Chapter 11
“Two places, set at opposite ends of a table meant for forty.” Louisa stood in the doorway of the dining room, surveying the arrangement with open disbelief. “Whoever decided this was sensible clearly did not consider that a conversation requires two people within shouting distance of each other.”
“It is how His Grace has always taken his meals, Your Grace,” the footman said with careful neutrality, unwilling to venture an opinion on his master’s habits.
“Well, His Grace is about to discover that his new wife finds shouting down the length of a dining table considerably less appealing than actual conversation.” Louisa crossed to the place setting nearest the head of the table and gestured toward it.
“Move this one beside the other, if you would. I have no wish to conduct an entire dinner as though we were exchanging letters across a great distance.”
The footman hesitated only a moment before complying, resetting the second place at Julian’s right hand rather than at the table’s opposite end.
Louisa surveyed the result with satisfaction before taking her seat. She smoothed her skirts while listening to the quiet tick of the mantel clock in the otherwise empty room.
This is a small thing; it has nothing to do with wanting his company. I simply see no sense in a marriage conducted at twenty feet of polished mahogany when a few feet would serve the purpose considerably better.
* * *
Julian noticed the change the moment he entered the room.
He had eaten alone at this table more evenings than he could easily count, the distance between the two settings a habit inherited from his father, who had believed a properly run household maintained a certain formal distance even at its own dinner table.
He had never questioned the arrangement. It had simply always been so.
Now the second setting sat at his right hand, close enough that conversation would require no effort at all, and his wife sat behind it with an expression that dared him, quite plainly, to comment on the change.
He did not comment. Whatever he made of it, he judged it wiser this early into their marriage to choose his battles with care, and a rearranged place setting did not strike him as a hill worth dying on.
He crossed to his chair and sat, and found that the closer arrangement unsettled him rather less than he might have expected an hour ago.
“The soup is very good,” Louisa offered, once the first course had been set before them and the footmen had withdrawn to the edges of the room. “Your cook has a talent for it, whoever she is.”
“Mrs. Adler. She has been with the household longer than I have held the title. My father hired her, and I have never once found reason to question his judgment on that particular front, whatever else I might question about him.”
“High praise, coming from you.”
“I am not given to praise I do not mean, Duchess. I should think you had gathered that much about me by now.”
“I had. I merely enjoy hearing it confirmed.” She reached for her water, eyeing him over the rim of the glass. “Speaking of Kit, I would like to begin proper lessons with him as soon as it can be arranged. Tomorrow, if the household can accommodate it.”
“The schoolroom stands ready whenever you wish to use it. What did you have in mind?”
“An hour each morning, to start. No more than that. I do not wish to overwhelm him, and I suspect a boy accustomed to silence will find even an hour of concentrated attention rather taxing at first, however willing he seemed in that schoolroom.” She set the glass down, thoughtful.
“I would like your permission to take him to the stables for some of the lessons as well, if the weather allows it.”
“The stables.” Julian’s eyebrows rose slightly. “That is not where I would have thought to conduct a lesson in sign language.”
“No, I imagine not. But he is more himself there than anywhere else in the house, by every account I have heard, including your own. I suspect he will learn faster in a place that does not feel like a schoolroom, surrounded by the horses he already trusts, rather than trapped behind a desk, being asked to perform for two adults he barely knows.”
“You have my permission for whatever arrangement you believe will serve him best.” Julian set down his spoon.
“I confess I have never once thought to conduct his education anywhere but the schoolroom in all these years. Tutors came, sat him at a desk, and expected him to meet them there, and when he did not, they simply tried harder at the same desk rather than asking whether the desk itself was the difficulty.”
“It is not a failure of imagination on your part, Your Grace, if that is what troubles you. It is simply that most people believe a child must be taught in the manner that suited them as children, rather than the manner that suits the child in front of them. I suspect six tutors and two governesses failed for the same reason long before I ever arrived to point it out.”
“That is a rather generous reading of six years of accumulated failure.”
“I am not being generous. I am being accurate. There is a difference, though I grant they can look similar from a distance.” A faint smile touched her mouth.
“My grandmother taught me the same way, incidentally. Never at a desk, if she could help it. Always wherever I was comfortable enough to actually listen, rather than wherever propriety dictated a lesson ought to be conducted. I have simply borrowed her method and applied it to your ward, since it served me better than any governess I had.”
“Your grandmother sounds like a formidable woman.”
“She was the most formidable woman I have ever known, Your Grace, and I include in that assessment every duchess, countess, and matron I have ever encountered in five London Seasons.” Something soft moved behind Louisa’s eyes, there and gone.
“I only wish she had lived to see what her teaching has come to be useful for. She would have found the whole business with Kit vastly entertaining, I think, and would have had a great many opinions about you specifically.”
“I imagine she would.”
“She would have changed her mind eventually.”
“Would she?”
“Only if you gave her reason to. She was very fond of being proved wrong, provided someone had the courage to prove her.”
The second course arrived, and conversation drifted easily from Kit to Eleanor, Louisa describing the changes she intended to make to the nursery like a different set of curtains, perhaps, and softer blankets for the cradle, along with a few other small comforts she thought Eleanor might need.
To his surprise, Julian found himself offering opinions rather than simply permissions, suggesting the room that had once been his nursery might suit better than the one currently assigned, given its proximity to the wet nurse’s quarters.
“You remember your nursery well enough to have an opinion on its merits?”
“I remember it well enough to know it had better light in the mornings than the room currently in use, and considerably less draft in the evenings. Beyond that, I confess my memories of it are somewhat vague. I was rather young when I left it for the schoolroom, and my father was not a man who encouraged lingering fondness for childish spaces.”
“That is rather sad, said so plainly.”
“It is merely a fact, Duchess. I have found sadness a poor use of energy better spent on practical matters.” But something in his voice did not entirely match the words.
Louisa did not press further, sensing correctly that the subject had reached the limit of what he was prepared to offer this evening.
She asked question after question, genuinely curious rather than merely polite, and he found the answers coming easily, more easily than they had in any dinner conversation he could readily recall, the words arriving without the usual effort of feigning interest he associated with most social interactions.
By the time the final course had been cleared and the candles had burned down, Julian realized, with some private astonishment, that the better part of two hours had passed in easy, uninterrupted conversation, and that at some point during the second course he had stopped noticing the unfamiliar closeness of the rearranged place setting.
It occurred to him, not without surprise, that he had spent years dining in silence without ever questioning the habit. He had thought the absence of conversation preferable to the strain of making it. Yet Louisa possessed the uncommon ability to speak without exhausting him.
She filled the spaces naturally, asked questions worth answering, and expected nothing from him beyond honesty. It was… not unpleasant. Indeed, he found he rather preferred it to another evening alone with only the sound of cutlery and the mantel clock for company.
* * *
Louisa climbed the stairs afterward with a single thought following her the whole way up, small and unexpected and entirely unwelcome in its persistence.
Ashvale Park does not feel quite so lonely tonight.
She paused at the top of the staircase, considering the thought properly, turning it over the way she turned over most things that troubled her.
The house had felt, upon her arrival that afternoon, beautiful but hollow, every room too large, too still, too carefully arranged for people who no longer properly lived in it.
She had felt the weight of that stillness pressing down on her the whole length of Mrs. Whitfield’s tour, and had wondered whether she had married into a house rather than a family.
Tonight, walking toward her rooms with the echo of two hours’ easy conversation still settling pleasantly in her chest, the house felt different. Not transformed, precisely. Simply less empty than it had a few hours ago.
It is only because dinner went well, she told herself firmly, continuing down the corridor toward her chamber.
We spoke of Kit’s lessons, the nursery, the harvest, and his boundary dispute with the Alderleys, and found that we have a great deal to discuss when the subject is practical rather than personal.
That is all this is. A marriage of convenience proceeding rather more smoothly than either of us had any right to expect, and nothing more complicated than that.
She reached her door and paused there for a moment, hand on the handle, replaying the warmth that had crept into Julian’s voice as he mentioned his tenant families by name, the unexpected ease with which he had answered every question she’d put to him, the brief unguarded honesty of his answer about his childhood nursery, offered and then quickly set aside as though he had surprised even himself by saying it aloud.
Nothing more than that…
She let herself mostly believe it, then went to bed.