Chapter 9 #3
She watched Mrs. Allen lead him away, his small shoulders hunched, mud trailing across the pristine floors. Then she turned to face her husband.
“Your study, then.”
They walked in silence through corridors that seemed to have grown longer, colder. Every footstep echoed. Every breath felt too loud.
Thaddeus held the study door for her with rigid courtesy, then closed it behind them with a click that sounded horribly final.
“Forty-five minutes.”
Maribel turned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Forty-five minutes that child was out of sight. Forty-five minutes unsupervised, playing with a servant’s son, near a pond deep enough to drown in.
” His hands were shaking—she could see them trembling before he clasped them behind his back.
“Forty-five minutes during which anything might have happened.”
“Nothing happened. He was with Thomas—”
“A five-year-old boy who knows as little of proper supervision as Oliver himself.” Thaddeus’s voice rose despite his obvious efforts to control it.
“Do you have any notion of the dangers? The pond. The grounds. The—” He stopped, his throat working.
“What if he had fallen? What if something had happened and no one was there to—”
He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t voice whatever nightmare was playing behind his eyes.
Maribel felt her anger drain away, replaced by something uncomfortably close to understanding.
“He was safe,” she said quietly. “I was watching. And he needed—”
“What he needs is discipline. Structure. Not to be encouraged in unsuitable attachments and reckless behaviour.”
“He’s four years old. He caught a frog. That’s not reckless—it’s normal.”
“There is nothing normal about being raised in a duke’s household.” The words came out harsh, scraped raw. “He must learn the difference between what is appropriate and what is—”
“What is what? Joyful? Spontaneous? Everything you’ve spent your life avoiding?”
The accusation hung between them.
Thaddeus went very still. “You overstep.”
“Do I? Because from where I stand, you’re punishing that child for the crime of being happy. For forgetting, just for an hour, that his parents are dead and his life is governed by a man who sees disorder in every laugh and threat in every friendship.”
“I am trying to protect him.”
“From what? From Thomas? From frogs? From having a childhood?”
“From losing someone else he loves!” The words exploded from him, raw and terrible. “From forming attachments that will only hurt him when they’re torn away. From—” He stopped himself, but too late.
The truth sat between them now, undeniable.
Maribel drew a breath. When she spoke, her voice had gentled despite everything. “He wasn’t doing anything wrong, Thaddeus. He was being a child. And you...” She paused, choosing her words with care. “You cannot protect him from loss by teaching him never to love anything at all.”
“You do not understand.”
“Then help me understand. Tell me what you’re so afraid of.”
But the walls had already gone back up. She watched it happen—saw the shutters fall across his eyes, saw his shoulders square, saw the Duke of Blackwood reassemble himself piece by careful piece.
“See that it does not happen again,” he said, his voice empty of all inflection. “Oliver is not to leave the house without my express permission. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly.”
She turned to leave, but his voice stopped her at the door.
“The east wing.”
Her hand froze on the handle.
“I know you’ve been there. Mrs. Allen informed me you requested keys to the linen closet.” A pause. “I know you entered the wing.”
Maribel’s heart hammered against her ribs. She turned slowly.
Thaddeus stood before his desk, his face carefully blank. But his hands—his hands were pressed flat against the wood, fingers spread as though bracing against something.
“I only…” She broke off, searching her mind for an excuse, but there was none. She lifted her chin, attempting to show none of the guilt she felt. “I thought—”
“You thought what? That opening sealed chambers and disturbing eight years of deliberate closure would somehow—” He stopped. Drew a breath. “You had no right.”
“I am the Duchess of Blackwood. Those rooms are as much mine as—”
“Those rooms are nothing to do with you.”
True as it was, there was no denying that the words hurt. She was the duchess—yet only in name. His tone, his words, all of it made it rather clear that she was no more than a guest in this manor.
“Very well,” she said quietly. “I shall not trouble them again.”
She left before he could respond, left him standing alone in his study with his brandy and his silence and all the ghosts he refused to lay to rest.
That night, Oliver cried.
Maribel heard him from her chambers—those soft, muffled sobs that spoke of a child trying very hard not to be heard. She was in the corridor before conscious thought could intervene, her wrapper hastily donned, her feet bare against cold floorboards.
The nursery door stood open.
Oliver sat up in bed, his face blotchy with tears, his wooden soldiers clutched against his chest. When he saw her, a fresh wave of weeping overtook him.
“Hush, sweetheart.” She gathered him into her arms, rocking gently. “Hush now. It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right.” His voice came out thick and miserable. “I made him angry again. I always make him angry.”
“You did not—”
“I did. And now he’ll send me away like—like—” A sob choked off whatever he’d been about to say.
Maribel’s chest constricted. “Oliver. Look at me.”
He raised his tear-streaked face.
“His Grace is not going to send you away. Do you understand? You live here. This is your home.”
“But if I’m bad—”
“You are not bad. You caught a frog with a friend. There is nothing bad about that.”
“Then why was he so angry?”
Because he’s terrified, Maribel thought. Because he has sealed away every person he’s ever loved and convinced himself that distance equals safety. Because he watched his mother die and his friend die and now he’s convinced that caring for you means risking the same unbearable loss.
But she could not say any of that to a four-year-old child.
“Sometimes,” she said instead, “grown-ups worry too much. They see danger where there isn’t any because they care so much it frightens them.”
“Does he care about me?”
The question landed like a blow.
“Yes,” Maribel said firmly. “Yes, sweetheart. He cares for you very much. He simply... doesn’t know how to show it.”
Oliver considered this with the gravity of extreme youth. Then: “Do you think if I was very, very good, he might let me see Thomas again?”
Maribel closed her eyes against the ache. “I think,” she said carefully, “that we shall have to wait and see.”
She stayed with him until he fell asleep, his breathing evening out into the rhythms of exhausted childhood. Then she slipped from the nursery with her heart heavy and her thoughts churning.
Sleep would not come.
She tried—lay in her bed for what felt like hours, watching shadows shift across the ceiling whilst rain began again against the windows.
But her mind would not settle. Kept returning to Thaddeus’s face when he’d spoken of protecting Oliver.
To the fear beneath his anger. To the way his hands had shaken before he’d hidden them.
Finally, near midnight, she gave up.
The library was dark when she entered, lit only by the embers dying in the grate. She moved toward the shelves by instinct, running her fingers along leather spines until she found something—anything—that might quiet her thoughts.
“You may stay. I’m not so petty as to hoard an entire room.”
Maribel spun.
Thaddeus sat in one of the wing-backed chairs near the fireplace, a book open on his lap, candlelight catching the hard planes of his face. She had not seen him in the shadows—had thought herself alone.
“I did not mean to intrude,” she said.
“You did not.” He gestured toward the opposite chair without looking up from his page. “The library is as much yours as mine.”
The invitation—if it could be called that—was ungracious enough to be almost rude. But beneath the curtness, she heard something else. Not quite welcome, but not refusal either.
She selected a slim volume of poetry and settled into the chair he’d indicated.
Neither spoke.
The silence stretched between them, broken only by the soft crackle of dying coals and the whisper of turning pages.
Maribel read the same stanza three times without comprehending a single word.
Every nerve was aware of him—the measured rhythm of his breathing, the occasional shift of his weight, the presence of him filling the space between them.
An hour passed. Perhaps more.
Her eyes had begun to drift closed despite herself—the warmth of the fire, the comfort of the chair, the strange peace of shared silence conspiring to pull her toward sleep.
She forced them open and glanced toward Thaddeus.
He had fallen asleep.
The book lay open on his chest, one hand still resting upon it as though he might resume reading at any moment. But his eyes were closed, his breathing deep and even, and in sleep the harsh lines of his face had softened into something almost vulnerable.
He looked younger. Less the Duke and more simply a man, exhausted by burdens he carried without complaint.
Maribel found herself rising without conscious decision. Crossing to where a blanket lay folded over the back of a settee. Returning to drape it carefully over him—one small kindness, offered to someone who would never ask for it.
Her hand brushed his shoulder as she adjusted the fabric.
He stirred slightly, his brow creasing, but did not wake.
She stood there a moment longer than necessary, looking down at this complicated, wounded, impossible man she had married.
Then she slipped from the library as silently as she’d come, leaving him to whatever dreams visited him in the dark.
Morning came too soon.
Maribel woke to sunlight streaming through her windows and the sound of servants moving in the corridors below.
She dressed quickly, her mind already turning toward the day ahead—Oliver’s lessons, the nursery routine, the careful navigation of a household that felt increasingly like a battlefield where every move might trigger consequences she could not predict.
She found the drawing room first.
The cushions had been returned to their proper places, exactly as they’d been after the fort-building. But this time, there was no wooden soldier waiting.
Instead, on the side table where Thaddeus had left his previous offering, sat a small brass key.
Maribel picked it up with trembling fingers.
It was warm, as though someone had been holding it recently. As though someone had stood in this room, turning it over in his hands, before setting it down and walking away.
She did not need to test it to know which door it would open.