Chapter 10
Cecily found him in the study.
She had not gone looking for him immediately.
She had taken a tour of her rooms with Mrs. Eldridge first, said the right things about the view and the furnishings, unpacked nothing because her trunks had not yet arrived from London, and sat on the edge of the bed for approximately four minutes, telling herself she was gathering her thoughts.
What she was actually doing was losing her nerve and recovering it and losing it again in a fairly consistent rotation.
Then she stood up, smoothed her skirt, and went to find her husband. The word still felt strange.
She knocked.
“Come.”
He was at the desk when she entered, coat off, sleeves rolled to the elbows in the way of a man who had returned to work the moment ceremony permitted it. Papers were spread before him in the organized pattern of someone who had a system and kept to it.
He looked up when she came in, and something in his expression shifted. Cecily didn’t even want to read it.
“Duchess.” A slight pause. “Is your room satisfactory?”
“It is very comfortable, thank you.” She closed the door behind her with quiet care. “I won’t keep you long. I only wish to—there are some things I’d like to establish. Between us. While we are still at the beginning of this arrangement and have not yet formed habits that are difficult to break.”
He set down his quill and leaned back in his chair with the easy composure of a man who had all the time in the world, which she was coming to understand was simply how he occupied space.
“By all means,” he allowed.
Cecily clasped her hands in front of her and looked at him directly, because looking away would concede something she was not prepared to concede.
“You are not to enter my rooms without permission,” she began. “Not my bedchamber, not my sitting room. If you need to speak with me, you will send word first.”
She kept her voice even and practical, the voice of someone discussing household logistics and not at all like she had spent the carriage ride from London thinking about what it meant to share a house with a man who looked the way he looked.
“And you are not to touch me without warning. Not even in company, if it can be avoided. I realize some contact will be necessary for appearances, but I would prefer to know it is coming,” she finished.
The room was quiet, except for the fire.
William looked at her for a moment. Then he said pleasantly, “Do you truly think I would storm into your room uninvited?”
“I think,” she said carefully, “that you are a man accustomed to a great deal of latitude. I think doors have opened for you rather readily your entire life, and you have not often had cause to consider whether they were meant to.” She held his gaze. “I am simply being clear.”
He rose from his chair. It was not a threatening move, but she couldn’t keep her pulse from jumping.
He moved around the desk with the unhurried ease of a man taking a turn about his own study, and came to stand perhaps three feet from her, close enough that she was aware of it without it constituting any kind of transgression.
“You have a reputation,” she said, holding her ground, “for turning heads and bending women to your will. For being persuasive in ways that have nothing to do with reason.” She kept her chin up. “I am your wife, not one of your conquests, and I would appreciate you remembering the distinction.”
His head tilted, very slightly. “Bending women to my will,” he repeated, as though testing the phrase for accuracy. “That is quite a characterization.”
“It is the characterization the papers… in fact, the ton has given you.”
“The papers and the ton,” he said, “have also described me as dissolute, reckless, and once, memorably, a menace to the institution of matrimony.” The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I am now married, so at least one of those has been addressed.”
Despite herself, she felt a pull—the warmth of him, the effortless way he made even a difficult moment feel almost enjoyable—and she straightened against it like a ship correcting in a cross-wind.
He took one more step toward her. Not into her space, simply nearer. Close enough that she could see the slight disorder of his dark hair, the sharp line of his jaw.
“Most doors,” he added, with a smile that was doing something entirely unfair to the room, “open for me without protest.”
It was the smile that did it—easy, unearned, and utterly aware of itself. Cecily took a step back before she had decided to, and then another, until the wall met her shoulder blades.
She realized she had backed herself into a corner, which was not the impression she had intended to make.
She did not move. To move now would be to admit retreat.
He had not followed her. He had not needed to. He simply stood where he was, three feet away, with that expression of mild, genuine amusement that was somehow more disconcerting than if he had actually advanced.
I am not frightened of him.
She had said so to Letitia not forty minutes ago with complete confidence, and she had meant it.
She still meant it.
“Do you truly believe,” he asked, his voice dropping to the quieter register he used when he was no longer performing and was simply saying something he meant, “that I charm women against their will?”
“I believe that charming men rarely have to.”
He considered this. Something shifted in his expression—interest, she thought, genuine rather than affected.
“And sensible women? What do they do?”
“Sensible women,” she said firmly, “avoid them.”
“Avoid charming men altogether.” He looked faintly amused. “That seems like rather a bleak strategy for navigating Society.”
“It has served me adequately so far.”
“Has it?” He looked at her for a moment with those green eyes that were, she was discovering, considerably more expressive than they appeared. They revealed exactly as much as he chose. “Do you find me charming, then? Since we are on the subject.”
She recognized it, the slight lean into the question, the deliberate ease of it. It was a trap laid with perfect charm, which was, she supposed, the most fitting kind.
“No.”
“No?”
“I do not find you charming,” she said crisply.
“I find you aware of your charm, which is a different thing entirely and considerably less appealing. A man who knows exactly how he appears and deploys it accordingly is not charming; he is calculated. And I would not,” she added, with the decisive confidence she had been meaning to deliver since the drawing room in Brighton, “ever fall for a man as shallow as you choose to appear.”
She watched the word shallow land hard. Watched the amusement leave his face. What replaced it was a cooler, more composed expression that she had not yet seen on him and that made him look entirely different.
When he spoke, his voice was level and devoid of warmth, leaving her with a chill. “Then we are fortunate that you feel so.”
A pause.
“My wife,” he continued, “will be the last woman I make any effort to charm. What exists between us exists on paper and in public and nowhere else, and I have no interest in complicating it.”
He held her gaze with firm steadiness. “You are free to live exactly as you choose, Duchess. I only ask that you perform what the arrangement requires and nothing more.” He paused once more. “As will I.”
He moved back to his desk with the same unhurried ease, picked up his quill, and returned his attention to the papers in front of him with a completeness that suggested she was no longer the primary subject of his thoughts and had not been made to feel that she was.
She stood by the wall for a moment.
I am not frightened of him.
No, she was not frightened. She was standing in his study, on her wedding day, with her back against the wall and the slight chill of a conversation that had been warm a moment ago and was now decidedly not, and she was not frightened.
She was something else entirely, something that had no clean name and that she was not prepared to examine in his presence.
“Goodnight, Duke.” Her voice came out steadier than she deserved credit for.
He glanced up from the papers. “Goodnight.”
She left.
In the corridor, with the study door closed behind her and the house settling quietly around her into its evening rhythms, Cecily leaned against the wall for a moment and thought about the word shallow, which she had said on purpose and which had done exactly what she’d intended.
She thought about why it had, for approximately three seconds, felt like a mistake.
She pushed off the wall and went to find Mrs. Eldridge.
* * *
“…and then Mrs. Eldridge said the cat had no business being in the linen cupboard, but the cat had very clearly formed a different opinion on the matter, and I said–”
“Letitia.” Isadora sat back in her chair. “You are going to knock over the cream.”
“I am not going to knock over the–” The cream listed alarmingly to the left.
Letitia righted it with the reflex of long experience and continued without pause.
“As I was saying, I told Mrs. Eldridge that if the cat had chosen the linen cupboard, that was rather more a comment on the linen than on the cat, and she did not appreciate that observation at all, which I thought was…”
Cecily, who had been sitting across the table for approximately seven minutes and had already discovered that breakfast at Blackmoor House was a considerably livelier affair than breakfast anywhere else she had ever been, pressed her lips together against a smile and reached for the teapot.
The breakfast room was well-lit and south-facing, which she approved of, with tall windows that let the morning in properly rather than suggesting it from a cautious distance.
The table was set with the quiet precision of a well-run house—silver laid correctly, bread already sliced, the butter dish in its place—and yet there was something in the room that resisted the formality of it, some warmth that persisted despite the good silver and the pressed tablecloths.