Chapter 34
“Anna.” He kept his voice low and even. “You’re safe. You’re in your own house. You’re safe.”
Anna began to stir sometime later, although Frederick could not have said how much later.
Time had become approximate, and he had gone very still watching her.
Her brows drew together. Her head moved slightly on the pillow, slow and confused.
She was trying to focus; he could see the effort of it in her face.
“Frederick,” she said, barely audible.
He waited a moment longer to make sure it was real. Her eyes blinked open and looked up at his face, then lost it. She blinked them open again and something in her had settled, the confusion receding into something more lasting. Or at least he prayed.
“Frederick,” she said, a bit more clearly.
“Yes.” He didn’t move. “Are you in pain?”
A faint, unsteady breath. The smallest shake of her head.
“You gave me quite a scare.” He had intended this to come out dry, and it did not.
Her eyes were closing again. “What—”
“You have a fever. You walked home in the rain last night.” He kept his voice steady. “You are going to recover. You will be fine, Anna.”
She seemed to accept this. A small, slow nod, and then her eyes closed entirely, and her breathing deepened back into sleep. Frederick sat in the chair beside her and held her hand and did not move. Rachel came in a few minutes later.
“Go and rest, at least for a few hours. I’ll watch her.”
“I’m staying.”
“Frederick—”
“I’m staying, Rachel.”
She studied him for a moment and then went away without arguing. She came back at two, four, and six. Each time, he was in the same chair, in the same position, Anna’s hand still loosely in his.
The night was not easy. Anna’s sleep was restless; she turned and muttered and went rigid in ways that brought him out of his chair to smooth the compress or adjust the blanket.
He did not sleep. The night went the way such nights do, slowly, and then all at once, until the grey light at the curtain’s edge signaled morning, and Frederick sat and watched her breathe and felt the hours.
“Good Morning, Your Grace,” the physician said. “I am here to see Lady Birchall.”
“Please,” he said as he rose from his chair to give the doctor room.
Dr. Warren had arrived at seven and was thorough. He examined and made sounds of cautious satisfaction.
“The fever has broken and while Lady Birchall is not yet well, she is no longer in immediate danger. With rest and continued care, she should recover fully within the week.”
Rachel exhaled beside Frederick like she had been holding her breath for twelve hours and was finally allowed to stop.
The tension in the house changed. Something that had been drawn very tight loosened into something with enough slack to give, to allow a soft landing rather than bracing for disaster.
“This is splendid news,” Frederick said as he shook the doctor’s hand. “Please see to it that all bills are sent to my estate.”
“Of course, Your Grace,” the doctor said as he made his exit.
Anna slowly became more present, and by mid-morning she could follow conversation and answer simple questions.
When Rachel sent for broth, Frederick took the bowl from the tray.
He was several spoonfuls in before he became aware of what he was doing.
He glanced up. Rachel was folding fresh cloths on the far side of the room.
He looked back at Anna. She was watching him with a clarity that hadn't been there yesterday.
“You should finish it,” he said as he offered her another spoonful, and she did.
“Well, we have enough cloths for now,” Rachel said as she crossed the room to Frederick. “I am going to pick some fresh flowers from the garden to bring up, to help raise her spirits.”
“That is a nice idea,” Frederick said as she walked out of the room and closed the door quietly behind her.
Anna sat up slightly and gingerly propped herself up on one elbow. She looked at Frederick for a long time.
“Why did you stay?” she asked finally.
Her voice was weak, roughened by the fever, but the question underneath it was strong. He set down the broth bowl. He looked at his hands, and then at her.
“Because I could not leave,” he said. “Rachel sent word to me that you were unwell and I was in my hall with my coat in my hand before I had finished reading it.”
“I see.”
“I have stopped pretending, at least to myself, that this is a simple thing.” He paused. “When I saw you in this bed… I have told you already, some of it. You may not remember.”
“I heard you,” she said, quietly. “Not all of it. But I heard your handsome voice.”
“I started at the beginning,” he said. “Our beginning, when you came to me. I need you to understand what I saw, because I have never said it aloud to anyone.” He looked at her directly.
“My mother had bruises like the ones I saw on your arm. For years. I was the only one who saw them you see. She was careful about it, very careful, which tells you something about the kind of man my father was… and the particular skill a woman has to develop around such men. I recognized them on you the morning after you arrived, and something…” He stopped.
“Something that had been sitting closed in me for a very long time opened up, and I have not been able to close it again.”
Anna had gone very still.
“There was a night,” he said, “when I was twelve, almost thirteen. I found her alone in the nursery, one night. My mother. She had Rachel in her arms, and I thought… Well, for one moment, I thought I was watching something tender. And then I saw what her hands were doing. She was trying to smother her.”
Anna gently took Frederick’s hand, and he continued.
“I got there in time. I don’t know how. I don’t remember crossing the room, only that I had Rachel against my chest and my mother was on the floor, weeping in a way I had never seen a grown woman weep, and she told me everything.”
“You are so brave,” Anna said, her voice hoarse.
“My father was not what the world believed him to be. She showed me then…” He stopped, then made himself go on. “She showed me what he had done to her, over years. Things a coat sleeve or a high collar can hide if a woman is careful.” He looked down. “My mother had become very careful.”
“I cannot imagine… how hard this was…”
“He had never touched me. I used to think that was mercy. It wasn’t.
I was his heir and I was useful to him, and a man like my father did not break the things he had use for.
But Rachel was a small girl. He’d have had no use for her at all, only contempt, and my mother knew exactly what that contempt would grow into. ”
“Oh Frederick…”
“She thought… God help her, she thought the kindest thing she could do for that child was end it before it began. But I told her I would not let that happen. I swore I would protect her, and I would protect Rachel. So, I became the wall between them and him. I learned what drew his eye and what turned it away. Sometimes I would stand in the wrong place at the right moment just so his temper landed somewhere it could do less damage. For a long time, it worked.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then he understood what I was doing. After that, Anna, it was me.”
He said it, without looking away, and watched tears come slowly into Anna’s eyes, and did not stop.
“And when I looked at you and I knew more than most just what you had walked out of on your wedding morning. I was not looking at a woman in difficulty. I was looking at something I had failed once before, something I had promised myself I would not fail again.” He paused. “That is what I told myself. At first.”
“And after?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“After,” he said, “I stopped being able to distinguish between protecting you and wanting you close to me. And I could not tell you that. I told myself I could not tell you that, because I have my father’s cursed blood in me, and I had watched what that blood did to the people in its reach.
I thought that it was better for this line to end with me. ”
He said it as plainly as everything else and watched her face. He waited for her to speak.
“Do you still believe that?” she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said.
“Not anymore. Not for some time if I am being honest, which I intend to be henceforth.” He looked at her.
“When I think of the future now, and oh God, I have tried not to, for a considerable while… but when I do, it is not absence I see. Every argument I made for restraint has stopped making sense.”
“What do you see now?” she asked. “When you think of the future?”
“You,” he said simply, quickly, his voice warm and full.
“I see you. And I want…” He stopped, steadied himself.
“I want it all, Anna. Not in pieces. Not at a careful distance. A life. A home. Children, if God is good and now more than ever I pray that he is. Everything you told me you wanted in the middle of a market, and everything you didn’t say.
” His voice was even, but underneath it she would be able to hear, he hoped, the thing that evenness was costing him.
“I know I have no right to ask it. I know what I put you through in this Season and the year before, the distance, the withdrawal. It seemed cruel, but I hope you understand now…”
“Tell me now then.”
“I know I kissed you in a carriage and then apologized for it as though it were a fault to be corrected, and I am so very sorry for that. For all of it.” He held her gaze. “I love you.”
She did not speak immediately. She was too busy looking at him, really looking, the way she had not quite let herself do until now as he laid himself bare before her.
At his face, drawn thin with exhaustion born from care.
At his hands, which had not stopped moving since he began, restless in a way she had never seen from him, as though the stillness he wore like armor had finally cracked.
She could not reckon that Frederick, the Duke of Rathbourne, was now sitting folded into a sickroom chair too small for a man his size, having not slept in a day, telling her the worst thing he knew about himself.
He has never told this to a living soul. Not like this.
She understood, watching him, that she was not only hearing the words.
She was hearing everything that had stood behind him for years.
She saw the boy who had learned to read a room before he could properly read a treatise, the man who had built himself around the shape of a wound he’d never shown anyone.
He is telling me this, with all his heart, because he trusts that I will not break it.
“I believe you,” she said at last. “Not only the words. All of it. Thank you for sharing this with me.”
She watched something in him ease at that, just slightly at the shoulders.
“But I have to say this.” She drew a breath, aware of how thin her own voice sounded.
“I do not want to be something you protect from a distance. I have been protected from a distance before. It is lonely in a way that is worse than being unprotected. Do you understand that? To be kept safe by someone who has already decided not to need you back.” She held his eyes, because this part mattered too much to look away from.
“I think I do.”
“If I am to be with you, it must be because you want me. Not because you feel responsible for my pain, or because you are some hero. Not because Birchall reminded you of something you couldn’t leave behind.”
“I swear it is not that,” he said immediately, before she had even finished drawing breath after the last word. “It has never been only that. If it were, I would have been able to walk away.”
She studied him. Some old, careful part of her that had learned, long before him, to distrust a man’s certainty, made her ask it anyway. “Are you certain you are not simply confusing care for love?”
“I know the difference,” he said. “I swear it. Care is what I have given everyone, my entire life. It is organized. Manageable. It does not…” He stopped. “What I feel for you has not made me more controlled. It has made me considerably less. That is how I know.”
Something in her chest gave way the way ice melts in the sun, all at once and yet somehow gradually, her rigid body going soft. She gave him a small, tired smile.
“I love you too then,” she said. “I have been failing not to for rather a long time.”
He exhaled and laughed slowly. He inched closer to her and brushed a stray curl off her face. He cupped her cheek.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and it came out of her with no hesitation at all, her voice suddenly strong. “Oh yes, Frederick.”
He leaned forward and kissed her, gently and lovingly.
The room went quiet around them. Not a hush.
He cupped her cheeks in both hands, drew back to look at her, and she let him.
She knew he’d find a pale, weak version of herself, still a good week from anything like recovery.
Yet with a confidence imbued with true love, she looked back at him and did not try to hide what was on her own face.
For the first time in a long time, perhaps ever, she was truly, incandescently happy.
“You should sleep,” he said finally.
“Probably,” she agreed, and did not let go of his hand.
He settled back into the chair beside her. He stayed. And the quiet that filled the room this time was nothing like the quiet of the night before. This one was full of everything they finally had, and a promise of the future to come.