Chapter 16
“You are staring at the toast as though it has offended you.”
Mary set down her knife. She had been spreading butter on the same piece of bread for the better part of a minute, and the result was less breakfast and more construction project.
Across the table, Evander sat with a cup of coffee and the morning paper, and the fact that he appeared entirely composed made the flutter in Mary’s stomach worse.
She had not seen him since the night she caught him telling Tommy a fairytale.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“About toast?”
“About the household accounts.”
Evander folded the paper and set it beside his plate. His sleeves were rolled to the forearms, the bandage on his left arm visible beneath the cuff, and Mary forced her gaze to stay on his face rather than trace the lines of muscle she had memorized in the kitchen ten nights ago.
“We will be attending the Atherton ball next week,” he said.
Mary blinked. “A ball.”
“Yes. Lord and Lady Atherton hold one every summer. It will be our first public appearance as a married couple, and the ton will be watching.” He took a measured sip of coffee.
“I have been absent from society since the wedding. It is time to show London that the Duke and Duchess of Blackholm are not hiding from the scandal.”
“I was not aware we were hiding.”
“We are not. Which is precisely the impression I intend to reinforce.” He studied her across the table. “I will send for Madame Laurent this afternoon. She is the best modiste in London and can produce a gown on short notice.”
“I have dresses, Evander. Trunks of them. My father sent them from Langham House last week.”
“You will have a new one.” His tone left no room for negotiation. “You will be the Duchess of Blackholm at a public event for the first time. Every woman in that ballroom will be measuring you against the scandal, and I intend for you to give them nothing to find fault with.”
Mary set the butter knife down and met his eyes. “Is this about appearances, or about me?”
Something crossed his face, quick and unguarded. “It is about both. You deserve a gown that was chosen for you, not repurposed from a season before our marriage began.”
The words landed softer than Mary expected. She searched for the cold pragmatism she had come to associate with his decisions and found consideration underneath. The kind of man offered when he could not yet bring himself to offer more.
“Very well,” she said. “Send for your modiste.”
Evander nodded, finished his coffee, and rose from the table. He paused at the door.
“The color should suit you,” he said. “Not the family. You.”
He left before she could respond.
“Stand straight, Your Grace. Arms out. Yes, like that.”
Madame Laurent circled Mary with a measuring tape draped around her neck and a mouthful of pins.
She was a small, sharp-eyed Frenchwoman who moved with the efficiency of a general conducting maneuvers, and she had arrived with two assistants, a trunk of fabric, and the absolute certainty that she could produce a masterpiece in less than a week.
“His Grace selected these two.” She held up the sapphire and the silver, one in each hand. “Both would serve. The sapphire is bolder. The silver is more refined.”
Mary touched the sapphire silk. The fabric was heavier than she expected, cool and liquid under her fingers. “He chose these?”
“From the six I sent this morning.” Madame Laurent pinned a length of the sapphire against Mary’s shoulder and stepped back, tilting her head.
“He has a good eye, your husband. The sapphire brings out the warmth in your complexion. The silver would make you look like a painting. Both are correct.” She met Mary’s eyes in the mirror.
“Which would you prefer? To be warm, or to be admired?”
Mary looked at herself in the glass. The sapphire silk caught the light and held it, rich and alive against her skin. Beside her, Hattie hovered with a pincushion, her eyes wide at the quality of the fabric.
“Warm,” Mary said.
Madame Laurent smiled. “The sapphire, then. An excellent choice. His Grace will approve.”
“Is that important?” Mary asked. “His approval?”
Madame Laurent looked at her over the top of her spectacles.
“A woman dresses for herself, Your Grace. But there is nothing wrong with enjoying the effect.” She snapped her fingers at her assistants.
“The sapphire. Full skirt. We will do a fitted bodice with the natural waist, and the neckline will be square. Not too deep. Elegant. Your collarbones will do the rest.”
The fitting took an hour. Madame Laurent measured and pinned and draped, her assistants scribbling notes, and Hattie fetched tea and watched from the corner with barely concealed excitement.
“You will be the talk of the ball, Your Grace,” Hattie said, bringing over a fresh cup. “I heard Mrs. Cahill say that His Grace hasn’t attended a society event in over a year.”
“Longer, by my count,” Madame Laurent said through a mouthful of pins.
She removed them one by one and tucked them into her cuff.
“His Grace is not a man who tolerates ballrooms willingly. If he is choosing to attend, he has his reasons. And if he is commissioning a gown from me on a day’s notice, the reason is standing in my silk. ”
Mary felt the color rise in her cheeks. She looked at herself in the glass and saw the sapphire fabric draped across her shoulders, the bodice pinned to suggest the shape Madame Laurent would build overnight.
For the first time since her wedding, she allowed herself to feel like something other than a solution to someone else’s problem.
The woman in the glass wore sapphire silk and stood with her chin lifted, and she looked like a duchess because she had chosen to, not because a man had arranged it.
The afternoon passed. Dinner was the most civil meal they had shared since the wedding. Evander asked about the fitting, and Mary told him she had chosen the sapphire.
“The sapphire.” He set down his wine glass. Something passed across his face, brief and quickly mastered. “That was the right choice.”
“Madame Laurent said you would approve.”
“Did she?”
“She also said that a man who commissions a gown on a day’s notice has his reasons.” Mary held his gaze across the table. “What are your reasons, Evander?”
He picked up his glass again. “I told you. The ton will be watching.”
“And that is the only reason.”
“That is the only reason I intend to discuss at dinner.” But the corner of his mouth moved, just slightly, and Mary filed the image away beside the smile she had caught in the nursery and the way his voice had softened when he told her the color should suit her, not the family.
They finished the meal in something that felt, for the first time, almost like companionship. Not warmth, not yet. But the absence of frost.
After dinner, Mary went upstairs to check on Tommy. Mrs. Bridwell reported a good day, and Tommy slept through Mary’s visit, his fists curled above his head in the pose she had come to think of as surrender. She kissed his forehead and retired to her room.
She did not sleep.
At half past ten, she heard it.
Evander’s footsteps in the corridor, measured and purposeful. The creak of the staircase. The low murmur of Harding’s voice. The front door is opening and closing.
Mary sat up in bed. The house settled into its post-departure silence, and she stared at the ceiling and listened to her own breathing.
Tommy was asleep. Mrs. Bridwell’s room was right next door. He would not wake for hours, and if he did, the nursemaid would hear him before his first cry finished.
But she had never left him at night. The thought of the staircase, the stables, the dark road pulled at her, and the thought of Tommy’s crib, warm and close, pulled back.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed.
Where was he going? The same place he went every night?
To the same person? She thought of the knife wound he had blamed on a fall, the lie so transparent it insulted them both.
She thought of the distance, the locked study, the empty side of her bed.
If her husband was keeping a mistress, Mary wanted to see it with her own eyes, because imagining it was destroying her more slowly than the truth ever could.
Mary dressed in the dark. She pulled on her riding habit, twisted her hair into a knot, and slipped down the servants’ staircase to the back entrance.
The night was cool, the sky overcast. The stables were unattended at this hour, but Mary had been riding since she was seven, and she saddled a mare in the dark.
She led the mare through the back gate, mounted, and followed the distant rattle of Evander’s carriage down the Mayfair streets and into the night.