Chapter 30 #2
A pause, weighted, before the Dowager inclined her head. “Best,” she repeated softly, as though tasting the word. “For whom, I wonder.”
The Dowager’s eyes narrowed a fraction.
“I should like to make things easier for you,” the Dowager went on, her voice low and measured, as though bestowing kindness. “Truly, I would. No doubt the gossip of London has cut you more deeply than you will admit.”
Margaret’s throat tightened. She thought of the stares, the whispers that chased her through drawing rooms whenever she dared appear at a rout or musicale. She had felt the barbs as though each were meant to pierce her alone.
“You must not let such things undo you,” the Dowager continued smoothly, her spoon tapping against porcelain with deliberate leisure.
“Gossip burns quick and bright, but it can be quenched—silenced altogether—by one thing alone. There is… one matter which can quiet every tongue, one certainty that will secure your place beyond all question.”
Her gaze sharpened, a hawk’s eye fixing upon its mark.
“An heir, Margaret.”
Margaret’s head lifted, her spine stiffening at the bluntness. “Your Grace—”
“Do not look at me so. You are not ignorant of the duty you married into.” The Dowager’s eyes narrowed; her gaze was sharp enough to sting.
“It is not for your sake, nor even Sebastian’s.
It is the family, the title, the estate—all that has been safeguarded for centuries.
You sit now in the place of duchesses past, who all understood what was required of them. ”
Margaret’s lips parted, but no ready reply came. Her mind grasped at words that might appease, words that might soften the piercing truth of the demand.
“I… I know what is expected,” she said at last, her voice scarcely above a breath. “And I do not dismiss it. I only think—” She faltered, the words caught in her throat. “—that some things cannot be forced. That harmony must come before…”
The Dowager’s brow arched, her expression unyielding.
Margaret’s chest rose and fell more quickly, as though the very air pressed against her. “I would not willfully neglect my duty. But—” She broke off again, her courage wavering beneath that implacable gaze. At last, the truth pressed itself out, raw and small, between them.
Margaret’s throat closed around her words. She forced it open. “Things between Sebastian and me are… complicated.”
“Complicated?” The Dowager repeated the word softly, as though testing its shape. Her brows arched, and a faint smile, not kind, touched her lips. “What is complicated about duty, child? You rise to it, or you fail. There is nothing more.”
Margaret felt her pulse quicken in her ears. “It is not so simple as that.”
“Not so simple?” The Dowager leaned forward, her voice gentling, though her eyes remained sharp.
“Margaret, look at me. I speak to you not as your husband’s mother, nor as the Dowager Duchess, but as a woman who has worn the mantle you now bear.
I know what it is to sit where you sit, to feel the weight of expectation pressing from all sides.
You think yourself alone in it, but you are not.
Every duchess before you has borne the same burden. ”
Margaret swallowed, her gaze fixed upon the tea rippling in her cup.
The Dowager continued, her tone almost coaxing.
“You are young still, and perhaps you tell yourself there is time. There is not. Every month wasted is a risk to this family’s line.
My son must have an heir. Your husband must have an heir.
And only you may give it to him. Believe me when I say, no matter the quarrels between you, this one duty can afford no delay. ”
Her words pressed in, steady and relentless. Margaret’s fingers tightened around her cup, her knuckles pale against the porcelain.
“Set aside your feelings for now,” the older woman urged.
“They matter less than you think. You imagine you must wait for fondness or for ease between you and Sebastian. Foolish child, those things are luxuries, not necessities. What is necessary is an heir. Secure that, and you will find the rest easier to endure.”
Margaret’s breath came unevenly, her chest tight as though bound. She tried to lift her head, but the weight of the Dowager’s gaze seemed to hold it down.
The pause that followed stretched, heavy with unsaid things. And then, the faintest edge entered the elder woman’s tone.
“Your mother, God rest her soul,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “did you no service. She filled your head with nonsense of sentiment and girlish fancy. She ought to have told you the truth: love is nothing, duty is all. Yet she preferred to chatter about affection and happiness. Foolishness.”
The words struck as if a lash. Margaret’s breath caught, her fingers tightening on her cup until the porcelain trembled. For a moment, she could not lift her gaze, the shame of her mother’s name spoken so witheringly weighing her down.
What could this woman possibly know of her mother? She had never seen her gentle smile, nor heard her laugh, nor felt the quiet strength of her arms. To Margaret, her mother’s love had been the very marrow of life; how dare the Dowager reduce it to folly?
Slowly, she raised her head. Her voice was soft, but it did not waver. “If it is a fault to speak of love, then it is a fault I will forgive her a thousand times, for she gave me what you have never known.”
The Dowager’s composure stiffened, her chin rising. “Love,” she said with disdain, “is a bauble. A glittering trinket, pleasant to look upon, but it shatters at the first blow. Sacrifice endures. Sacrifice builds legacies. That is what your mother failed to teach you.”
The words burned, but Margaret forced her breath to be steady. Her fingers curled tighter around her cup, porcelain knocking faintly against the saucer. “Without love, sacrifice curdles into bitterness.”
The Dowager’s lips curved in something too thin to be a smile. “Bitterness matters little if the line is preserved.”
A log cracked in the grate, sharp as a whip, but Margaret did not flinch. Her gaze lifted, cool and unwavering. “What is a line worth, if it leaves only coldness behind?”
The Dowager’s hand smoothed her skirts, each movement deliberate, measured. “Posterity will not ask whether you were warm, only whether you fulfilled your charge.”
Margaret’s eyes glistened, though no tears fell. She leaned forward, her voice low, urgent. “Posterity may not ask, but children do. Husbands do. Wives do. I will not believe that affection is a bauble simply because you never held it.”
The older woman’s nostrils flared; she shifted her teacup as if to mask the tightening of her jaw. “You speak as though love shields against ruin. It does not. Duty alone prevents collapse.”
Margaret’s hands, still trembling slightly, folded atop one another.
Margaret lifted her chin, fragile but unyielding, and let her gaze drift to the far wall, as if searching for an answer there.
Her voice, quiet yet steady, carried the weight of all she had felt.
“And yet duty without love is only collapse drawn out more slowly. A legacy built on fear leaves nothing but ruins in the heart.”
She imagined the generations who had come before, bound by expectation, and shivered at the thought of what their lives might have been if affection had been allowed to flourish alongside obligation.
The Dowager’s gaze lingered on her, sharp as a pin. For a moment, the silence between them felt like a held breath, the entire house waiting to hear which would break first.
The elder woman’s eyes flashed. “Child, you speak of what you do not understand. Love is selfish—it demands, it weakens, it blinds. Duty is hard, yes, but it strengthens. Without it, families crumble, titles fall, and nations decay. It is duty alone that preserves.”
Margaret leaned forward now, her breath unsteady, though her words came swiftly. “No, Your Grace. It is love that preserves. Love binds one heart to another, makes sacrifice bearable, even noble. It is not weakness. It is strength of the truest kind.”
The Dowager’s hand struck the table, a sharp crack against the china. “Strength? You would speak to me of strength? I have buried a husband, held an estate together, raised a son to his station—all without the luxury of your fanciful ‘love.’ Do not presume to lecture me, Duchess.”
Margaret’s cheeks burned, her pulse hammering, but she met that fierce gaze without flinching. “And yet for all you claim, you sit here alone, scorning what you never allowed yourself to feel. That is no strength, Your Grace—it is poverty of the soul.”
The Dowager’s breath hissed through her teeth, her back stiffening like a blade.
“Poverty of the soul? Better that than the ruin love brings. Love makes fools of women… it makes slaves of them. Your own mother wasted herself in such folly. And you…” Her voice cut low, almost a snarl.
“You will waste yourself too if you cling to it.”
Margaret trembled slightly, but her voice steadied, sharpened by pain. “If to love is to waste, then I would rather be spent than withered. I would rather give and lose a hundred times than live untouched, cold as stone.”
The Dowager leaned forward, her eyes narrowing to slits. “You speak like a girl, not a duchess. Do you not understand the eyes of the world are upon you? That an heir is expected, and soon? Sentiment will not secure your place. Only duty.”
Margaret rose half from her chair, her color high, her breath unsteady.
“And what good is a place secured by chains? I will not have my heart traded for appearances nor be measured only by the children I bear. If Sebastian and I—” She stopped, catching her breath, realizing how near she had come to saying too much.
The air between them was taut, crackling like a storm about to break.
The Dowager drew breath to unleash her reply, but the words never came. The door burst wide, striking the paneling with a crack.
Sebastian filled the threshold, broad-shouldered and dark-eyed, the light from the corridor at his back casting him in stark relief. His sharp gaze swept the room once and fastened upon his mother with all the force of a storm breaking upon the shore.
Margaret’s breath caught, a wild thrum rising in her throat. Relief… terror… longing, she could not name what seized her, only that the sight of him struck through her like a bell’s toll.
“Enough,” he said, his voice low yet carrying, a command that stilled even the air. “This ends now.”