Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Will you be going out today, Your Grace?” asked Mrs. Betsworth, coming into the room as Frances began her solitary breakfast. “It would be a pleasant day for luncheon on the front lawn, if you are staying at Westall Park. His Grace wished you to know that he has already gone to London and will not be back until the evening.”
“Oh, I see,” Frances responded quietly. “I shall think on it, Mrs. Betsworth, and find you after breakfast.”
The atmosphere at Westall Park had been subdued in the days after the visit of Frances’ family.
She had managed to recover her spirits alone in her room following that difficult afternoon, and felt that her mother and father had simply accepted Beatrice’s story of migraine.
The Duke of Westall was another story, however, both that evening and afterwards.
While always polite, the duke’s mood seemed to have become distant and detached. He had been his normal self at dinner with Lord and Lady Scovell and Beatrice, or at least had put on a convincing act. Then, immediately after waving the carriage away, something had changed.
Why can you not leave me alone?
Oh, why had she hurled those words at him on the staircase? They had bubbled up from somewhere in Frances’ febrile inner mind before she could stop them. Now, she did not know how to take them back, and perhaps it was too late to try.
Seemingly preoccupied with his own thoughts, Ambrose no longer attempted to start conversations with Frances, beyond the most cursory exchanges about Winifred.
He also spent much more time out of the house, either walking or riding alone, and twice passed full days in London without offering explanation.
Questions gnawed at Frances. Where was Ambrose going, and with whom? Why wasn’t he trying to talk to Frances anymore as he had done in the first weeks after their wedding? Did he think differently of Frances now that he knew so much of her past? Had Frances driven him away?
Today, after almost a week of mounting anxiety that she could neither entirely justify nor explain, such questions would not be silenced.
They followed Frances through her morning of letter writing and household tasks, the suggested luncheon at a small table outside, and her long afternoon ramble with Winifred in the woodlands.
When Frances finally heard the sound of returning carriage wheels that evening, she knew that she could wait no longer for answers.
Despite Burrington distinctly informing the duke of Frances’ presence in the library, Ambrose’s now-familiar footsteps crossed the hallway and passed onwards without stopping.
Frances had an uncomfortable sense of having been abandoned although she felt also that she had no right to this.
Unable to sit still any longer with such feelings, she rose and went to the duke’s study, knocking lightly on the door so as not to take him by surprise. In tones of polite neutrality, he bid her enter, getting to his feet as she approached the desk.
“Are you well, Ambrose?” Frances asked tentatively, noting his slightly weary appearance, rumpled hair and loosened stock.
“Yes, I am well,” the duke confirmed, his tone still giving little away and his expression somewhat distracted. “I trust all is well here at Westall Park? Winifred certainly seems happy every time I speak to her.”
“Yes, she is,” Frances replied. “All is well.”
The second part of her statement lacked conviction even in her own ears. All was not well, certainly with her, but she struggled either to find the right words or the will to express such things.
“Is Winifred asleep?” the duke added. “I read to her last night and assumed it would be your turn tonight.”
“Yes, she fell asleep very quickly, an hour ago,” Frances responded, and then continued to stand there in rather lame silence, wishing that Ambrose would help her broach more weighty topics. “We had a long walk in the woods today.”
If he did not lead the conversation in a more meaningful direction, was she going to just stand there all night? Or only until he made it clear that he was busy and did not want her company?
“Why are you avoiding me?” Frances blurted suddenly and saw a flash of surprise in her husband’s midnight blue eyes.
“I am not avoiding you, Frances,” he told her after a short pause for thought. “I have had a great deal on my mind this week, and you had asked me to leave you alone.”
Frances looked down, again wishing that she could take back that foolish assertion. Whatever else it was that she wanted, it seemed not to be Ambrose’s absence from Westall Park and her own life.
“Why did you go to London today?” she asked the duke, playing for time as she tried to arrange her own thoughts more clearly, but dismayed by how interrogative her question sounded.
“Many reasons. I wanted to see Colin and I also had calls to make on acquaintances, lawyers and so forth.”
This was not a very forthcoming answer and Frances did not know what to make of it. Ambrose might equally be hiding the truth or simply not wishing to talk to her.
“Which friends and acquaintances?” she put to him, half-expecting him to evade the question.
“Lord Mulford, among others,” he told her without prevarication. “That particular call could not be delayed.”
“You spoke to Oswald Keeton?!” Frances gasped in dismay, feeling slightly sick at the idea of it. “Why did you have to do that? I just wish I could forget about him. Now he will only get worse.”
“I did it because it was necessary,” Ambrose stated implacably, without any hint of apology or regret. “I did it because he has hurt you and I would be no kind of husband if I did not protect my wife. You need not worry about him again because I will be here to deal with him.”
Part of Frances wanted badly to believe this, to believe that the Duke of Westall could be a shield from her troubled past and a guide to a new future. Another part of her quailed at the thought of what vengeful tactics Lord Mulford might stoop to next.
“Oh, I hate him. I hate him! But I told you not to do this!” she protested, giving words to both streams of contradictory thoughts in her vexation and confusion. “I fear he will never stop, Ambrose. Everything only seems to encourage him. I wish you hadn’t called on him.”
The duke shook his dark head, the gravity of his expression unchanged by her emotional outburst.
“Seeing you like this only confirms that I was right to confront him, Frances. One day, I hope you will see it too. Now, you are overwrought and I think you ought to retire.”
“I am not a child to be sent to bed!” Frances snapped but then stopped, anguished all over again by the effects of her own inner turmoil. “I am sorry, Ambrose. I do not know what is wrong with me. Why can I not be normal, like other wives?”
“I would not want you to be like anyone else’s wife,” the duke told her simply. “I should not have married you if you were. As for what is wrong with you, you are simply tired and overwrought, as anyone can me, man woman or child.”
How sensible he sounded, despite everything, and how handsome and appealing his own tired face looked. In this moment, Frances really did wish that she could be a proper wife to him.
“I’ve missed you,” she confessed very softly, her heart rising into her throat with the vulnerability of such an admission.
At first Ambrose said nothing and Frances wondered whether he had not heard her, or even if she had only thought the words rather than speaking them aloud. Then, he came out from behind the desk and stood in front of her, his brows knitted thoughtfully.
“Frances, when we married, I told you that we must get to know one another better,” he told her patiently.
“I still think that, but I don’t want to put you under pressure.
After all that I learned when your family visited Westall Park, and especially after you told me to leave you alone, I realized I had inadvertently pushed too hard already. ”
“I didn’t mean it,” Frances told him. “I didn’t mean for you to avoid me.”
She heard Ambrose sigh again and wondered if he was wishing she would just go away and stop bothering him.
“What did you mean, Frances? What do you want from me?”
His questions were kind and less demanding than any of her own had been tonight, but still she struggled to answer him and shook her head mutely.
Once more Ambrose sighed. With tears in her eyes, Frances stepped forward, tensing herself.
“Shall I kiss you?” she whispered, but he swiftly took her by the shoulders and held her back before she could attempt it.
“Not here and now, not like this,” the duke answered firmly. “It would not be the same, believe me.”
Feeling both rejected and relieved, Frances nodded, a tear now escaping and running down her face.
“I understand,” she began to say but Ambrose shook his head.
“No, I don’t think you do,” he replied, wiping her tear with his handkerchief.
“If you really wished to kiss me now, it would be the most wonderful thing in the world, but you are not ready, Frances. You are presently tired, afraid and hurt. I am not going to let you hurt yourself more by giving yourself to me unwillingly.”
Taking her arm, Ambrose walked her to the study door and then into the hallway, where he put a candlestick into her hand from a side table.
“Go to bed and sleep, Frances,” he advised her. “We might find that the world looks less bleak and desperate in the morning.”
As the Duke of Westall returned to his study and closed the door, Frances walked slowly up the stairs replaying every part of the conversation. She cursed her own failures of communication and the irrationality that always seemed to take her over when the past came into play.
Frances felt herself full of impossible contradictions, both lonely and yet wishing to be left alone; both wanting Oswald to be stopped and yet not for her husband to confront him; both longing to be a proper wife to Ambrose and yet terrified at the thought of going to his bed…
How could such a tangle ever be unravelled?