Chapter Twelve
Winter had arrived with frost on the windows and a chill that crept into every corner of Northmere Hall.
Eliza woke each morning to find delicate patterns of ice traced across the glass, nature's artwork that melted as soon as the fires were lit. The moors beyond had turned brown and gray, and it was a stark landscape, harsh and unforgiving, but she found that she loved it more with each passing day.
She loved other things too, though she wasn't ready to name them.
Since her declaration in the library that she was staying, something had shifted between Alistair and her.
Not resolution, exactly. The tension was still there, but beneath it now ran something steadier.
A foundation. An understanding that whatever this was, neither of them was running from it anymore.
He continued his awkward courtship with books and glances and small attentions that made her heart flutter.
A volume of natural philosophy appeared on her nightstand.
Then, a collection of travel essays about Italy.
Then a slim book of botanical illustrations, the margins filled with handwritten annotations in a feminine hand she didn't recognize.
It was this last book that changed everything.
"These notes," she said to him one morning, finding him in the library before breakfast. "Who wrote them?"
Alistair looked up from the estate papers he had been reviewing, or pretending to review, since she suspected he spent more time watching the door for her arrival than actually working. His eyes fell on the book in her hands, and something flickered across his face. Pain, perhaps. Or memory.
"My mother," he said quietly. "She was a passionate amateur botanist. That was her personal copy—she used to take it with her on walks, pressing flowers between the pages and making notes about where she found them."
Eliza's breath caught. She looked down at the book with new eyes, suddenly aware of what she was holding. Not just a gift, but a piece of his history. A window into the woman who had raised him, loved him, and left him too soon.
"Alistair, I can't…This is too precious…"
"I want you to have it." He rose from his desk and crossed to where she stood, stopping close enough that she could see the emotion in his eyes.
"She would have liked you, I think. She had the same fire, the same stubborn determination to drag happiness out of reluctant circumstances.
" There was a ghost of a smile. "The same red hair, actually.
Not quite as vivid as yours, but close."
"Your mother had red hair?"
"Auburn, she called it. She was very particular about the distinction." His smile deepened, touched with sadness. "She used to say that red-haired women were descended from ancient queens, warriors and wise women who refused to be tamed. I think she would have recognized a kindred spirit in you."
Eliza didn't know what to say. She stood there, clutching his mother's book to her chest, feeling the weight of what he was offering. Not just a gift, but a piece of his heart.
"Tell me about her," she said softly. "Please."
And so, he did.
They sat together by the fire in the library, the botanical book open between them, while Alistair spoke of his mother for the first time in years.
Her name had been Catherine. She had been the daughter of a country squire; "respectable but hardly grand," Alistair said, echoing Lady Pufferton's description.
She had met his father at a local assembly, where she had distinguished herself by telling him his dancing was adequate, but his conversation was dull.
"She said that to a duke?" Eliza asked, delighted.
"She did. My father was apparently so astonished that he asked her to dance again immediately, determined to prove her wrong." Alistair's eyes were soft with memory. "He spent the rest of the evening trying to make her laugh. He succeeded, eventually, and they were married within the year."
The marriage had been happy, by all accounts.
Catherine had brought warmth and laughter to Northmere Hall, filling it with flowers and music and the kind of chaotic energy that ancient houses sometimes lacked.
She had loved the moors, loved her horses, loved her garden with a passion that bordered on obsession.
"She used to sing while she gardened," Alistair said, his voice taking on a distant quality, as if he were seeing something far away.
"Badly, I should add; she had a terrible voice, completely tone-deaf, but she didn't care.
She said that plants responded to joy, not pitch, and that the roses grew better when she sang to them. "
"Did they?"
"They were the finest roses in Yorkshire.
" He smiled, a real smile that transformed his face.
"She would cut them and put them in every room.
The whole house smelled of roses in summer.
I used to hate it when I was a boy because I thought it was too sweet, too feminine.
Now I would give anything to smell them again. "
Eliza thought of the abandoned rose garden, its beds choked with weeds, and understood something she hadn't before.
It wasn't that Alistair didn't care about his mother's legacy.
It was that he cared too much and that seeing her roses untended was still less painful than trying to maintain them without her.
"She planted the roses in the south garden," Alistair continued. "Designed the whole layout herself, and spent years cultivating varieties that could survive the Yorkshire winters. She used to say that anything beautiful enough was worth fighting for."
"She sounds wonderful."
"She was." His voice caught slightly. "When she died, it was like…Like the sun went out. Everything that had been warm and alive suddenly felt cold and empty."
"How old were you? When it happened?"
"Twenty-five. Old enough to manage, or so everyone assured me. Old enough to take on the dukedom, run the estates, care for an infant brother." His jaw tightened. "I didn't feel old enough. I felt like a child, pretending to be an adult while the world fell apart around me."
"That's an enormous burden for anyone to carry. Regardless of age."
"Perhaps. But I didn't carry it well." He stared into the fire, his expression haunted.
"I made so many mistakes, Eliza. With the estate, with the staff and with Henry, most of all.
I was so focused on maintaining control, on proving that I could manage, that I wouldn't fall apart the way my father did, that I forgot to actually live.
I built walls instead of bridges, and I pushed away everyone who tried to help. "
"You were grieving. You were overwhelmed. Those are understandable responses to impossible circumstances."
"Understanding doesn't make them right." He turned to look at her, and the pain in his eyes made her chest ache. "I wasted all those years of Henry's life, years I can never get back. He needed a brother, and I gave him a guardian. He needed love, and I gave him schedules."
"You're changing that now."
"Am I?" The question was genuinely uncertain. "Sometimes I feel like I'm just fumbling in the dark, trying to figure out how to be human again. I've forgotten how. Or maybe I never really knew."
"You knew once." Eliza's voice was gentle. "Your mother taught you. I can see it in the way you talk about her—the love in your voice, the way your whole face softens when you remember her singing to the roses. That capacity for love didn't disappear, Alistair. It's just been buried. Frozen."
"And you think it can thaw?"
"I think it already is." She held up the botanical book. "This isn't something a frozen man would give away. This is precious. This is your mother's heart, pressed between pages. And you trusted me with it."
He was silent for a long moment, staring at her with an expression she couldn't quite read.
"And your father?" she asked gently, steering the conversation back to safer ground. "What happened after your mother died?"
Alistair was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was carefully controlled—the voice of a man discussing something that still had the power to hurt him.
"My father adored her…. Worshipped her, really. She was his whole world." He paused. "That was the problem, I think. He loved her so completely that when she was gone, there was nothing left. No room for anything else. Not even us."
Eliza reached out and laid her hand over his, where it rested on the arm of his chair. It was an impulsive gesture, the kind of thing a governess should never do with her employer, but she couldn't help herself. He looked so lost, so haunted by the memory of being left behind.
He stiffened at the touch, and for a moment she thought he would pull away. But then his hand turned beneath hers, his fingers curling around her palm, and he held on as if she were an anchor in a storm.
"You're not him," she said softly. "You know that, don't you? You're not going to become him."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because you're still here. Because you spent years in pain, but you didn't give up.
You kept going…for Henry, for the estate, for all the people who depend on you.
" She squeezed his hand. "Your father's mistake wasn't loving your mother.
It was forgetting that love doesn't have to be exclusive.
You can love someone completely and still have room for other things. Other people."
"Is that what you believe?"
"It's what I know." She thought of her own parents: her father, who had loved her mother desperately, who had mourned her for years after her death, but who had never stopped being present for his children.
"My father loved my mother with his whole heart.
When she died, he was devastated. But he didn't leave us.
He stayed. He raised us. He found ways to be happy again, even though he never stopped missing her. "
"How did he do it?"