Chapter Seven #3
“Or a lifetime. Whichever you decide to be generous with.”
Something flickered in his expression—surprise, perhaps, or hope, or the wary recognition of both. Before he could reply, Morrison appeared in the doorway.
“Dinner is served, Your Grace, my lady.”
“Thank you, Morrison,” the Duke said, releasing her hands. “Shall we, wife?”
“Lead the way, husband.”
Dinner was different that night. They still occupied opposite ends of the long table, but the distance felt less like exile and more like space in which to breathe.
They spoke of books, of the accounts she had reviewed, of improvements he contemplated for the estate.
It might almost have been an ordinary dinner between an ordinary husband and wife—if one disregarded the awareness that sparked each time their eyes met.
After dinner, they withdrew to the blue drawing room—his mother’s room—where a fire glowed against the evening chill. Celine took up her long-neglected embroidery (a sampler which stubbornly refused to improve), while he opened what appeared to be a treatise on agricultural innovation.
It was… peaceful. Companionable. The soft crackle of the fire, the whisper of turning pages, the occasional clink of embroidery scissors—it all wove together into a quiet that felt startlingly right.
This, she thought, might be what marriage was meant to contain as well: not constant drama, but shared space.
A presence one did not have to fill with words.
“You are staring,” he said after a while, without looking up.
“I am thinking.”
“About?”
“How very unlike my expectations you have turned out to be.”
“Better or worse?” He kept his eyes on the page, but she heard the genuine curiosity.
“More,” she said after a moment. “More complex. More interesting. More…” She hesitated, searching. “More possible.”
He did look up then. “Possible?”
“When I signed that contract, I believed I was binding myself to a marble statue. Cold, perfect, impervious.” She laid the embroidery in her lap. “But you are not marble. You are flesh and blood and temper and a thousand contradictions, held together by will and properly tied cravats.”
“My cravats are unimpeachable.”
“Your humanity is more so.”
He closed his book, giving her his full attention. “You are determined to discover something redeemable in me.”
“I am determined to see what is already there.”
“And if what is there disappoints you?”
“Then I shall at least be disappointed by truth rather than comforted by illusion.”
“Truth,” he repeated. “You attach great value to it.”
“Do you not?”
“I attach value to control. To predictability. To structures that keep chaos from the door.” He rose, moving to stand before the fire, the light gilding his profile. “Truth is frequently the enemy of such things.”
“Or their foundation,” she countered. “You cannot command what you refuse to see, nor anticipate what you refuse to acknowledge.”
He exhaled—quiet, measured. “Speaking of acknowledgement… I am trying, Celine. To lower these walls. These distances. These carefully arranged interactions.”
“I know,” she said gently. “But try harder.”
“Celine—”
“Tell me something real. Something that isn’t about control or your father or the past. Tell me who you are when no one is watching.”
He was silent for so long she thought he would refuse. Then, quietly:
“I read poetry,” he said. “Byron, Keats, Shelley. The Romantics you’d expect me to despise. I read them late at night when I can’t sleep, which is most nights. I find their chaos oddly soothing—all that passion spent on paper where it can’t hurt anyone.”
“That is a beginning,” she said softly. “What else?”
“I compose music. Badly. I burn the sheets immediately, but the mathematics of harmony—of rules producing beauty—comforts me.”
“More.”
“I swim in the lake at the country estate,” he said, eyes distant.
“In October, when the water is so cold it feels like dying—and also like being unequivocally alive.” He turned away from the fire.
“And I speak to my mother’s portrait. About my day, my plans, my repeated failure at being the son she hoped I might become. ”
“She would be proud of you.”
“She would be horrified by what I’ve become.”
“A successful duke? A responsible landowner? A man who pays pensions to former servants and reads poetry in secret?”
“A man who bought a wife at a gaming table.”
“A man who saved a family from ruin.”
“Same action,” he murmured, “different interpretation.”
“Same truth,” she corrected, “different perspective.”
She moved toward him, unable to maintain distance when he was being this vulnerable. “One more thing. Tell me one more true thing.”
He looked at her then. Really looked. And she saw everything he hid from the world—fear, longing, hope, uncertainty—all flickering through his eyes like candlelight threatened by a draft.
“I’m frightened,” he said quietly. “Of you. Of this. Of the possibility that I might—improbably—become the sort of husband you deserve. But most of all, I’m frightened that I am not, that I will fail you, and that one day you will look at me and see precisely what the world sees—nothing but a beast attempting to impersonate a man. ”
She lifted her hands to his face, cradling it as though he were something breakable. “You are not a beast,” she whispered. “You are a man doing the best he can with the wounds he carries. And that is enough. More than enough.”
He caught her wrists—not pushing her away, not drawing her in, simply holding. Anchoring himself.
After a moment or two, he released her, pulling back as though he required the space in order to breathe.
She recognised the retreat for what it was—a necessary distance to maintain the boundaries they’d agreed to. “Goodnight, husband.”
“Goodnight.”
She reached the door, then paused and looked back.
“The locked door,” she said softly. “It is as much for your protection as for mine, isn’t it?”
He hesitated. “Perhaps more.”
“Then keep it locked,” she said. “Until you’re ready.”
“And if I never am?”
“Then we shall make do with a very unusual marriage.”
She left him then, climbing the stairs to her chambers—to the locked door and everything it symbolised.
But as she readied herself for bed, she found her thoughts returning not to that locked door, but to the unlocked one they had opened together. The one filled with old ghosts and new truths.
Some doors, she thought, were meant to be opened slowly. With care. With time.
But oh, how she ached to pick the lock and discover what waited on the other side.