Chapter Twenty
“Miss Weston, do dukes have mothers?”
Lorraine set down her teacup with the measured care of a woman who had learned that Thomas’s questions, however innocently delivered, tended to detonate without warning. “They do, as a rule. Dukes are not, to my knowledge, assembled from spare parts in a workshop.”
“Then where is His Grace’s mother?”
Jenny, folding linens by the nursery fire, went very still. Lorraine marked the reaction and tucked it quietly away.
“That is a question for His Grace, sweetheart.”
Thomas considered this with the judicial gravity he applied to all matters of importance.
Seated cross-legged upon the floor, his watercolours spread before him, he worked at a female kestrel with the same exacting attention to plumage Dominic had encouraged the day before.
The compass lay beside him on the rug—as it always did now—within arm’s reach, a small, steadfast talisman against the world’s uncertainties.
“Is she dead?” Thomas asked, with the bluntness peculiar to children and surgeons.
“Thomas.”
“Mama’s mother is dead. My mother is dead. Lots of mothers are dead.” He dipped his brush into burnt sienna and applied it to the kestrel’s wing with careful precision. “I only wish to know if his is.”
Lorraine exchanged a glance with Jenny, who did not speak this time, but only lowered her eyes to her work with sudden, studied absorption.
“Yes,” Lorraine said at last, her voice gentler now. “His Grace’s mother died when he was a boy.”
Thomas nodded, as though this confirmed a pattern he had already begun to suspect. “That is what I thought.”
He returned to his painting, frowning slightly at the kestrel’s wing.
She knew very little of Dominic’s mother. He had mentioned her very few times, in passing, during their late-night conversations, his tone flat and carefully neutral—the voice he reserved for subjects long sealed away.
There were doors in Dominic’s past that opened only from within; to force them achieved nothing but retreat.
Yet Thomas’s question lodged in Lorraine’s mind like a burr, and it remained there two hours later when lessons ended and she found herself—without quite knowing why—walking toward the long gallery in the east wing.
***
She had passed through the gallery before, but she had never lingered.
The corridor was cold and dimly lit, its walls crowded with the accumulated portraiture of two centuries of Vanes: men in wigs, armour, and hunting coats; women in silk and lace, their expressions composed into aristocratic endurance; children posed beside spaniels they had almost certainly not been permitted to touch beyond the sitting.
Today, she lingered.
She moved slowly along the wall, reading the brass plates beneath each frame.
Edmund Vane, 3rd Duke of Ravenswood, 1689–1741.
A man with a jaw like a shovel and the air of one who had never encountered a difficulty he could not resolve with money.
Catherine Vane, née Aldridge, Duchess of Ravenswood.
Beautiful and remote, painted in blue that echoed the cool distance of her gaze.
Generation upon generation. The same grey eyes recurring like a familial signature—sometimes pale as winter sky, sometimes dark as a gathering storm. The same strong jaw. The same quality of stillness, as though even in oil paint, the Vanes withheld something essential.
She was halfway down the gallery when she found him.
The portrait was smaller than the rest—not a grand commission, but something more intimate, perhaps eighteen inches square, hung slightly apart from the ancestral procession, in the narrow space between two windows where the light fell soft and indirect. The brass plate read simply:
Dominic, age fourteen.
Lorraine forgot how to breathe.
The boy in the painting bore almost no resemblance to the man she knew. That was the first shock—and it struck with physical force, a sharp tightening beneath her ribs, as though a tuning fork had been set vibrating against her sternum.
He was laughing.
Not smiling—laughing. His head thrown back, mouth open, eyes nearly closed with the force of it.
His dark hair was uncombed, falling across his brow in a manner that would have scandalised any valet.
He wore no coat, only a linen shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, revealing forearms tanned and unscarred.
A faint smudge marked his jaw—mud, perhaps, or charcoal.
And his eyes—those pale grey eyes Lorraine knew as guarded, watchful, capable of freezing a room at twenty paces—were alight with unguarded joy.
This is who you were, she thought, her throat tightening.
Before Spain. Before Badajoz. Before the ravine—and the three seconds—and the twenty-one letters you write each year to families who will never read them.
This was the boy who brought Mrs Potter crushed flowers.
Who watched kestrels from the folly. Who laughed as though the world had been made for his delight.
What became of him?
She knew. War. William. A ravine in Spain, a moment’s hesitation that cost twenty-one lives—and turned a laughing boy into a man who carried himself like a wound that had never properly healed.
“You have found it, then.”
Lorraine started. Dominic stood at the far end of the gallery, one shoulder resting against the doorframe, his arms loosely crossed. His posture was indolent; his gaze was not. It was fixed upon her with a quiet intensity that suggested he had been observing her for longer than he admitted.
How did a man of his size move so silently? she thought, her pulse quickening. Four years of learning invisibility, perhaps.
“I was not snooping,” she said, which was technically true and wholly unconvincing.
“I did not say you were.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking that you are standing before the only painting in this house I have ever considered destroying—and you look as though you have been struck.” He pushed himself away from the frame and crossed toward her, his footsteps echoing softly against the stone.
“So either the portrait offends your sensibilities, or you are having a remarkably strong reaction to a version of me long since vanished—which, I confess, I do not find especially reassuring.”
The dry delivery nearly undid her. A laugh escaped—unsteady, damp at the edges, and impossible to disguise.
“You were beautiful,” she said.
He halted a few feet away. “I was filthy. It was painted shortly before my mother died—after I had spent the entire morning in the stables. The artist had been engaged for a formal portrait, but I refused to change. He painted what he saw.”
“You were laughing.”
“I had put a frog in my tutor’s desk. The memory was still fresh.”
“Dominic…” She turned back to the portrait, studying the wild-haired boy, the smudge upon his jaw, the unguarded light in his face. “Why would you wish to destroy this?”
The silence that followed was not of the gentle kind they had grown accustomed to. It had edges.
“Because he does not exist anymore,” Dominic said at last. His voice was low—not the composed restraint of the Duke, but something rougher, closer to the bone.
“That boy died in Spain. What returned was something else.” He paused.
“Each time I pass this corridor, he is here—laughing. As though he does not know what awaits him. As though, in a future he cannot yet conceive, he will stand frozen in a ravine while twenty-one men die because he could not move his damned feet.”
Lorraine turned to him. He was not looking at the portrait, but at the floor, his jaw rigid, his hands thrust deep into his pockets in a gesture so uncharacteristic of the Duke of Ravenswood that something in her chest tightened painfully.
“He is not dead,” she said.
“Lorraine—”
“He still watches kestrels. He lifts a little boy upon his shoulders and pretends he is not smiling.” She stepped closer—close enough to see the faint scar at his brow, the tension along his throat.
“He teaches a child the structure of wings, and gives of himself in quiet ways when he believes no one is paying attention.”
“That is not—”
“He brought me to his bed and touched me as though I were the first beautiful thing he had seen in years.” Her voice lowered, steady and fierce. “He held me afterward and asked me to remain. That is not a dead man, Dominic. That is not a ghost.”
His jaw tightened; she watched the struggle there—the visible effort of a man holding himself against something long denied.
“The boy in that painting,” he said hoarsely, “would not have frozen. He would have drawn his sword. He would have charged. William would be alive. Thomas would have his parents. And I would be—”
“What?” she pressed softly. “Someone else? Someone who did not endure the worst imaginable and yet become the man Thomas needs?” She was close now—too close for propriety, for daylight, for anything but truth.
“You cannot spend your life mourning the man you might have been, Dominic. You will lose the man you are.”
He lifted his gaze.
The grey eyes that met hers were utterly unguarded—no distance, no ducal reserve. Only the stark, exhausting honesty of a man who had grown weary of pretending he felt nothing.
“The man I am,” he said quietly, “is in love with his governess—and has not the faintest notion what to do about it.”
The words fell into the gallery like stones into still water.
Lorraine’s heart stilled—then lurched painfully back into motion.
He had said it. Not almost. Not nearly. Not the words trembling unsaid behind his eyes. He had spoken them.
“That,” she managed, her voice scarcely more than a breath, “is not nothing.”
“It is not enough, either.” His mouth tightened. “Love does not solve the Hardings. It does not erase the gulf between us. It does not undo the fact that I have compromised you beyond—”
“Dominic.”
“—any hope of recovery, and if anyone were to discover—”
“Dominic.”
He stopped.
“I am going to say something,” she said, steady despite the hammering of her pulse, “and I need you to hear it. Not as the Duke. Not as the soldier. As the boy in that painting—who had not yet learned how cruel the world could be.”
She lifted her hand and set her palm against his cheek. He leaned into it at once—an instinctive yielding, his body answering before pride or caution could intervene.
“I love you too,” she said. “I have loved you since the night you spoke to me of Spain. Perhaps since the morning you gave Thomas the wooden horse and could not bear to meet his eyes when he named it Captain.” Her fingers curved gently against his jaw.
“I love the man you are, Dominic—not despite what has shaped you, and not because of it, but entirely apart from it. The way you think. The way you persist, even when you believe the battle already lost. The way you look at Thomas when you think yourself unobserved.”
She held his gaze, unwavering.
“I am not asking you to mend the world. I am telling you that I am here—and I am not leaving. Whatever comes, we meet it with our eyes open.”
He kissed her in the gallery, beneath two centuries of painted Vanes and the laughing likeness of the boy he had once been.
It was not a kiss of hunger—not the consuming urgency of the garden wall, nor the slow, deliberate heat of his chambers. It was quieter than that. Steadier. It tasted of relief, and gratitude, and the terrifying, exhilarating weight of a truth finally spoken aloud.
When they parted, he rested his forehead against hers. His breath was uneven. His hands, where they curved about her waist, trembled faintly.
“I do not deserve you,” he said.
“That is not for you to determine.”
A soft exhale—almost a laugh. “You are the most obstinate woman I have ever encountered.”
“I prefer tenacious. It is more flattering.”
He drew back just enough to look at her. Something in his expression had shifted—not the breaking of ice, but the movement of water beneath it. Resolve. Direction. The look of a man who had stood still for far too long and was, at last, preparing to move.
“I will find a way,” he said. “For Thomas. For you. For all of it. I do not yet know how—but I will.”
“I know you will.”
His gaze flicked past her shoulder, to the portrait. The laughing boy. The frog. The unscarred arms, the untamed hair, the unshadowed joy.
“He would have liked you,” Dominic said softly. “That boy. He would have been utterly, hopelessly besotted.”
“He still is,” Lorraine replied. “He merely hides it better now.”
They stood together a moment longer—his arm about her waist, her head resting lightly against his shoulder, the painted ancestors observing from their frames with expressions that ranged from disapproval to what Lorraine chose to interpret as reluctant approval.
Then footsteps sounded upon the stairs—quick, eager, unmistakable.
“Miss Weston! Miss Weston, come and see—I painted the female, and she is better than the male, and His Grace says the female is the superior hunter, so I made her larger—”
They stepped apart. Not with the startled haste of earlier days, but with the quiet, practised ease of two people accustomed to the delicate boundary between truth and appearance.
“Coming, Thomas,” Lorraine called.
She smoothed her skirts. Touched her lips where his had been. Met Dominic’s eyes one last time.
I love you, she mouthed.
He did not echo the words. He simply looked at her—long, steady, wholly unguarded—and then turned to the portrait of the boy he had been.
And for the first time in four years, he did not look away.