Chapter 34
“Well, well, aren’t we fortunate that the Duchess has deigned to visit us?
” Samuel came out of his study before Rosaline had gotten past the hall, as if he had been listening for the door.
“You look thin. Is His Grace not feeding you, or have you made a complete hash of running his household already?”
“Good afternoon, Samuel.” Rosaline pulled off her gloves and did not stop walking. “I am here to visit my sisters.”
He fell into step beside her.
“I asked you a question.” There was that familiar tone in his voice, as if he were reaching for a leash to rein her in.
“Are you conducting yourself as a duchess should? Are you obeying His Grace? If you cannot manage your own husband, Rosaline, you’ll become a joke.
And a joke reflects poorly on your entire family.
And on me. Is there news of an impending heir?
There should be talk of an heir if you are conducting yourself—”
“Have you redecorated the hall?” She paused at the bottom of the stairs and looked with feigned interest at the new wallpaper. “It’s rather loud, don’t you think? Like it’s shouting to be heard.” She placed her hand on the banister. “Beatrice and Ivy are upstairs, correct?”
Samuel’s jaw tightened.
A year ago, his questions would have landed on her like sharp hooks, each one digging into the soft place they were meant for. She would have stood in this hall and felt herself shrink with every word. She waited for it to happen, but it did not.
He was a weak, disappointing man standing in a hall with loud wallpaper. He had spent three years controlling her life and growing larger in her mind, and now that he could no longer do it, he had shrunk to his real size, which she realized was not very impressive.
“You are as insolent as always,” he scoffed. “Marriage has not improved your disposition.”
“No,” Rosaline replied pleasantly.
She went up the stairs, leaving him gaping after her in his loud hall.
The nursery door had barely opened before someone barreled into her.
“You came, you came, you came!” Ivy had crossed the room like a cannonball and clung to Rosaline’s waist with all of her strength.
“Beatrice said you might not visit because duchesses are very busy. But I told her that you promised on the frogs, and you never break a frog promise, and I was right.” She tilted her chin up, beaming.
“Have you brought me a stag? Are we going to Scotland? Did you bring me anything at all?”
“Take a breath, you mercenary creature. I have brought myself, and that will have to do.” Rosaline crouched and gathered Ivy in her arms. She pressed her face into her sister’s hair, which smelled of chalk and jam and innocence, and she held on a moment longer than necessary.
“Let me look at you. I believe you have grown five inches since I last saw you, and I forbid it. Stop growing at once.”
Ivy giggled and submitted herself to Rosaline’s inspection before launching into a tale of a frog she had smuggled into the house and then promptly lost. The ensuing catastrophe had banished her to the nursery for an entire day.
Ivy was sure that the frog had emigrated to Scotland without her out of spite.
Rosaline listened and laughed at the retelling, and let the warmth of Ivy’s small body against her do its work on the cold thing that had been lodged beneath her ribs for days.
Across the room, Beatrice remained silent. She sat in the window seat with a book open on her lap, watching them.
Rosaline knew that look. Beatrice noticed everything—the weight she had lost, the shadows under her eyes, and the way she had held onto Ivy a bit too long. And judging by her expression, she had decided that something was very wrong.
“Ivy.” Her voice was quiet, but her eyes did not leave Rosaline’s. “Go and tell Cook that the Duchess is here and we will want the good cakes, not the plain ones. Stand over her until she promises. Take your time. Check the cakes personally, as this is a grave responsibility.”
Entrusted with an important task, Ivy tore off toward the stairs with the door swinging shut behind her.
When the sound of her footsteps faded, Beatrice turned to Rosaline. “Tell me who I have to ruin.”
“No one.” Rosaline settled into a chair and folded her hands in her lap. “It’s nothing, Beatrice. Simply a quarrel that every married couple has.”
“You have not slept, judging by the circles under your eyes. You have not mentioned your husband once, and you held onto Ivy as if you were saying a permanent goodbye.” Beatrice closed her book and set it down.
She slid off the window seat and sat beside Rosaline.
All the usual sharpness in her voice had gone quiet and grave.
“I warned him, you know. At the wedding. I told him I read a great deal and never forget a slight. I told him that I would find a way to make him regret it if he made you feel small. I meant it then, and I mean it now. So, what did he do?”
Rosaline, who had kept the pain of the fissure with Magnus behind her teeth for a week and swallowed her words in Abigail’s drawing room, found that she could share it with her sister.
Beatrice, who had shared with her all the good and the bad throughout the years, was the one person she could entrust with it.
So she told her. Not all of it. Not the dangerous heart of it with the names, because that was Magnus’s story to tell. And because she could not risk anything coming to rest on her sisters’ shoulders. But she told the shape of the quarrel.
Beatrice listened without interrupting, which for her was an act of superhuman strength. When Rosaline fell silent, she remained quiet, turning the story over.
“So he is a fool,” she concluded.
“Bea…”
“Your husband is a large, romantic, self-immolating fool, which is the very worst kind, because they think their nobleness is a virtue.” Her eyes narrowed.
“I could put stinging nettles in his bed. I am not without resources. I could acquire a good, a truly vindictive good, and place it in his study. I have read several books on poisons, the kind that would force a person to spend several days hugging their chamber pot. Nothing fatal. I am not a monster.”
She was ticking off her methods one by one on her fingers, her tone entirely serious. Rosaline felt the corners of her mouth twitch upwards for the first time in a week.
Beatrice, however, was not done. “I could write him a letter so devastating that he would have to leave the country. I am excellent with letters. Or Ivy could simply pester him for an extended period, which no adversary in history could survive.”
“Stop.” But Rosaline was smiling helplessly. It both hurt and helped in the same breath. “You cannot goose a duke, Bea.”
“I can goose anyone I like. Rank is no protection against a determined goose.” Beatrice let the words land, watched the smile take hold. Then, she gently let go of the joke and took her sister’s hand. “There. That is much better. You have a face again, rather than a mask.”
They sat there for a while, their hands linked, like they had sat a thousand times through bad nights when they were children.
Rosaline looked at her sharp, fierce, absurd sister, armed with nettles and a whole arsenal of love, and felt the thing she had been circling all week settle over her like a weight.
Because in that moment, she understood Magnus, and that was the trouble. Sitting here in this room, with Ivy’s laughter coming up the stairs and Beatrice’s hand tight in hers, Rosaline felt the same fierce certainty that she would do the same for these two as Magnus felt he must for his father.
She understood what drove him, and she could not pretend she did not.
She would burn the whole world down for Beatrice and Ivy.
She had nearly burned herself down for them already, year after year, calling it nothing.
She never once thought it a choice because for the people you loved, it was not a choice. It was simply the shape of you.
That was what she had walked out on. Not a man being cruel, but a man loving a father the way she loved her sisters. And that was the thing she could not tell Abigail and could barely admit to herself.
She wasn’t truly angry, not really. She only wished, with everything inside her, that understanding a person and living with that understanding were the same thing. But they were not, and the wishing did not make it true.
“He is not cruel,” she said softly to Beatrice, and herself.
“That is what makes this so hard. If he were cruel, I could simply hate him and be done with it. But he is only a man who loves too fiercely and cannot let it go. I know exactly how it feels because I am the same.” She squeezed her sister’s hand.
“I understand him, Bea. Completely. And it’s the understanding that hurts, not the quarrel. ”
Beatrice looked at her a long moment. “Then it sounds less like your marriage is over and more like two people who have not had the right conversation,” she said quietly.
Rosaline had no answer for that.
Below, Ivy was galloping up the stairs, triumphant and bearing cakes and news of cakes. Rosaline quickly wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand, plastered a smile on, and let the matter close.
But the words stayed with her the whole cold ride home.
Two people who have not had the right conversation.
She turned her sister’s words over and over in the dark carriage, and did not let herself hope, because hope was dangerous. She had spent a week learning to live without it.
Yet she had not quite managed to put it down.