Chapter 26
“The nursery fire, Your Grace—shall I still light it?”
Mrs. Keating stood in the doorway of the breakfast room with her hands folded and her face carefully arranged into the expression of a woman who had served long enough to know when a question was not really about fires.
Behind her, the corridor stretched silent and grey in the early light.
No footsteps on the stairs. No thin, determined wail drifting from two floors above.
No Lottie humming tunelessly as she prepared the morning feed.
Penelope set down her teacup. She had not taken a single sip. The tea had gone cold twenty minutes ago, and she had been staring at the surface of it—watching the faint film form, the steam vanish—as though the cooling of the liquid were a phenomenon requiring her full and undivided attention.
“No,” she said. “There’s no need.”
Mrs. Keating nodded once. If she had opinions about the nursery, about Rose’s absence, about the Duchess sitting alone at a breakfast table set for two with the second place untouched, she kept them behind that immaculate composure.
“And Lottie, Your Grace? She was asking whether she should continue with the household or—”
“I’ll speak with her myself. Later today.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
The door closed. Penelope sat in the silence that followed and pressed her palms flat against the tablecloth—white linen, freshly pressed, not a crease or stain to suggest that anything had ever been spilt on it. Perfect. Orderly. Exactly as it should be.
She could not bear to look at it.
She rose. The chair scraped against the floor with a sound that felt obscene in the quiet, and she left the breakfast room without touching the plate of toast and preserves that someone—Mrs. Keating, almost certainly—had arranged with the sort of hopeful precision that implied if she eats, she’ll be all right.
The house was wrong.
Not broken. Not damaged. Simply wrong, the way a familiar room feels wrong when a piece of furniture has been removed—the proportions off, the space too large, the air moving differently through gaps that shouldn’t exist. Penelope walked the corridor and felt it in her bones.
The absence of sound where sound had lived.
The stillness of rooms that had hummed with purpose only yesterday.
She climbed the stairs. Her hand found the banister and gripped harder than necessary, her knuckles whitening against the polished wood.
She did not intend to go to the nursery.
Had told herself, twice already since waking at dawn, that going to the nursery would accomplish nothing, that it would be indulgent and foolish and precisely the sort of wallowing she could not afford.
Her feet carried her there regardless.
The door was open. She did not remember leaving it so, though perhaps Mrs. Keating had aired the room.
Or perhaps no one had closed it at all, because the person who usually closed it—who checked it last thing at night and first thing at morning, who ensured the latch caught softly so as not to wake the baby—no longer had a reason to.
She stepped inside.
The cradle was empty.
Of course it was. She had known it would be.
Had watched Marianne carry Rose to the carriage herself, had felt the weight of the baby leave her own arms for the final time.
She knew the cradle was empty the way she knew her own name—as fact, as certainty, as the immovable architecture of the world she now inhabited.
Knowing did not help.
The blankets were still rumpled from Rose’s last sleep.
Penelope had not smoothed them. Could not bring herself to smooth them, because smoothing them meant acknowledging that no small body would press them into disarray again, that the dip in the mattress where Rose had curled would slowly flatten, that the faint scent of lavender water clinging to the fabric would fade and be replaced by nothing.
She gripped the edge of the cradle. The wood was cool beneath her fingers—the same wood she had polished herself in those frantic first days, when managing the nursery had been the only thing standing between her and complete collapse.
She had scrubbed this cradle, organised the linens, established the routines.
Had built, with meticulous care, a life around a child that was never hers.
And now the child was gone, and the life she had built was a house with no one living in it.
She sat in the rocking chair. It creaked—the same slow, familiar rhythm that had accompanied a hundred midnight feeds, a hundred whispered conversations, a hundred moments when Alastair had appeared in the doorway with his cravat undone and his guard dismantled and said things that lodged beneath her ribs like shrapnel.
Everything I swore I’d never need.
She closed her eyes.
This was what she had wanted. She needed to remember that.
When she had agreed to this marriage, she had wanted safety, not sentiment.
A practical arrangement. Separate rooms, separate lives, a shared obligation that would end when the obligation itself ended.
She had drawn those boundaries herself. Had insisted upon them.
Had reminded him of the rules every time his smile turned too warm, his gaze lingered too long, his voice dropped to that dangerous register that made her pulse stammer.
She had built those walls. She had no right to mourn them now.
And yet.
The rocking chair creaked. Sunlight slid across the nursery floor in slow golden bars, illuminating dust motes that drifted without direction. The room smelled of lavender and absence.
She pressed her fist against her sternum, where the ache had taken root overnight and refused to loosen.
Not grief, precisely. Grief implied loss, and how could she grieve something she had never possessed?
Rose was not her daughter. This house was not her home.
The man downstairs was not her husband—not truly, not in any way that mattered beyond ink on a licence and vows spoken without love.
Except that was a lie, and she was tired of telling it.
She loved him. She had known it since the night in this very chair, when he had held Rose against his chest and spoken about wanting and belonging and the ache of growing up tolerated rather than cherished.
She had known it and done nothing, because doing something meant risking everything, and Penelope Hartwell—Penelope Reed, she corrected herself, the name still foreign and fragile—did not risk.
She managed. She planned. She held things together with lists and duty and the iron conviction that wanting more than she had been given was a form of greed.
But Rose was gone, and the lists were useless, and the duty was discharged, and what remained was a woman sitting in an empty nursery in a house that did not belong to her, loving a man who had married her out of obligation and kept her out of decency and would, she was certain, release her with the same careless grace he applied to everything.
She stood. The rocking chair swayed behind her, empty, marking time for no one.
It was cowardice, what she was about to do.
She recognised it with the same clear-eyed precision she brought to household accounts and linen inventories.
She was going to walk downstairs and offer him his freedom, and she was going to do it calmly, politely, with the composed dignity of a woman who understood her place.
She was going to frame it as practicality—the sensible conclusion to a sensible arrangement—and she was going to hope, with every treacherous fibre of her being, that he would refuse.
That he would say stay.
That he would cross the room and take her hands and tell her that the rules no longer applied, that the arrangement had become something real, that he wanted her—not out of scandal or duty or the convenient proximity of two people sharing a crisis, but because he chose her.
Because she mattered. Because the midnight nursery and the whispered arguments and the ride across the hills had meant as much to him as they had to her.
She pressed her fingertips against the doorframe of the nursery and felt the wood grain under her skin.
And if he didn’t say it? If he nodded, thanked her for her service, and arranged the carriage with the same brisk efficiency he applied to estate business?
Then she would know. And knowing, however brutal, was better than this—this suspended, breathless uncertainty that had been eating her alive for weeks.
She went downstairs to look for her husband. Even the thought of his existence in that proximity to her, made it feel as though her heart would break.
He was in the study.
She knew before she reached the door. Could hear the scratch of his pen, the creak of his chair, the quiet restlessness of a man pretending to work while his mind operated elsewhere.
She paused outside, her hand raised to knock, and realised with a lurch that she had never knocked on this door before.
Had always simply walked in—drawn by a question, a piece of news, a crying baby, the gravitational pull of someone who infuriated and unsettled and moved her in equal measure.
She knocked.
The pen stopped. A beat of silence.
“Come.”
She opened the door. He was behind the desk, coat off, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows in the way that she had stopped pretending not to notice weeks ago.
His hair was disordered. He had not shaved.
The morning light caught the shadows beneath his eyes, and she realised with a pang that he had slept as poorly as she had.
He looked up, and something moved across his face—quick, unguarded, gone before she could name it. Then the mask resettled. Not the rakish grin. Not the practised charm. Something newer, more careful—the guarded neutrality of a man bracing for impact.
“Penelope.” He set down the pen. “Sit, please.”