Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
If Isadora had ever hoped their circumstances might be salvageable, that hope was dashed the morning she came down to find the breakfast room empty.
For all the silence between them, Nicholas had kept his promise to breakfast with her. Late sometimes, often lost behind his broadsheets—but he always came. She had learned to expect him there, by the waiting cup and folded napkin, the silver set opposite her own.
That morning there was one setting at the long mahogany table. The sideboard, too, had been reduced: eggs beneath a cover, a rack of toast, apricots luminous in the pale light. No coffee. Nothing kept warm for him.
Her stomach dropped into her feet. She stared at the empty chair, then at her single plate, and felt with deathly certainty that something had broken past mending.
“Where is His Grace?” she asked a footman who came in with fresh tea.
He dropped his gaze and set the pot down with inordinate care. “Today is the anniversary of the former duchess’s death, Your Grace.”
Grace.
The word was her own title, and still all she heard was the first wife’s name.
No matter where she went, she could not escape Grace’s influence.
Nicholas claimed he no longer loved her—yet what was this reticence, if not love?
He was still in love with her after all this time, and nothing Isadora did would change it.
She was fighting a losing battle. Once, she had thought they had left Grace behind. Now, she no longer believed it.
“And Sophia?” she asked, keeping her voice very flat and calm.
“With His Grace, Your Grace.”
If they were together on the day of Grace’s passing, then they were probably at the cemetery.
Inside, Isadora seethed. Not that they were mourning her—they had a right to mourn—but that they had cut her off so they could do so. She was angry because Nicholas had claimed one thing and then his actions had proved another.
She was angry, because underneath all the anger was hurt, and she couldn’t allow the hurt a chance to win. Anger was better, more easily vanquished, more manageable as an emotion until it was.
Yes, it was far easier to be angry than anything else.
But there was her pride to consider.
“Thank you,” she muttered, taking a seat at the empty table.
She helped herself to some pound cake and did her best not to let her iron mask slip.
No one would know how deeply Nicholas had betrayed her or hurt her, or how embarrassed she was that she had to discover her husband’s absence from the servants and not from his own lips.
She would give him one final chance to make things up to her and prove that he could be a husband of any kind, and then she would wash her hands of him and this marriage.
The cake tasted like ashes in her mouth, and she chewed mechanically. No one would know. She’d had enough of bleeding out in front of the world so everyone could see her hurt. No longer.
This time, she would take matters into her own hands.
Whatever she felt about Nicholas, she harbored no ill will toward Grace, and so she collected flowers from the rose garden before carrying them along the path she had once followed Nicholas down in the middle of the night. In sunshine, everything felt different. Cheerier, mocking her and her grief.
No doubt mocking Nicholas and his, too.
She came upon the small gravestone suddenly. The crumbling tomes that made her think of stumps of rotten teeth, and in the middle, by a new tombstone that looked far more recent than any of the others, was Nicholas, his arm around Sophia’s shoulders.
His head ducked as he said something, and then he smiled.
The smile was what undid Isadora the most. She had come assuming him to be in the depths of grief, but there was no sign of sorrow in the way he teased Sophia, flicking her on the ear and making her giggle. They looked like the sweetest father and daughter, unified in this moment.
They both turned to the grave at the same time, and Sophia said something, her lips moving solemnly even as her eyes held a smile.
Isadora looked at the roses in her hand. She’d intended to join them, offering her own condolences, but now the idea seemed petty and almost cruel. This was not her moment in which to intrude.
She turned to make her way back home.
“Izzie!” Sophia’s giddy shriek rang out, and Isadora froze before reluctantly turning back around to find Sophia running toward her, twin braids flying on either side of her face. “You came!”
“Did you think I wouldn’t?” Isadora caught Sophia and, before she could think better of it, pulled the girl into a hug and buried her face in her hair.
“I hoped you would. Papa said you wouldn’t, but I said you were our family too.”
Isadora glanced up to find Nicholas watching her, his face inscrutable. “Is that so?” she asked.
“Evidently, I was mistaken,” he answered.
“You brought flowers as well!” Sophia took the roses from Isadora’s hand and skipped back to the grave.
Kneeling, she tucked the pale blooms among the others.
“Papa says Mama loved her flowers. I don’t remember her, but I bring them anyway.
And I tell her about myself. I’ve already told her all about you.
” She looked trustingly up at Isadora. “I think she would like you.”
Isadora’s stomach was a tight, painful knot. She made herself meet Nicholas’s gaze. “Do you think so?”
“You were not much alike,” he said quietly. Not the most promising beginning. “But yes. Perhaps she would have.”
His eyes seemed darker in the grey morning, and although he had been smiling for Sophia, she thought she caught a glimpse of something approaching devastation in his expression before it smoothed over into blankness.
She longed to demand what was on his mind and what had made him look like that, but with Sophia there, all she could do was muster a small smile and nod. “Then I’m sure we would have gotten along well.”
Sophia slipped her small hand in Isadora’s. “Do you want to join us? We were telling her everything that has happened since last year.”
“Oh, well.” Isadora glanced at Nicholas, who showed no emotion one way or the other. “Would you like me to? I’ve never met her, I would not wish to force myself into something that belongs to the three of you.”
At last, Nicholas looked fully at her. “But you have already come all this way.” His voice was civil, almost gentle. It made the knowledge in his eyes harder to bear. He had seen through her. “I thought this was why you came.”
She wished she could ask him why he was being this way, but instead, she merely nodded. “Very well. Shall I tell your mama the story of how I came to marry your papa?”
Sophia nodded enthusiastically and beamed. “I already told her some of it, but it will be more fun to hear it from you.”
If Grace could really hear them, she wondered what the lady would think of her daughter so easily informing her of her father’s second marriage. Or, more, what she would think of the second wife coming to tell the story herself.
Isadora sat on the wet grass before the stone, took a deep breath, and began to tell the tale.
She left out some specifics, but she included having been left at the altar and how Nicholas had saved her—not by repurchasing the dress, but by marrying her and bringing her into his home and family.
She spoke longest on how important Sophia was to her, and refused to look at Nicholas when she explained how grateful she was for the life he’d given her
When it was over, she inclined her head as though she were greeting an acquaintance and rose to her feet.
Sophia immediately came to wrap her arms around Isadora’s middle. “It’s like a fairytale!” she chimed, eyes shining.
There was such a thick lump in Isadora’s throat, she feared she might burst into tears then and there. Fairytales usually had happy endings, but she doubted there was one in sight for her. At least, not the happy ending she had begun to hope for.
Before Nicholas had shown her any affection, she had thought being a duchess and Sophia’s mother would be enough. But now that she’d had a taste of more, she wondered how she ever thought she could settle for less.
“Shall we return to the house?” Nicholas suggested. They all fell into line, winding their way back home. Isadora found herself beside Nicholas, but he didn’t so much as look at her.
And this, she thought, is the beginning of the end.
Nicholas didn’t know what to think. Every time he saw Isadora, especially when he saw her speaking with Sophia in that affectionate, gentle way she had, he wanted to throw aside all his doubts and run to her.
But standing before Grace’s grave, all he had been able to think about was how he had believed in her, and yet, she had betrayed him.
Everything in his world had been gilded with pain.
His daughter, his wife, the very life they all lived together.
He saw the cracks; he went looking for them, finding reasons why it couldn’t last.
Sooner or later, Isadora would tire of raising another woman’s child. She would discover wants he could not satisfy. She would miss York, then crave London, its gaiety and admiration, just as Grace had. And Nicholas would be left behind again.
Worse, when Sophia repeated his carelessly uttered words that Isadora and Grace would be friends, he felt his entire world collapse a little around him.
Would they have liked one another? Truthfully, he doubted it, yet in his bleakest moments, exhaustion made him cruel, and he wondered whether women were not all drawn eventually toward the same open door.
In spite of it all, he wanted to reach out and pull her close and lose this awful tension, this distance between them. And he also wanted her miles away, where she could not become necessary enough to destroy him.