was bare stone instead of carpet, and her slippers made soft, rhythmic sounds that blended with Tommy’s breathing.
His fist gripped the fabric at her collar, and his cheek pressed warm against her neck, and his weight settled into the crook of her arm with the trust of a child who did not yet know enough to doubt.
Voices drifted through the half-open kitchen door. Two of the younger maids, their words punctuated by bursts of laughter they were trying and failing to suppress.
“He brought the flour in himself this time. Carried the whole sack on one shoulder.”
“You noticed his shoulder, did you?”
“I noticed his arms, Lucy. A girl would have to be dead not to.”
More laughter, bright and conspiratorial, the sound of two young women savoring a harmless thrill over a handsome delivery boy.
Mary smiled. She had been that age once, whispering with Charlotte in their shared bedroom about which of the footmen had the nicest calves, dissolving into giggles that made their governess bang on the wall.
The smile faded as the memory turned, the way memories did lately, and led her somewhere she had not permitted it to go.
Arms. Shoulders. The firelight moving across bare skin.
Evander’s chest beneath her palms. The ridge of muscle along his stomach.
The scar beneath his collarbone that she had wanted to ask about and hadn’t.
His skin had been warm, impossibly warm, and when the muscles of his arm had contracted beneath her fingers as she cleaned the wound, she had felt the flex of it all the way down to her wrists.
And then the kiss. His hand in her hair, tilting her face up to meet his.
The hunger in it, the urgency, the sound he had made against her mouth that had sent heat spilling through her body like wine tipped from a glass.
Her own hands pressing flat against his bare chest instead of pushing him away, pulling him closer, wanting more of the warmth and the weight and the taste of brandy on his tongue.
A flush crept up the back of Mary’s neck. She adjusted Tommy against her shoulder and kept walking.
The corridor was cool, and the stone floor was solid beneath her feet, and she focused on these things because the alternative was standing in a hallway with a sleeping baby on her chest, flushed and breathless over a man who had apologized for kissing her.
Tommy sighed against her neck. Mary pressed her lips to the top of his head and breathed in the smell of clean linen and lavender soap.
“It is just you and me this afternoon,” she murmured. “Your uncle is hiding in his study, and I am walking in circles with a head full of nonsense.”
Tommy’s grip tightened on her collar. Mary turned at the end of the corridor and started back toward the staircase.
The nonsense did not leave. It followed her up the stairs, down the east corridor, and into the nursery, where she settled Tommy in his crib and covered him with the wool blanket Mrs. Bridwell kept folded at the foot.
Tommy’s eyes fluttered closed, his fingers uncurling one by one as sleep took hold.
Mary sank into the rocking chair and pressed her hands against her cheeks. They were still warm.
She was being foolish. One kiss in a dark kitchen, born out of exhaustion and adrenaline and the strange intimacy of cleaning another person’s blood from your hands, did not constitute a romance.
Evander had made that clear enough.
And yet…
Yet his hand had shaken when he reached for his coat.
She had seen it. A tremor in his fingers, brief and quickly mastered, but real.
A man who regretted a kiss did not tremble afterward.
A man who regretted a kiss did not flee breakfast the next morning because he could not sit across from the woman he had kissed without his composure cracking.
Evander was not indifferent to her. The kiss had proved that much.
Whatever walls he built, whatever distance he maintained, his body had told a different story in that kitchen, and Mary’s body had answered it, and no amount of cold tea and sensible thinking was going to undo what both of them now knew.
The question was what to do with the knowing.
Mary rocked the chair and watched Tommy sleep and tried to think about anything other than the way Evander’s mouth had felt against her jaw, the scrape of stubble, the heat of his breath, the low sound in his throat that she could still feel vibrating somewhere behind her ribs.
She did not succeed.
But Tommy slept, and the nursery was quiet, and for now, that was enough to keep her steady.
The rest, whatever it became, would have to wait for a man who had not yet learned that walls built to keep people out had a habit of keeping a person locked in.