Chapter 6 #2
Marjorie stood beside her, less composed in every visible respect. Her bonnet ribbon had come half loose, one curl had escaped over her brow, and her fingers worried impatiently at the seam of her glove. Yet even she was not smiling.
Sophia glanced at the Duke. Benedict stood a little behind his wards, tall and severe in dark morning dress.
He had said very little since arriving. He had greeted her parents with all due courtesy, accepted her mother’s invitation to sit, and then looked once at Sophia with such quiet steadiness that she knew he had come for her answer.
“I…” Sophia began, but no explanation came.
Marjorie took a step forward. “If you do not come, who will read to us?”
Amelia colored faintly. “Marjorie.”
“And who will walk with us in the garden?” Marjorie continued, gathering speed because distress, in her, always became motion. “And who will listen properly when I tell a story? Uncle Benedict listens, but he looks worried whenever the story has a roof, a pond, or a ladder in it.”
“That is because your stories often end with someone falling,” the Duke said.
“That is the best ending for a story.” Sophia might have smiled on any other day. Marjorie looked back at her. The brightness in the child’s eyes turned brittle. “And Amelia made a list of books. A very long list. She used her best handwriting.”
“I did not mean to presume,” Amelia blushed, as though an apology might soften rejection before it arrived. “Only… you said perhaps we might speak of them.”
Sophia’s throat tightened. She could feel her mother watching from the sofa, silent for once. Her father stood near the mantel, pretending not to attend too closely while attending to every word.
Sophia had told herself she had to refuse.
It was the sensible choice. She repeated this for days, until the phrase had worn a groove in her mind.
She was not made for a ducal household. She was not grand enough, experienced enough, admired enough.
She did not know how to become a duchess merely because a lonely house required one.
But the girls did not ask whether she would become a duchess. They asked whether she would leave. And there it was, the thing Sophia had not allowed herself to name. Amelia and Marjorie were not merely disappointed. They were bracing themselves.
Sophia saw it in the careful set of Amelia’s mouth, in the way she had folded herself into politeness before pain could make her untidy.
She saw it in Marjorie’s chin, lifted too high, as if defiance could keep hurt from reaching her.
They had lost enough to recognize the shape of another loss before it arrived. The thought was unbearable.
Benedict moved at last. “Girls,” he spoke quietly, “Miss Norton must be allowed to answer freely.”
Marjorie looked down. “We know.”
Their little faces fell with such practiced courage that Sophia felt something inside her give way.
She looked at Benedict. He was watching the children, not her, and for once his guard slipped.
The fear was there again, stark beneath the discipline: fear for them, fear of asking too much, and perhaps fear that he offered Sophia not a future but a burden no woman should be expected to take up.
Then his eyes met hers. Sophia’s heart beat once, hard and clear.
She spent her whole life believing herself easily overlooked.
Yet here were two children who looked at her and saw someone worth keeping.
Here was a man who, in his severe and impossible manner, trusted her with the tenderest part of his life.
She could not walk away from them.
Before she could think better of it, before caution returned with its endless list of sensible objections, Sophia turned fully toward the duke.
“I accept,” she said.
The word was soft, almost lost. A stillness passed over him, deeper than surprise. Her mother made a small sound behind her.
“You do?”
Sophia drew a breath. Her hands trembled, so she clasped them together. “Yes, Your Grace. I will marry you.”
For one suspended moment, no one moved.
Then Marjorie gasped. “Truly?”
Amelia’s eyes filled with sudden tears. “You will stay… with us?”
Sophia looked down at them, and whatever fear remained was washed through by tenderness. “If your uncle still wishes it.”
Benedict stepped forward. “He does.”
The simplicity of it struck her more than any grand declaration could have done.
Marjorie flung herself at Sophia with such force that Sophia nearly lost her balance.
Amelia followed more gently, pressing close against her side as though afraid to ask for too much and unable to resist asking for some.
Sophia bent over them both, her cheek brushing Amelia’s hair, her hand settling against Marjorie’s back.
She had accepted a duke.
She had agreed to become a duchess.
She had chosen a life she did not understand.
Yet in that moment, with two little girls clinging to her as if she opened a door they believed was closed forever, Sophia felt none of the triumph her mother surely imagined and none of the fear she expected. She felt only the quiet, trembling weight of being wanted.
Across the room, Benedict bowed his head. It might have been gratitude. It might have been relief. Sophia could not know.
But when he lifted his eyes again, they were fixed upon her with such grave intensity that she understood that her answer had not only changed the children’s lives. It had changed his.
And perhaps, most bewildering of all, it had changed hers, too.