Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning, Isadora woke tired and tangled in her thoughts. All she could think about was the way Nicholas had looked at her last night. The flame in his eyes, doused so quickly by his anger at her having received a letter from Mr. Windham.
She had already burned it.
Still, she resolved to put her husband from her mind. As he had told her, theirs was not a marriage of affection but of convenience, and she was determined to make the best of it.
Sophia’s lessons began at ten, so Isadora had plenty of time to rise early and explore the house. But Anna caught her the moment she stepped from her room.
“Would you like to visit the rooms His Grace prepared for you?” she asked.
Isadora faltered. “My… rooms?”
“He had them fitted up last night so you’d have a place in the house that felt comfortable and entirely your own.” Anna smiled, her face lighting up. “He was most particular that you approve.”
Most particular that she approve?
She inhaled deeply, doing her best to push the warmth away. Not affection. Considering she knew what this marriage would be before she entered it, she had no right to feel put up or put out now. “Yes,” she said. “I would very much like to see these rooms.”
Anna’s smile turned into a beam, and she led Isadora up the stairs to the third floor.
A series of bright, sunlit rooms greeted her, complete with a pianoforte, painted screens, a snug library filled with books, and several comfortable armchairs and sofas where she might entertain guests.
By the window, an easel sat out looking across a vista to a lake.
“You may have paints delivered if you choose to paint,” Anna said. “His Grace was not sure if you preferred oils or watercolors.”
For a long moment, Isadora was speechless.
For Nicholas to have done all this for her spoke volumes about what role she played in his life—and how important he viewed his wife to be.
Perhaps this was a marriage of convenience, but it was clearly important to him that she had her own space and could be happy here.
Warmth flowed through her… But she could not forget the cold way he had looked at her the previous night, all because of something she couldn’t help.
The way he had failed to listen to her when she had tried to explain that she had done nothing to encourage Mr. Windham, and that she had not known about his letter.
Still, this had done something to ease some of her worry.
Husband of contradictions. Well. They would make the best of things, one way or the other.
Left to herself, she wandered through the rooms once more on her own before finally making her way downstairs for breakfast. She was nearly at the morning room when Sophia burst from a doorway with her arms full of something enormous and fluffy.
It was a cat, tail dangling, eyes large and mournful.
Not only was it a cat, but it was also a heavily pregnant one.
“Quick,” Sophia hissed the moment she spotted her. “Help me take Molly upstairs!”
“I—” Before Isadora could decide whether or not to assist the potential fugitive, she heard Nicholas’s stern voice from the breakfast room.
“Sophia? Come here, please.”
“Coming, Papa!”
Sophia sent her a desperate glance, then marched to the breakfast room, the cat still firmly cradled in her arms. Isadora followed, feeling as though she had stepped into another world.
Her husband sat at the head of the table in claret superfine, shaved and brushed and buttoned back into the Duke of Winchester, every trace of last night’s man locked away beneath a cravat tied in flawless, snowy folds.
She knew what that linen covered now. That was the trouble with knowing; there was no unknowing it.
He looked up, cool gaze finding hers.
“You requested we breakfast together each morning, and yet you are late.” Each word arrived clipped and pressed, like his linen. “And I do not appreciate surprises.” His gaze dropped, inevitably, to the cat.
“But Isadora said I could keep her,” Sophia said, the lie so blatant, Isadora nearly choked. Sophia turned pleading eyes on her, and Isadora’s heart melted.
There was nothing for it but to play along.
“Is a cat so very terrible?” she asked as she drew out a chair at Nicholas’ right hand, close enough now to catch cedar and shaving soap, “Besides—”
“Not that one.”
Her fingers stopped on the carved back of the chair. He did not look up. “That chair stays empty,” he explained. A page of his newspaper turned, and the silence closed over the words like water over a stone.
Sophia had gone still, her face half-buried in the cat’s fur.
Isadora moved down one place and sat. The forbidden chair stood nearest the window, where the morning sun fell warmest. She smoothed her napkin across her lap and understood, without a word spoken, that she had just been introduced to the late Duchess of Winchester.
“Though not at the table, I think,” she said to Sophia, taking up the thread as though her heart were not beating in her throat. “The cat.”
Sophia pouted. “Cats are clean.”
“Be that as it may, but I think we would all prefer her to be elsewhere for now. Perhaps you could take her to the schoolroom. We can find a proper place for her later.”
Sophia’s scowl turned into a beam. “Thank you, Izzie!” She looked ready to fling her arms about Isadora, were her hands not full of the cat she had somehow—and Isadora was determined to discover precisely how—adopted.
Nicholas snapped his newspaper open as though it had personally offended him. Once Sophia left the room, he muttered, “Must you encourage her? That animal is plainly with kits, and I won’t have the staff put upon.”
“I’ll see that she cares for it herself. Besides, a pet teaches a child responsibility.” Isadora reached for the strawberry jam. “You may add it to my duties. Overseer of lessons, and of felines.”
The paper lowered an inch. His lips thinned, but he gave no reply.
Isadora had meant to thank him for the beautiful rooms he’d put together for her last night, but his tumultuous mood dissuaded her.
So, instead, she let the words dissolve on her tongue like communion and helped herself to the warm bread.
So this was what breakfast together would be like. She had imagined something a little different—an opportunity for them to be friends, perhaps.
As she ate, she spied on him from beneath her lashes. He set the newspaper aside at last and took off his gloves so he could eat. The sight arrested her mid-bite. Across his knuckles bloomed a fresh, livid violet like that of a bruise.
He glanced up, catching where her gaze was directed, and immediately dropped his hands below the table.
What could have caused such wounds? Somewhere between her chamber door and this table, in the small dark hours of their wedding night, her husband had found something to beat.
A tavern brawl seemed absurd; dukes did not brawl.
And yet those knuckles said otherwise, and it came to her, in a terrifying shiver along the spine, how very little she knew of the man whose ring she now wore.
She returned her eyes to her plate and buttered another bread as though she’d seen nothing at all. If she asked, that frost would come down again, and once a morning was quite enough.
He said nothing more. She said nothing more.
They parted from their first married breakfast as two strangers rising from a mail-coach.
Where had he gone, the dry, almost kind gentleman from the park?
There was not even an attempt at strained politeness.
It was as though he had already decided he disliked her and everything she represented in his life, even though they barely knew each other.
Gregson arrived with a fresh batch of correspondence before bowing out.
York was no London, but a new duchess drew the whole county the way a lit window draws moths: cards for tea, for dinner, for soirées, and beneath them the inevitable summons of the Assemblies.
She and Nicholas would have to appear there eventually, arm in arm, civil as two distant strangers.
Isadora could sooner imagine attending with the cat.
She was sorting through her invitations when Sophia reappeared.
“What are you doing?” Sophia asked, sliding into the chair that Nicholas had deemed off-limits. Isadora sent her a questioning glance, and Sophia merely snorted, “I break rules all the time when Papa isn’t here. He so very never is these days! Ugh.”
Isadora felt a twinge of sympathy for the little girl. She had only experienced his distant manner for less than twelve hours, and it already made her want to bury herself in a hole until the feeling passed.
“Looking through my invitations,” she eventually explained.
“Do you have many?”
“I do now that I married your father. It appears half of York wishes to make my acquaintance.”
Sophia made a sound of disgust, raising large, blue eyes to Isadora’s. “I would rather you stay with me at Winchester. It’s so boring all alone.”
As would Isadora. All these people who were playing oh so nice now had ignored—and sometimes even gave her the cut—when she was merely the Fairbourne girl, her uncle’s unwanted ward in made-over gowns. This was nothing more than insincere; a grasping attempt at power and influence.
“Yes,” Isadora said. “I would, too. But first, you must tell me more about this cat.”
“Will you tell Papa?” Sophia asked doubtfully.
Considering Nicholas seemed disinclined to grant her so much as a ‘good morning’, the opportunity was unlikely to arise. “I will not. Your secrets are safe with me.”
“I knew you were a good one.” Sophia grinned and leaned forward. “Molly is a stray from the nearby farm, but they said they would drown her babies, so I saved her and brought her inside.”
“Well,” Isadora said, meeting the girl’s smile with her own—she couldn’t help it. “I suppose we had better find a place for her and her kittens, then.”
Nicholas walked into the drawing room the next day after his daughter’s afternoon lessons, and stopped short at the sound of Sophia’s raucous laughter.
But beneath it, something lower and sweeter that he had not heard under this roof in six years, and what had really given him a strange feeling in his chest.
A woman, laughing.
Isadora had just finished regaling a tale that Sophia found enormously hilarious, and she looked up when he entered, one curl tumbling loose against her cheek.
Dark garnet where the sun caught it, and her whole face still lit from laughing, warm as windfall apples in October grass.
His daughter sat tucked against her side as though they’d always belonged together, and Nicholas felt a pang of longing.
This had been what he’d always hoped for with Grace.
His bruised knuckles ached. Everything in him was leaning toward that chaise, and he strangled it, the way he always did when it came to affection. If he let it out, he risked hurting her the way he had hurt Grace. And that, he could never let himself do again.
He took a deep breath, composing himself.
“Was there something you needed?” Isadora asked, untangling herself free of Sophia. “We were just about to begin our music lesson. Your Sophia is an… accomplished singer,” she burst out laughing as she met Sophia’s snickering face.
“I told you, it wasn’t me singing to Molly!” Sophia snorted back. Two days in his home, and Isadora had already somehow grown closer to his daughter than it had taken him the first entire year after his ex-wife’s passing.
“Well, I am older,” Isadora said, bopping the red tip of Sophia’s nose. “And I’ve had a great deal more practice.”
Coughing, Nicholas straightened, hands locked behind his back.
Every time he looked at Sophia now, that letter rose in his throat.
After a night of reading it and re-reading it over and over, an ill feeling had begun to unfurl in the deepest recesses of his stomach.
If Grace had truly been having an affair behind his back…
He kept catching himself searching her little face for the wrong man’s features—and finding, thank the Lord above, none.
She was his. He knew it. He felt it.
But already, he felt as though she was slipping away.
“A word in private, please,” he said to Isadora.
She frowned, confused, but nodded and uncurled, sauntering toward him like a feline.
She quite possibly hadn’t the faintest notion of how gracefully she moved, did she?
Her morning dress was washed soft and faithful to every curve, slipped at one shoulder to bare skin like the pale inner curve of a rose petal, one faint blue vein running beneath it.
She pouted up at him and he forced himself back to the present.
Taking her wrist gently, he drew her out into the corridor.
“You wrote a note to me for funds for a dancing master for Sophia,” he murmured once they were out of sight.
“I came to tell you that such frivolous acts of communication aren’t necessary.
Merely direct all your questions and demands to Gregson, and he will oversee the appropriate arrangements.
When it comes to Sophia, I will spare no expense. ”
Her eyes searched his, amber and liquid, and she frowned as though she wished to say something back. But after a moment, she merely inclined her head politely. “You are very generous, sir.”
“I do what I ought by my family.” Too curt, and he knew it, but her perfume had just reached him—orange blossom and soap—and a hotness coursed through him like a match dropped in dry grass.
She was too close, and the vision of their wedding night played out in his mind’s eye, the faint tips of her perfectly caressable breasts poking through a translucent nightgown.
Christ. Boxing tonight again.
He would have to. He needed to expunge the ungentlemanly feelings she’d stirred in him since then. Devil, what kind of woman wore a practically see-through nightgown in the presence of another man?
Well, frankly, any ordinary woman in the privacy of her own bedchamber.
Her eyes shuttered, and she returned to Sophia, summoning a smile for his daughter that she had not given to him.
Good. That was how things ought to be around here.
Even if, in his weaker moments, a tiny part of him wished it weren’t so.