Chapter 9
“It’s raining again.”
Oliver’s voice drifted from the nursery window, flat with the particular disappointment only a child denied outdoor play could muster. Maribel looked up from the watercolour she’d been helping him mix—a muddy brown that was meant to be grass but had gone rather spectacularly wrong.
“So it is, sweetheart.” She set down her brush and crossed to stand beside him.
Beyond the glass, the October sky hung low and grey, releasing sheets of rain that turned the grounds into a watercolour of their own—all blurred edges and running colours, the landscape dissolving beneath autumn’s relentless weeping.
It had been raining for two days now. The third storm in as many weeks, trapping them all indoors whilst the house creaked and settled around them like an old woman complaining of her joints.
“I’m bored,” Oliver announced, pressing his forehead against the cool glass. “Very, very, horribly bored.”
“I can see that.”
“And my soldiers are tired of being soldiers. They want to do something else.”
Maribel bit back a smile. “What would they prefer to be?”
“I don’t know.” He turned from the window, his small face scrunched in thought.
“What if,” Maribel said slowly, an idea forming, “they weren’t soldiers at all today? What if they were knights defending a castle?”
Oliver’s eyes brightened. “A proper castle? With towers and everything?”
“The very best sort. But we’d need to build it first.” She glanced toward the drawing room down the corridor—that vast, pristine space Thaddeus never used, filled with furniture arranged in perfect symmetry. “I think I know just the place.”
Twenty minutes later, the drawing room had been transformed.
Maribel had pulled every cushion from every settee, draped blankets over chairs to form walls, and enlisted Oliver’s help in constructing what could only generously be called architectural chaos.
The boy was in his element, his earlier boredom forgotten as he directed the placement of each element with the seriousness of a general planning a siege.
“That one’s the tower,” he declared, pointing to a particularly tall stack that swayed ominously. “And this is the drawbridge—see? We can pull the chaise back and forth.”
“Brilliant tactical thinking.” Maribel wedged another cushion into place, creating what might have been a battlement or possibly just another source of structural instability.
She’d removed her shoes at some point—they’d been interfering with her ability to climb over furniture—and her hair had come loose from its pins, falling in dark waves around her shoulders.
She looked, she imagined, utterly ridiculous.
She could not remember the last time she’d felt this light.
“We need a flag,” Oliver said suddenly. “Every castle needs a flag.”
“What shall we use?”
He looked around the room with the focused intensity of a child on a mission, then his face lit with inspiration. “Your shawl! The blue one you were wearing earlier!”
Maribel retrieved it from where she’d draped it over a chair, and together they fashioned a banner from her shawl and a fire poker. Oliver planted it atop their precarious tower with a flourish that nearly brought the whole structure tumbling down.
“Perfect,” he breathed, stepping back to admire their work. “Now we just need—”
He stopped mid-sentence, his gaze fixed on something behind her.
Maribel turned.
Thaddeus stood in the doorway.
He’d been out riding that morning—she’d heard the grooms discussing it over breakfast—and had clearly just returned. His dark hair was damp from the rain, his riding coat spotted with water, and he held his gloves in one hand as though he’d frozen mid-gesture of removing them.
His eyes swept the room as though it were a battlefield.
The cushions pulled from their carefully arranged positions.
The blankets draped over Chippendale chairs worth more than most people earned in a year.
The ottoman serving as a drawbridge. Her shawl—a gift from Lady Eleanor, and one of her few remaining possessions of any value—tied to a fire poker and planted atop a tower of silk damask that was currently defying several laws of physics.
And in the centre of it all: herself, barefoot and dishevelled, with Oliver clutching her hand and looking suddenly uncertain.
The silence stretched.
Maribel lifted her chin, preparing for the lecture, the cold dismissal, the reminder that drawing rooms were not meant for play and duchesses were not meant to remove their shoes and build forts from furniture that cost more than a cottage.
“The left flank is exposed.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
Thaddeus moved into the room with measured steps, his gaze fixed on their construction with an expression she could not quite decipher. He stopped before the section Oliver had designated as the western wall—two settee cushions propped against each other at a precarious angle.
“Here.” He picked up a cushion from the floor and wedged it into place, reinforcing the weak point with the same precision he might apply to reviewing estate accounts. “You’ll need more support if you expect to withstand a siege.”
Oliver’s mouth had fallen open. Maribel felt her own doing much the same.
Thaddeus stepped back, surveying his addition with a critical eye. Then he nodded once—curt, businesslike—and turned to leave.
“Your Grace,” Maribel found her voice. “Thank you.”
He paused at the threshold without turning back. For a moment she thought he might say something—acknowledge the absurdity of a duke offering architectural advice on pillow fortresses, perhaps even smile at the ridiculousness of it all.
Instead he simply walked away, his footsteps echoing down the corridor until they faded into silence.
Oliver looked up at her, his brown eyes wide. “He helped us.”
“He did.”
“He didn’t seem angry.”
“No,” Maribel said softly, staring at the reinforced wall that now stood considerably more stable than before. “He didn’t.”
That evening, long after Oliver had been tucked into bed with promises of continuing their siege warfare the following day, Maribel descended to the drawing room to restore order before the servants arrived to do it themselves.
The cushions had already been returned to their proper places.
Every blanket folded and draped precisely where it belonged. The ottoman back in position. Even her shawl had been retrieved from its post and laid carefully over the back of a chair.
But on the side table beside the tallest settee sat something that had not been there before.
A small wooden soldier.
Hand-carved, the paint worn from years of handling. The detail was extraordinary—she could make out the individual buttons on its tiny coat, the plume on its miniature helmet, the serious expression on a face no larger than her thumbnail.
Maribel picked it up with trembling fingers.
This was not one of Oliver’s soldiers. Those were newer, factory-made, purchased by Thaddeus when he’d taken guardianship. This was something older. Something that had been loved.
She thought of the Duke of Blackwood as a boy, small hands clutching this figure, inventing battles and sieges and victories in nurseries long since sealed away.
She thought of the man who had stopped to reinforce their fort, who had sorted cushions in the dark rather than summon servants to do it, who had left this offering where she would find it.
An apology for something he did not want to face.
She closed her fingers around the soldier and carried it upstairs to her chambers, where she placed it on her dressing table where she would see it each morning.
The rain continued through the night and into the next day.
By afternoon, Maribel found herself restless in ways the nursery could not contain.
Oliver was napping—finally, after wearing himself out reorganizing his troops for the fourth time—and the silence of the house pressed against her like a physical weight.
She thought of the east wing.
The locked doors she’d discovered weeks ago now. Thaddeus’s mother’s chambers. Eight years sealed away. Eight years of deliberate avoidance.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Maribel made her way to the housekeeper’s quarters.
Mrs. Allen looked up from her mending with surprise. “Your Grace? Is there something you need?”
“I was hoping to access the linen closet in the east corridor,” Maribel said, the lie sliding out with practiced ease.
She preferred truth in all her dealings, but years of shadow under the Ashcroft name had given her ample opportunity to shade the truth in pursuit of her goals, “Lady Eleanor mentioned that I may consider storing some of my winter things there when the season changes, and I thought I might organize the space in preparation.”
It was plausible enough. Mrs. Allen’s expression cleared, and she rose to fetch her ring of keys. “Of course, Your Grace. Though I must warn you, that wing hasn’t been properly aired in some time. It may be rather close.”
“I shall manage.”
The key was smaller than she’d expected—delicate, almost decorative, the sort that might open a jewelry box rather than a door. Mrs. Allen pressed it into her palm with hands that trembled slightly.
“The second door on the right is the linen closet,” she said. “The others...” She trailed off, her weathered face troubled. “Best leave the others be, Your Grace.”
“Of course,” Maribel lied again.
The east wing corridor stretched before her, narrower than those in the main house, its faded blue wallpaper ghostly in the grey afternoon light. Maribel’s footsteps sounded too loud against the worn carpet, each one an announcement of her transgression.
Transgression. As though entering unused rooms in her own house constituted a crime.
But it felt like one nonetheless. Felt like crossing a threshold she had no right to breach, into territory Thaddeus had marked as forbidden not through words but through eight years of absolute avoidance.