Chapter 12
“Your Grace, will you take the eggs or the kippers this morning?”
“Both, I think.”
“Very good, Your Grace. Is there anything else you require?”
Julian considered a moment before folding the letter. “No, thank you.”
He sat alone at the breakfast table, the morning light falling pale and clean through the tall windows, the house around him stirring awake—footsteps on the stairs, the distant clatter of pots from the kitchens below, a door opening somewhere above that might have been the nursery.
He found himself listening for that last sound rather more closely than he had any occasion to before yesterday.
“Simmons.” His butler had appeared at the sideboard to refill his coffee, and Julian addressed him without quite looking up from his letters. “Has the wet nurse and the child settled in comfortably?”
“I believe so, Your Grace. Mrs. Whitfield saw to her rooms personally, and I’m told the child slept through most of the night, which I understand is no small mercy for a household unaccustomed to infants.”
“No, I imagine it is not.”
Simmons withdrew, and Julian returned to his letters, though his attention kept drifting toward the ceiling above him, toward the room where an infant not his own by blood now slept, toward the boy somewhere in the stables who was likely already elbow-deep in Rosalind’s grooming.
Everything feels different this morning, he thought, buttering a piece of toast he had no appetite for. And I cannot determine the exact reason, beyond the obvious fact that there is now a baby sleeping two floors above my breakfast table and a wife sleeping considerably closer than that.
“Did you say something, Your Grace?”
Julian looked up. A footman stood near the door, an inquisitive expression on his face, clearly under the impression he had just been addressed.
“No. Nothing. My apologies, John.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” The footman withdrew, though not without a small, curious glance over his shoulder.
Alone again, Julian realized with faint embarrassment that he had voiced a part of that thought without meaning to. He could not recall exactly which part.
He set down his toast.
I must be more careful. A duke who voices his thoughts in front of the staff will very quickly become a duke the staff finds too interesting.
He finished his coffee, gathered his letters, and made his way to the stables before his study, as he always did, though this morning the errand felt less like a habit and more like something he actually wished to do.
“Good morning, Kit.”
The boy did not look up from where he stood brushing down his mare, his dark head bent over the work with the same absorbed concentration Julian had come to expect, the same wall standing exactly where it had stood the day before and the one before it.
“I trust Rosalind is behaving herself this morning.”
Nothing. The brush moved on, steady, unhurried.
“Your new tutor—” Julian caught himself. “The Duchess. She tells me she means to begin your lessons today. I understand some of them may be conducted here, in the stables, rather than the schoolroom, if that suits you better.”
Kit’s hand paused briefly over the mare’s flank, the same small hesitation Julian had learned to notice and had learned, just as quickly, not to hope too much from. Then the brush resumed its steady motion, and the boy gave no further sign.
After another moment of standing in the doorway waiting for something that would not come, Julian nodded to himself and withdrew.
One day at a time, he reminded himself, walking the short distance back to the house. She told me as much herself. There is no hurry.
His study, when he reached it, offered its usual quiet, the fire already laid. Julian settled behind it with the intention of losing himself in estate business for the better part of the morning, as he had done nearly every morning for the past three years.
Instead, his mind wandered to Daniel.
Elizabeth had never truly recovered. In the year after the accident, she had faded from a woman of warmth and laughter into a quiet shadow wandering her own house until she finally died.
Julian had watched it happen and understood that love could leave a wound no passage of time was guaranteed to heal.
He stared at the letter in front of him without reading a single word of it.
Kit lost two parents. His father to an accident no one could have prevented. And his mother, in every way that mattered, to a grief so complete it left nothing of her behind for him to hold onto.
He had made himself a promise in the year following their deaths, standing alone in this room with a boy upstairs who would not speak and his friend’s grave still fresh in the churchyard, that he would never allow himself to love a woman so much that her loss, or his, could destroy either of them the way Daniel’s death had destroyed Elizabeth.
He would be steady. Reliable. A man who gave protection and respect in equal measure, and asked for nothing beyond it, because nothing beyond it could ever be safely lost.
I will be a good husband to Louisa, and I will protect her. I will respect her, as I have promised. I will keep every line of that agreement to the letter, for as long as we both shall live. Nothing more than that. Nothing that could ever cost either of us what Daniel’s death cost Elizabeth.
The resolution settled over him with familiar, steadying weight.
“Your Grace? Might I have a moment?”
Julian looked up.
Louisa stood in the doorway, a small stack of papers in her hands. Her hair was dressed simply this morning, a single loose curl escaping at her temple that she had not troubled to brush back. She seemed absorbed in whatever figures she carried, a faint furrow between her eyebrows.
He was beginning to notice that she had that furrow whenever something intrigued her.
He found himself watching her a moment longer than the question required, the morning light catching the auburn in her hair, the unhurried certainty in the way she crossed his study without waiting for an invitation, entirely at ease in a room that made most people considerably more careful of themselves.
There was something about her stillness this morning, standing there frowning at her papers with her lower lip caught between her teeth, that struck him as almost unbearably lovely.
It was not the practiced loveliness of a woman dressed for admiration, but something quieter, more honest, a woman simply being herself without the smallest thought to how she appeared while doing it.
He swallowed and looked away before she could catch him at it.
“Of course. What troubles you?”
“Mrs. Whitfield has given me the household accounts to review, as I understand is customary for a new mistress, and I have found several entries here I cannot quite make sense of.” She crossed to his desk and set the papers before him, leaning slightly towards him to point at a column of figures.
“This expenditure, under ‘eastern tenancy repairs.’ Is that related to the thatching you mentioned yesterday, or is it something separate I ought to understand?”
“The same matter. My steward wrote requesting authorization, and I approved the expense before we left London. It should have been recorded under next quarter’s projected costs rather than this quarter’s actual, which I suspect is the source of your confusion.”
“That is precisely what confused me. Thank you.” She studied the figures a moment longer, then looked up at him, something satisfied settling over her features now that the puzzle had resolved itself.
“I find I would rather understand the whole of it properly, Your Grace, than simply sign whatever is placed in front of me. I hope that does not strike you as an imposition.”
“It does not strike me as an imposition at all.” He meant it more than the simple words suggested, and something in his voice must have conveyed that, because she held his gaze a moment longer than the exchange strictly required before gathering her papers again.
“I am glad of it, in fact. I would rather my wife understood my household thoroughly than merely occupied a chair at its head.”
“Good.” A faint smile touched her mouth. “Then you will not object if I have a great many more questions before the week is out.”
“I look forward to them.”
She left as briskly as she had arrived.
Julian sat a long moment after the door had closed behind her, the letters entirely forgotten in front of him, the memory of Elizabeth and the promise he’d made himself sitting oddly alongside the lingering warmth of Louisa’s smile.
Two thoughts that ought to have settled comfortably together but did not, however carefully he tried to arrange them.
He shook his head firmly, pulling the letters back toward him with more force than was required.
Everything is under control. I have made my promises, and I intend to keep every one of them precisely as written, nothing more than that.
He was not entirely certain that he believed it as fully as he wished to.