Chapter 17
“But Your Grace, if you would only listen—”
Dorian had not intended to stop. He had only meant to cross the stable yard on his way back from a meeting that had lasted far too long and involved entirely too many men suddenly eager to congratulate him on a success they had doubted only days ago.
However, the moment he stepped into the yard and caught sight of Anne near the paddock, his attention shifted so completely that he slowed down without fully realizing it.
She stood with one of the trainers beside a young chestnut mare that had earned an increasingly unpleasant reputation for refusing direction whenever anyone attempted to saddle her, and the trainer looked as though he had exhausted both his patience and optimism.
“Believe me,” Anne replied, “I understand that this is not what she wants either.”
“I am telling you, Your Grace,” the trainer sighed, “she is stubborn. She does not know what to do with herself.”
Dorian hung back, not wanting either of them to notice him.
Anne folded her arms, entirely unimpressed. “No,” she replied calmly, “she is anxious.”
“With respect, Your Grace, I have worked with horses for twenty years.”
“And in those twenty years,” Anne said evenly, “have you found shouting at them particularly effective?”
One of the younger stablehands nearby failed rather spectacularly to hide a laugh. The trainer ignored him.
“She refuses commands.”
“She refuses pressure,” Anne corrected. “You tightened the training schedule too quickly after the weather changed. She is overworked and irritated, and raising your voice at her will not help.”
The mare shifted restlessly beside them, tossing her head as if eager to support Anne’s argument.
Dorian leaned casually against the fence and watched the exchange unfold with growing amusement.
The trainer sighed. “Then what do you suggest?”
Anne stepped closer to the mare, reaching slowly for her neck. Her voice softened slightly. “Less handling for two days would be best,” she replied. “And we should move her to the quieter paddock. Shorter exercises would be beneficial too, and no forcing the saddle if she resists.”
“She cannot simply dictate her own training.”
“No,” she said, “but she can tell us what she needs from us, and right now she is doing precisely that.”
The stablehand laughed again, quieter this time.
The trainer muttered something under his breath.
“Do you disagree?” Anne asked.
“I think,” he replied carefully, “that Your Grace is too optimistic.”
Anne nodded once, as though considering the criticism seriously. “That is possible.”
Dorian raised an eyebrow.
“But,” she continued, “if I am wrong, you only lose two days of training. If I am right, however, then you stop getting bitten. I would argue that either outcome is fine by me.”
Even the trainer’s expression cracked slightly at that.
“Do you truly believe she will settle?” he asked.
Anne reached up and ran a hand gently along the mare’s neck. The mare, who had spent most of the morning resisting everyone else, lowered her head almost immediately.
“I know that she will,” Anne said quietly.
There was a brief silence after that. Then the trainer exhaled heavily.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Two days.”
Anne smiled faintly. “Three.”
“Your Grace—”
“Three,” she repeated.
The trainer shook his head. “I do not know when everyone started listening to you.”
“Probably around the time things started improving.”
That elicited another laugh from the stablehand, as well as Dorian himself. Only then did Anne finally notice him standing by the fence. Her expression shifted immediately into something halfway between surprise and suspicion.
“How long have you been standing there?” she asked.
“Long enough,” he replied.
Anne narrowed her eyes slightly. “That sounds concerning.”
“It was educational,” he said. “I had no idea my Duchess had begun terrorizing the entire stables.”
“I am not terrorizing anyone.”
One of the stablehands coughed loudly into his sleeve. The trainer shot him a warning look, and Dorian failed to suppress a smile.
“You negotiated one of my longest-serving employees into surrender.”
“I solved a problem.”
“You bullied a man twice your size into obedience.”
Anne looked entirely unrepentant. “And yet he agreed with me.”
The trainer sighed heavily. “I did not agree.”
“You did,” Anne insisted. “Reluctantly.”
Dorian watched her as she said it, listened to the quiet certainty in her voice and the ease with which everyone around her responded.
Weeks ago, she would have stood at the edge of these conversations, careful not to overstep. Now the stables moved around her without resistance, the staff listening instinctively whenever she spoke.
What unsettled him most was that she herself had not changed. She had always been like that, he was certain of it, but at last she was being taken seriously by all, himself included.
“You realize,” Dorian said after a moment, “that you have become alarmingly difficult to argue with.”
Anne looked almost pleased. “I learned from experience.”
“Oh?”
She met his gaze properly then. “You are very argumentative.”
The stablehands suddenly found their work fascinating.
Dorian laughed despite himself, quieter than usual but entirely genuine. The sound startled him slightly.
“You wound me,” he said.
“I believe I can live with that.”
He did not know whether she was being lighthearted or not, and that alone fascinated him.
He did not return to his study immediately after leaving the stables, though he had intended to. Instead, he found himself lingering in the corridor just outside the entrance hall.
The sound of distant movement carried through the house, and for reasons he could not immediately name, it struck him as unfamiliar. He stepped inside only when he heard his name spoken.
“Your Grace.”
The housekeeper stood near the foot of the main staircase, a ledger tucked beneath one arm. She nodded slightly as he approached, then waited rather than immediately continuing, as though she had already decided the order of her words.
“Were you at the stables?”
“I was,” Dorian replied. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” she answered. “Not anymore.”
The phrasing made him pause slightly. He studied her for a moment, then leaned lightly against the newel post as though he had all the time in the world.
“Would you say that something has changed?”
The housekeeper glanced briefly toward the corridor leading deeper into the house, where light reached farther than it had in months. “Your Grace may not have noticed,” she said, “but the west drawing room was opened again this week.”
Dorian frowned slightly. “Was it closed?”
“For nearly a year,” she replied.
That gave him pause.
“I was not aware of that.”
“No one mentioned it.” She shrugged. “It simply remained unused.”
He glanced down the corridor she had indicated. “Then why reopen it now?”
“Her Grace asked that it be cleared and aired properly. She said the light was too good to waste on a closed door.”
Dorian did not respond immediately. The words sat in the space between them a little longer than they should have, not because they were remarkable on their own, but because of what they implied.
“She has been making changes,” he said finally.
“Yes,” the housekeeper confirmed.
“Have they all been practical ones?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Practical.”
But she had hesitated. Not only that, but her tone made him look at her more closely.
“That hesitation suggests otherwise.”
“It suggests,” she corrected gently, “that practicality is not the only effect.”
Dorian straightened slightly. The housekeeper met his gaze directly, unflinching in the way only long familiarity with grief and households could allow.
“Since your father passed,” she continued carefully, “the house has been managed well enough, but it has not been lived in. That is not a criticism, of course. It is simply what happens when rooms are kept in order but not used.”
“And now?”
“And now, there are flowers in rooms that did not have them. The smaller dining room has been set for use again. The servants speak more freely. Even the evenings feel less silent.”
He exhaled through his nose. “You are describing the atmosphere, not maintenance.”
“I am describing the difference between a house and a home,” she said quietly.
That landed more heavily than anything else she had said.
Dorian looked away briefly, as though the corridor itself might offer a simpler explanation than the one forming in front of him. “You are suggesting that my wife has restored morale by rearranging furniture and reopening doors.”
The housekeeper’s expression softened slightly, though her voice remained steady. “I am suggesting that people respond differently when they are no longer waiting for things to stay broken.”
Dorian gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod, though his attention had already drifted elsewhere, back toward the image of Anne in the stables arguing without hesitation, standing with absolute certainty in a place that had once been resistant to change.
“She has been here barely long enough for any of this to matter,” he said.
“With respect, Your Grace, the house does not measure time.”
That silence between them lasted longer this time.
He stood there for a moment without moving, as though the conversation had left him with nowhere obvious to place his thoughts. Then he gave a short nod and stepped away from the staircase.
As he walked, he became aware of something he had not noticed before. The corridors no longer felt empty in the same way they had only weeks ago, and for reasons he did not fully allow himself to name, that change felt far less about the house itself than about the woman moving through it.
It was as though Anne belonged there in a way no one had quite anticipated, including him, and he almost envied her. He had wanted to belong for years, as the one place in the world he felt no connection to was his own home.
Later in the afternoon, he found her near the edge of the estate where the land opened out into a cliff path, the house already reduced to something faint and orderly behind them compared to the wind moving through the grass below.
He slowed down as he approached, taking in the way she stood, as though the view had become something she could study without interruption.
“I had assumed the entire estate had decided to reorganize itself in my absence,” he said, stopping a few paces away.
Anne turned at the sound of his voice, unhurried, as though she had already known he was there before he spoke.
“It has been doing that for some time,” she pointed out.
Dorian stepped beside her, letting his gaze follow hers across the landscape. “You have begun speaking about it as though it belongs to you.”
“It belongs to the people who care for it,” she said, her tone steady. “That matters more than ownership, if you ask me.”
He gave a quiet hum of acknowledgement, though his attention lingered on her rather than the view.
The wind moved through her hair and untucked loose strands that she did not attempt to smooth back, and for a moment, he considered reaching out to brush them from her face.
He barely managed to stop himself.
“You have certainly changed the household a lot, and I do not only mean that you have opened the west drawing room again.”
Anne glanced toward him briefly. “Then in what way?”
“In practically every way,” he said. “The servants speak differently. There is life there again. Even the light seems to stay longer in places it did not before.”
“That is an exaggeration.”
“I wish it were, but it is not. You truly have changed everything here, whether you have noticed it or not.”
She considered that, then turned her attention back to the horizon.
“Before I came here,” she said after a moment, “I thought marriage would mean becoming smaller inside someone else’s life. I thought it would decide everything in advance—where I would be, what I would do, what I would become. I did not think there would be room for anything else.”
The wind shifted again across the cliff’s edge, carrying her words with it.
“That has not been what this has become,” she continued.
“I feel as though I have been given something to shape instead of something to endure. I have spent a long time thinking life would happen around me rather than through me. This feels different. It feels like I can build something of my own, and I never thought I would have that.”
Dorian studied her as she spoke, not evaluating the words themselves, but trying to understand the direction they pointed him in.
The ease she had found, the quiet authority that had begun to settle into her manners, all of it formed a picture that no longer fit the version of her he had initially pictured.
“You are not describing what I expected to hear when you first arrived here.”
“Nor is it what I expected to say. I thought that I would be in misery if I am being honest. What did you expect?”
He hesitated, then answered with more honesty than calculation. “I expected you to endure it for the sake of Tempest.”
The wind softened slightly between them, carrying no immediate response.
Anne looked back out toward the horizon, her hands resting loosely at her sides. “I am pleased that you have accepted his real name.”
“It suits him,” he admitted. “I did not want him to seem off-putting to investors, but you have proven me wrong.”
“Fear not, you have proven me wrong in some ways, too.”
Dorian looked away then. She remained where she was, steady against the wind, and he became aware of how completely she occupied the space beside him without effort, as though she had always belonged there.
“What do you mean?” he asked after a moment.
“It hardly matters,” she replied with a smile. “But you are right, I am becoming aware of my place here, and it is making everything easier. I have you to thank for that.”
Alas, despite her smile, he noticed the one thing he had not expected to see.
There was sadness in her eyes.