Chapter 11
The rain had started after dinner and continued through the evening in the steady way of autumn rain. It was not a summer storm, just a persistent grey curtain that made the windows dark earlier and the fireplaces more necessary, and the whole house drew inward around itself.
Rachel had produced a pack of cards after dinner and taught Anna a game she claimed to have invented herself, which Anna suspected was a modified version of something she had learned elsewhere and improved to her own advantage.
They played for two hours at the small table in Rachel’s sitting room, with the fire going properly and a plate of biscuits.
“You’re cheating,” Anna said, studying her cards.
“I am not cheating,” Rachel said. “I am playing strategically.”
“Those are different things.”
“They are very different things. One of them is dishonest.” She rearranged her hand with great serenity. “Your turn.”
Anna played a card. Rachel played two, which was not how the game worked as had been explained to her, and Anna set down her hand and looked at Rachel, who looked back with perfect equanimity.
“Explain.”
“The double play is permitted when you’ve held that card for three turns,” Rachel said, which was entirely invented, and they both knew it.
“You made that up.”
“I remembered it late.”
“Rachel!”
“Oh, fine.” Rachel put the cards face down on the table and took a biscuit instead. “You were winning anyway.”
“I was winning before you began inventing rules.” Anna set her cards down and reached for her chamomile tea. It was just past ten; the clock on the mantelpiece had announced it. The fire had settled from bright to comfortable. “When did you start cheating at cards?”
“I prefer to think of it as adapting to circumstances,” Rachel said. “Frederick does it.”
Anna looked at her.
“Not at cards,” Rachel clarified. “At everything else. When a situation is not going the way he wants, he adjusts the terms until it does.” She turned her teacup in its saucer, and her voice shifted.
“He has always done it. He was thirteen years old when he decided he was going to…” She paused.
“When things at home became difficult. He simply rewrote the terms for himself. Decided what he was going to be and became it. He doesn’t realize that I noticed, at least some of it… ”
Anna was quiet for a moment and did not press.
“He carries a great deal,” she said carefully.
“He always has.” Rachel looked at the fire.
“I understood it less when I was younger. I thought he was simply like that. Very steady, very certain, nothing touching him.” She turned her cup again.
“It took me longer than it should have to understand he had built walls around himself to be that way.”
Anna thought about a desk full of papers and a door that was open late at night. She considered the way he sat at the dinner table, with the controlled surface firmly in place. Yet beneath it, she was increasingly certain, something alive and special lay in wait.
“He is proud of you,” Anna said. “He doesn’t say it, but it’s there.”
Rachel looked at her. “You think so?”
“I am quite certain.” Anna set down her cup.
“The way he watches you when you’re talking.
When you said something at dinner last week about the east wing curtains, I watched him.
He looked at you like you had said something perfectly correct that he wished he had thought of.
” She paused. “He just didn’t say so, because… ”
“Because he never says so,” Rachel finished. She was quiet for a moment. “I am still irritated with him, you know.”
“I know.”
“About the village.”
“I know.” Anna smiled. “Though, I think he was not entirely wrong, even if he was entirely wrong about how he said it.”
“Yes,” she said, finally, with the reluctance of a fair person reaching an unfavorable conclusion. “I suppose that’s about right.” She pointed at Anna. “Don’t tell him I said that. Don’t you dare.”
“Never.”
“He’ll be insufferable. His head will grow ten times its current size.”
“Imagine the sight!”
Rachel laughed, and Anna laughed with her, and the rain went on against the windows, and the fire went down by degrees, and they sat together in the comfortable quiet of two people who had stopped needing to fill the silence.
I cannot get myself to sleep, despite the chamomile tea and good company.
Anna had gone to bed at eleven with every intention of sleeping well. But the sleep would not come. She lay in the dark listening to the rain, which had not stopped. Her mind turned as midnight came. It was not on large things.
She thought about Maura, in the house in London, and hoped she was well.
She thought about the statement she had written, which was out of her hands.
She had written it in three hours and felt, afterward, as though she had set something down that she had been carrying since the morning itself.
She thought about Percy eating the chicken.
She thought about the Duke…
Frederick. I wonder if his parents ever called him Fred, or even Freddie? He has spoken so little of them, although I get the looming feeling that not all was well in the house prior to their deaths.
She turned over in the bed and looked at the ceiling.
He has the broadest shoulders I have ever seen, as wide as a doorway and muscles that show even under his overcoat.
His amber eyes hold speckles of green and brown that communicate more than his words ever could; as little as he speaks, it is a good thing he has them.
And his smell intoxicates me each time I pass him, try as I do to ignore it.
It is so soothing, warm soap, soft pine…
She was not going to think about Frederick. She was not going to think about his past, his present, or his future.
And she was definitely not going to think about what lay beneath his clothes.
He had been clear, and she had been sensible, and both of those things remained true. In fact, nothing had transpired between them, and yet she was lying awake cataloging each interaction they had ever shared. It was not a productive use of the midnight hours.
She thought more chamomile would help, and remembered Mrs. Hale had pointed it out during the tour, tucked into the herb cupboard off the kitchen.
The house was quiet enough at this hour; she would not encounter anyone.
She put on her dressing gown, found her slippers, lit the small candle on the nightstand, and went downstairs.
The corridor was dark and still. The rain on the windows was quieter, muffled by the old walls. She moved along the east wing toward the main stairs, her candle throwing a small warm circle around her feet. She saw the light before she heard anything.
Frederick’s study was at the end of the north corridor, which she did not need to pass on her way to the kitchen. She heard a sound. Low, unclear, and not a voice. She stopped and listened.
Then, she heard Percy’s soft meow. She went toward the study.
The door was four inches open, and she could see through it without pushing it further.
The Duke was at his desk, slumped forward, his cheek on his folded arms, papers everywhere, the lamp burning low beside him.
He had fallen asleep over his work, still fully dressed, his coat discarded on the chair behind him.
It was…rather endearing.
Percy was on the corner of the desk, very close to his head. The cat was watching him carefully. The cat reached out one paw and placed it softly on Frederick’s arm. Then she heard it properly.
“No.” His voice, blurred with sleep, stripped of everything that normally inhabited it. “No-no—”
His shoulders had tightened, and his hands had closed in the papers beneath them. Percy meowed again, the same short, concerned sound, and pawed at his arm a second time.
Anna pushed the door open and went in.
She was across the room before she had thought about it, her candle set down on the edge of the desk, her hand soft and rubbing his shoulder.
“Your Grace,” she whispered.
He came awake with a full-body flinch, and he was upright before she had time to step back. His breath was coming in fast and ragged, eyes open but not yet focused on the present moment.
“Your Grace.” She kept her voice low and very steady. “You’re at your desk. You’re in your study. It’s all right. I’m here. Percy’s here.”
He was breathing too fast. His hands were on the desk surface and pressing into it.
His eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle distance that was not quite the room.
She pulled the footstool over and sat directly in front of him, close enough that he would see her when he came back.
The proximity pulled at her like centrifugal force, as if they were one entity facing this nightmare together.
“Look at me,” she said as she put her hands on either side of his handsome face. “Here. Look at me.”
His eyes found hers, and she could feel the heat from his skin prickle her own.
“Good.” She kept her voice at the same soft tone as she inched her face closer to his, tentatively and calm. “Breathe slower than that. Follow mine.” She breathed in, deliberately, let him see it, breathed out. “Again.”
He breathed in. Ragged at the edges, but slower.
“Again.”
The third time was nearly steady.
“Good.”
She waited, setting her hands on her lap. She did not touch him again. She simply stayed where she was, close enough that he had something to focus on. Percy had retreated to the edge of the desk and was sitting very straight, watching.
After a minute, his breath regulated. His hands uncurled from the desk surface.
He blinked once, twice, and then he was back.
She could see him becoming aware of her, of the room, of the fact that she was sitting three feet away in her dressing gown, having just watched him be afraid.
The composure that came down was very fast and very thorough.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice rough from sleep and the nightmare.
“I could not sleep, and I thought some tea might help.” She kept her voice even, without drama. “I was going to the kitchen. Your door was open and Percy was… concerned.”
“Percy cannot speak.”
I am glad his quickness is back.
“I think he does in his own way,” she said.
He looked at Percy, who just looked back at him and blinked. “You didn’t have to—”
“You were shaking,” Anna said simply. “I did have to.”
He said nothing. She picked up her candle. She could leave. He was back, steady; the surface held. She should leave. She let the wax drip down her finger, the heat of which was not even close to the pull she felt to stay.
“You fell asleep at your desk working,” she said, instead.
“I work until the work is done.”
“You work until you collapse, you mean.”
“I don’t…” He stopped. “I don’t collapse. It was a nap.”
“You were asleep at your desk over papers at midnight.” She looked at him. “What would you call it?”
“An occupational hazard.” He reached up and pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes briefly. “I have a duchy to run.”
“A habit of punishing yourself with work until your body takes the decision away from you,” Anna said. “Because if you stop working, you might have to…” She paused. “Truly examine whatever that was, just now.”
He looked at her. She looked back.
“You’re perceptive,” he said.
“I’ve had a long time to understand what exhaustion looks like when it’s being worn as a suit of armor.” She held his gaze. “Your work will still be here tomorrow.” She kept her voice gentle. “But you will work better, think better, and be better if you sleep. Properly.”
I am worried about you, she wanted to say.
He was looking at her. She became aware, somewhere in the middle of this, that she had leaned forward slightly, and that the candlelight was between them, and that her dressing gown had slipped.
The left side shoulder seam was loose, she realized, and his gaze moved to her bare shoulder, the line of her collarbone in the warm light.
Then his warm amber eyes went back to her face, and what was them was not controlled at all.
Something hot and charged and unknown pulsed within her.
He was close enough that she could see the rare, unguarded warmth of his expressive amber eyes.
She hadn’t imagined it. She leaned forward, ever so slightly, which he returned as they grew closer.
She licked her lips and looked up at him from beneath her eyelashes.
Her braid shifted just a little, exposing her shoulder just a bit more, and she thought she heard him almost growl.
A ball of paper shot across the floor at considerable speed. They both pulled back.
Percy had apparently located a crumpled estate letter that had fallen beneath the desk and made it his new toy.
He batted it toward the bookcase, pursued it, lost it, found it again, and sent it skidding onto the fireplace screen with a small crash.
The room reassembled itself, and the electricity dissipated into something awkward.
The Duke straightened, and the dark thing in his eyes receded behind the surface. “Go back to your room,” he said sharply.
His voice was not cruel, but it might as well have been a knife. Anna stood and drew her dressing gown back onto her shoulder; her cheeks had turned pink, and she willed them to cool.
“Goodnight,” she murmured as she rose to her feet.
She did not wait for an answer. She took her candle and went out into the corridor.
Behind her, she heard the study door close, and Percy’s paper ball hit something else, and the rain went on.