The Breakfast Announcement
The breakfast room at Carthedge Hall had been designed for pleasant morning conversations.
Tall windows admitted the sun. The sideboard groaned with covered dishes.
The table was set with the family's second-best china—too formal for intimacy, too casual for state occasions.
Perfectly calibrated for an engagement party.
Frederick had always hated this room.
He stood in the doorway, aware that he had bathed and changed but had not slept, aware that his hands still ached from carrying a woman a mile and a half over rough terrain, aware that three pairs of eyes had turned to examine him with varying degrees of expectation.
His mother sat at the head of the table, as she had done since his father's death.
The Dowager Duchess of Edington was sixty-three years old, possessed of excellent posture and a gaze that could wither houseplants at twenty paces.
She was examining him now as though he were a servant who had arrived late with the morning post.
"Frederick." Her tone conveyed that she had expected him an hour ago. "How good of you to join us."
"Mother." He bent to kiss her cheek, a ritual neither of them enjoyed but both understood as necessary. "I apologise for my tardiness. There has been an incident."
Lady Penelope looked up from her plate, her fork poised midway to her mouth.
She was, as always, immaculately presented—her dark hair arranged in soft curls, her morning dress a becoming shade of lavender, her face composed in polite interest. Frederick tried to feel anything at the sight of her. Affection, perhaps. Anticipation.
He felt tired.
"An incident?" Penelope's voice was pleasant, modulated. She would make an excellent duchess. Everyone said so. "I hope nothing serious, Your Grace."
"A riding accident on the Ashbourne road." Frederick moved to the sideboard, more for the excuse to turn away than from any desire for food. "I discovered a woman thrown from her horse. Lady Florinda Ashbourne—the Queen's sister. Her leg is badly broken."
The silence that followed was precisely three seconds long. Frederick counted them without meaning to.
"Good heavens." The Dowager's voice carried the particular flatness she reserved for unexpected inconveniences. "And where is the woman now?"
"In the blue guest chamber. The surgeon has set her leg. She will require several weeks of recovery before she can be moved."
Another silence. This one lasted four seconds.
"Several weeks." The Dowager set down her tea cup with a care that suggested she would rather have thrown it. "In this house. During your engagement party."
"I was not aware that broken bones consulted social calendars before occurring, Mother."
"Do not be flippant with me, Frederick." She pressed her lips into a thin line. "Most irregular. But I suppose one cannot leave the Queen's sister lying in a ditch. Charity has its place, even when inconveniently timed."
"How fortunate that Lady Florinda's suffering can be classified as an act of charity." Frederick selected toast he did not want and placed it on a plate he did not need. "I shall inform her that she is being appropriately grateful."
"Frederick—"
"Kippers, Your Grace?"
He turned. Penelope had risen from her chair and was gesturing toward the sideboard with one elegant hand. Her face held nothing but solicitous concern.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Kippers." She smiled—a perfectly pleasant smile, perfectly appropriate to the situation. "You must be exhausted after such an ordeal. Kippers are most restorative."
Frederick stared at her.
He had carried a woman a mile and a half with her leg bent at an angle that would haunt his dreams. He had listened to her scream when he lifted her, felt her fingers tear the fabric of his waistcoat, watched her face go grey with shock.
He had stood outside her door while the surgeon worked and counted the minutes until he was permitted to confirm she would live.
And his fiancée was offering him kippers.
"Thank you," he heard himself say. "Perhaps later."
From the far end of the table, Lord Ashworth cleared his throat.
Penelope's father was a man of middling height and considerable ambition, his thinning hair carefully arranged to disguise its retreat, his eyes sharp beneath the performance of geniality.
He had been watching Frederick since he entered the room—not with concern, Frederick realised, but with calculation.
"Lady Florinda Ashbourne," Lord Ashworth said, as though tasting the name. "The youngest of the Ashbourne sisters, if I recall. Unmarried, is she not?"
"I believe so."
"And you carried her yourself? All that distance?"
"There was no one else available, and I could not leave her on the road."
"No, no. Quite right." Lord Ashworth nodded, his face sympathetic, his eyes still calculating. "Most heroic, Your Grace. Though I wonder—will there be talk? An unmarried woman, carried in the arms of an engaged man... You know how the county gossips enjoy their speculations."
The implication hung in the air like smoke.
"I imagine," Frederick said, his voice gone cold, "that anyone who would prefer I had left the Queen's sister to die of exposure rather than risk gossip is not someone whose opinion I value. Would you agree, Lord Ashworth?"
Lord Ashworth's smile did not falter. "Of course, of course. I merely meant—"
"I have sent word to His Majesty informing him of his sister-in-law's condition.
" Frederick set his untouched plate on the sideboard.
"The family will send someone to collect her when she is well enough to travel.
Until then, she is a guest in this house and will be treated as such. Is that understood?"
The question was directed at all of them, but his gaze rested on Lord Ashworth.
"Perfectly, Your Grace." Lord Ashworth reached for his tea. "Perfectly understood."
Frederick excused himself before he could say what he was thinking.
* * *
His study was at the back of the house, overlooking the gardens. It had been his father's study before him, and his grandfather's before that—a room built for dukes to do ducal things, whatever those might be. Frederick had never quite felt he belonged in it.
He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment in the silence.
Kippers.
She had offered him kippers.
He moved to the window, pressing his palm against the cool glass. Outside, the gardens stretched in orderly rows—hedges trimmed, paths raked, every bloom in its appointed place. His life was meant to be like those gardens. Arranged. Maintained. Appropriate.
He was going to marry Lady Penelope Ashworth. He was going to produce heirs and manage estates and attend Parliament and do all the things a duke was expected to do. He would be content. Content was sufficient. Content was safe.
This was the life he had chosen.
Except he had not chosen it, had he? His mother had chosen Penelope.
His father had negotiated the initial terms before his death.
The contract had been drawn up by solicitors who had never asked Frederick what he wanted, only what was owed.
He had signed because signing was expected, because dukes did not refuse advantageous matches on the grounds that they felt nothing.
Nothing was not a complaint. Nothing was merely... nothing.
He thought of Florinda's scream when he had lifted her. The way her fingers had clutched his waistcoat. The way she had said his name—Frederick—as though she knew him, as though nine years and a hundred formal introductions had not intervened since a stable and a summer afternoon.
He had felt everything on that road. Terror. Desperation. The animal need to protect what was his, though she was not his, had never been his, could never be his.
It had not been nothing.
Frederick turned from the window and crossed to his desk.
He opened a drawer, retrieved paper, uncapped the inkwell.
He did not know what he intended to write.
A letter to Edward, perhaps, with further details of the incident.
A note to his steward regarding household arrangements for their unexpected guest.
He picked up his pen.
And began to write.
* * *
I do not know why I am writing this.
You are upstairs in the blue guest chamber with your leg in a splint and laudanum dulling whatever pain the surgeon could not prevent.
You will not read this. You must not read this.
I am writing it only because I cannot seem to make my hands stop moving, and this is preferable to returning to the breakfast room and listening to my mother discuss charity whilst my fiancée offers restorative fish.
I counted your heartbeats against my chest. Seventy-three per minute. Too fast. Or perhaps that was mine. I could not tell where you ended and I began. This is not a thing I should admit, even to paper no one will ever see.
Two thousand eight hundred and forty-seven steps. I did not mean to count them. I never mean to count anything. It simply happens—the numbers arranging themselves in my head like soldiers forming ranks, giving order to things that have no order, making bearable what should not be borne.
You called me Frederick. Not 'Your Grace.' Not the title I have hidden behind for nine years. You called me by my name as though you remembered using it, as though a stable and a summer afternoon and a kiss conducted for scientific purposes still lived somewhere in your memory.
I am engaged to be married. I am hosting a party to celebrate that engagement.
I am doing everything a duke is supposed to do.
And I am sitting in my study writing letters I will never send to a woman I have no right to think about, because this morning I discovered that 'nothing' is not the same as 'content,' and content is not the same as alive, and I have not felt alive in longer than I can remember.
This changes nothing. It must change nothing.
But I am writing it down anyway, because if I do not put these words somewhere, I think they might eat me from the inside out.
* * *
Frederick read what he had written.
Then he folded the paper, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and placed it inside.
He had correspondence to answer. Guests to greet.
A fiancée to attend to with appropriate devotion.
The surgeon would return this afternoon to check on Lady Florinda, and Frederick would need to be informed of her progress, and he would receive that information with the polite concern of a host and nothing more.
He closed the drawer.
Outside, the gardens remained in their orderly rows. Inside, Frederick's carefully constructed numbness had developed a crack he could not quite ignore.
He pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him and began composing a proper letter to his steward about bedding and meals and all the appropriate arrangements for an invalid guest who would be staying several weeks.
It took him three attempts to write her name without his pen faltering.