Chapter Seven
“You are staring again.”
Edmund did not look away from the window.
He was watching the garden, or more precisely, he was watching the figure moving through the garden.
Helena had taken to walking every afternoon, learning the grounds the way she had learned the house: methodically, thoroughly, with the focused attention of a woman cataloguing enemy territory.
She was wearing her brown pelisse, the one she had worn during their negotiation by the river in Somerset. It was practical, warm, and slightly worn at the cuffs. He had noticed it, the way he noticed everything.
“I am not staring,” he said. “I am observing.”
Marcus snorted. He was sprawled in the chair by the fire, a book in his hands that he had not actually read in twenty minutes. “There is a word for a man who spends his afternoons observing his wife through windows.”
“Attentive?”
“Besotted.”
Edmund turned then, giving Marcus the full weight of his ducal disapproval, a look that had cowed solicitors, silenced gossips, and made lesser men reconsider their life choices. Marcus, who had known him since they were boys at Eton, merely grinned.
“You are gaping upon her for all the world like a moon-struck swain” Marcus continued, apparently immune to disapproval.
“It is frankly embarrassing for both of us. And as for the moon-struck swain, who might at least command the dignity to present himself openly, rather than lurking behind the window hangings like a thief in the night!”
“I am not lurking.”
“You are absolutely lurking. You have been lurking since I arrived three days ago. You lurk at breakfast, watching her pour tea. You lurk in corridors, listening for her footsteps. You lurk in your own study, timing your emergence to coincide with her passage to the library.” Marcus closed his book with a decisive snap.
“I have known you for twenty-three years, Edmund. I have never seen you lurk before.”
Edmund moved away from the window. In the garden below, Helena had paused to examine something, a dormant rose bush, perhaps, remembering their conversation from days ago. He saw her crouch down, her gloved fingers brushing the bare canes, and something in his chest tightened.
“She is my wife,” he said quietly. “Is it so strange that I should pay attention to her?”
“It is strange that you should pay attention to anyone. You have spent the last four years being the most inattentive bachelor in England. You were positively besieged by ladies eager to secure your favour, beautiful women, wealthy women, women who would have given their best jewels for a single dance, and you looked through them as though they were made of glass.” Marcus’s voice softened slightly.
“And now you cannot look away from a vicar’s daughter who jests about shrubbery. ”
Edmund said nothing. What was there to say? Marcus was not wrong.
He had spent the past week cataloguing Helena with the obsessive attention of a naturalist documenting a new species.
He knew that she organised books by a system he could not identify, not alphabetical, not by subject, something internal and instinctive that made sense only to her.
He knew that she hummed when she thought no one was listening, a melody he did not recognise but found himself straining to hear.
He knew that she took her tea with too much sugar but pretended she did not, as though sweetness were a weakness she was ashamed to admit.
He knew that she read in the library every evening, curled into the window seat like a cat, her shoes kicked off beneath her and her stockinged feet tucked under her skirts.
He knew that she bit her lip when she reached an exciting passage, and that she sometimes laughed aloud at things she found amusing, then looked around guiltily as though she expected to be scolded for it.
He knew that she had not once, in the week since their arrival, opened the connecting door between their chambers. And he knew that he thought about that door far more often than he should.
“What would you have me do?” he asked Marcus finally. “Declare myself? Fall at her feet and confess that I cannot stop thinking about the way she raises one eyebrow when she finds something ridiculous?”
“That would be a start.”
“We have an arrangement.” Edmund moved to the sideboard, pouring himself a measure of brandy he did not particularly want. “She made her terms very clear. Separate lives. Separate bedrooms. No pretence of affection. I agreed to those terms. I cannot now change them simply because I.”
He stopped suddenly.
“Because you what?” Marcus asked, too gently.
Edmund drank his brandy. It burned going down, but not as much as the words he would not let himself say.
Because I find myself wanting more. Because she makes me laugh. Because she looked at my rose garden with genuine interest and asked questions that showed she was actually listening. Because she rearranged the morning room and made it feel like a place where someone might actually want to live.
Because no one has ever called me passionate about shrubbery before, and I think about that sentence at least six times a day.
“She entered into matrimony with me for her family’s security,” Edmund said instead. “For the cottage and the dowry and the Season I could provide. She did not wed me for, whatever this is.”
“Have you asked her what she wedded you for?”
“I know what she wedded me for. She told me herself.”
“She told you what she was willing to admit at the time. That is not the same thing as the truth.” Marcus rose, setting his unread book aside.
“You are one of the finest men I know, Edmund. But you have a remarkable talent for assuming the worst about yourself. You persuade yourself that you are beyond affection, merely because your own mind cannot supply the reason for it. In doing so, you lock your heart against the very proof you lack.” He left before Edmund could respond.
Edmund stood alone in the study, holding his empty glass, watching through the window as Helena completed her round of the garden and disappeared inside.
Have you asked her what she wedded you for?
He had not. Because the answer might confirm what he already feared: that to Helena, he was nothing more than a convenient solution to an impossible problem. A means to an end. A roof over her mother’s head and a dowry for her sister and not one thing more.
And he did not think he could survive hearing that.
***
The library had become his refuge.
It had always been his favourite room, the one place in Westmere Park where he felt truly at home.
Here, surrounded by books his grandfather had collected and books his father had ignored and books he had chosen himself, he could forget that he was a Duke.
He could be simply Edmund, a man who had a passion for reading, and loathed to perform and wished, sometimes desperately, that he had been born the second son of a country vicar instead of heir to one of the oldest titles in England.
His brother Henry would have made a magnificent Duke.
Henry had been charming, confident, and comfortable in ballrooms and drawing rooms and anywhere else that required social ease.
Henry had known how to talk to people, how to make them feel seen and valued.
He knew how to command a room without ever raising his voice.
Edmund had been the quiet one. The one who was fond of books. The one who slipped away from parties to read in empty rooms, who preferred plants to people, who had never quite mastered the art of saying the right thing at the right time.
And then Henry had passed away, and Edmund had inherited everything he had never wanted, and the library had become the only place where he could breathe.
He was reading, or trying to read, with his mind drifting back to Marcus’s words every few pages, when he heard the door open.
He looked up, his breath catching in his chest as though all the air had suddenly been drawn from the room.
Helena was standing in the doorway, muttering to herself in the way she did when she was preoccupied.
She had not noticed him in the shadows of the reading alcove, half-hidden by the wing of his chair.
She was walking between the shelves, trailing her fingers along the spines, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“There is absolutely no logical system whatsoever. Who alphabetises by first name? Who does that? Absolute chaos. I shall have to speak to Mrs Prescott about reorganising the household records, because this is simply…”
She turned a corner. Saw him. And stopped.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
She appeared delightfully discomposed from her stroll, tendrils of honey-blonde hair escaping their pins, while her cheeks bloomed with a flush from the nipping air.
Her warm hazel eyes shone with that particular, spirited animation she ever possessed when her lively mind was racing far ahead of her body.
She looked nothing like a Duchess. She looked like herself.
Edmund thought she had never been more beautiful.
“Your Grace.” She collected herself quickly, her composure snapping back into place like armour. “I did not realise the library was occupied.”
“It is your library too.” The words came out before he could consider them. “You have as much right to it as I do.”
A subtle change marked her features for a brief moment, surprise, it seemed, mingled with an unspoken doubt. She glanced around the room, at the thousands of books that surrounded them, and he saw her shoulders relax slightly.
“I was looking for a particular volume,” she said. “A treatise on household management that Mrs Prescott mentioned. But I cannot find it because your organisational system, or rather, the complete absence of any organisational system.”
“There is a system.”
“There is not.”