Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Alice slipped away from Kenneth’s side with an excuse about refreshments and moved toward the far end of the room, where the retired naval captain was expounding on the strategic failures of the French fleet to a baronet who appeared to have stopped listening several minutes ago.
She needed distance. Not from Kenneth, but from the pressure of performing at his side, of smiling at introductions and absorbing the quick, appraising glances that followed each new handshake.
Every eye in the room had cataloged her: the cut of her gown, the curve of her hips, the way her hand sat on Kenneth’s arm.
She lifted a glass of ratafia from the tray of a passing footman. Too sweet. She held it anyway, grateful for the occupation it provided her hands.
Near the fireplace, two women stood close together.
Lady Ashton, wife of the Baronet, and Mrs. Forsythe, whose husband owned the textile concern east of the village.
Their heads were angled toward one another at the conspiratorial tilt Alice recognized from every assembly and drawing room she had ever attended. The tilt that preceded gossip.
She was not meant to hear. The room’s acoustics, however, conspired against their discretion. The marble surround of the fireplace acted as a sounding board, carrying their lowered voices across the gap between them and the punch table where she stood turning her glass by its stem.
“… vanished the morning of the wedding, you know.” Lady Ashton’s voice was pitched at the frequency reserved for confidences their speaker fully intended to be overheard. “Simply gone. No letter, no explanation.”
“One can hardly blame her,” Mrs. Forsythe replied. “Bearmoor has buried one wife already. A young woman might think twice.”
“Or a young woman might think once, look at the alternative, and decide that a duke who has buried one wife is still preferable to no husband at all.” Lady Ashton lifted her glass.
“I’m told the sister was practically on the shelf.
Twenty-one and not a single offer. One can see why she seized the opportunity. ”
Alice set her glass down. The ratafia trembled against the crystal rim.
“Seized is generous,” Mrs. Forsythe said. “I heard she engineered the entire affair, had Lady Rachel removed from the church by confederates. The timing was too precise to be a coincidence.”
“I heard she drugged her.” Lady Ashton’s tone made it clear that she quite enjoyed this shocking news. “Though no one is quite certain of the method. They say that Lady Rachel was insensible by the time the carriage arrived, and Lady Alice simply stepped into her place.”
Alice held very still and listened to two women she had never met dismantle her life as casually as seamstresses unpicking a hem.
“It hardly matters how she managed it.” Mrs. Forsythe glanced across the room toward the window where Kenneth stood speaking with Harcourt.
“The result is the same. Bearmoor needed a wife. The girl needed a husband. Lady Rachel was merely the obstacle, and obstacles have a way of disappearing when there is sufficient motivation.”
“Sufficient motivation.” Lady Ashton’s laugh was brief, a single exhale through her nose.
“My dear, look at her. No duke in England would choose that girl if her sister were standing beside her. Lady Rachel was the Diamond of the Season. Slender, accomplished, exquisite. And the new Duchess is…” She paused, allowing the silence to perform the cruelty her vocabulary was too polished to deliver directly.
“Well, she was available. That seems to have been her primary qualification.”
They moved away. Their conversation continued in the diminishing register of women transitioning to a more entertaining subject, and within moments Alice could no longer distinguish their words from the general murmur of the room.
She stood at the punch table. Her glass sat untouched on the linen. Her hand, she noted with distant interest, was steady.
She had heard worse. Her father had said worse on the morning of Rachel’s first Season, when Alice had appeared in the parlor wearing a gown let out twice that still stretched taut across her torso.
You will stand behind your sister. Speak only when spoken to. Do not draw attention.
She had stood behind Rachel for three Seasons and learned to read the language of omission: her value resided not in what she possessed but in what she lacked.
She picked up her glass and crossed toward the bay window, where Lady Harcourt was describing an orchid she had imported from the West Indies at considerable expense.
“Your Grace.” A woman she did not recognize intercepted her near the sideboard.
Middle-aged, handsome, dressed in dove-grey silk.
“Mrs. Pemberton. I believe we have not been introduced.” Mrs. Pemberton’s smile was wide and warm but did not reach her eyes.
“I must confess, I have been dying to meet you. The whole county has talked of little else.”
“I hardly believe my life is that interesting,” Alice replied.
Mrs. Pemberton laughed. “How delightfully modest. Though there are those who believe you authored this plot yourself. A bold stroke, if so. Not every woman would have the nerve.”
“I can assure you that the circumstances of my marriage were entirely unplanned. I did not scheme, and I did not engineer my sister’s departure. If you will forgive me, I believe the orchids require my attention.”
Alice left her by the sideboard and joined Lady Harcourt’s circle, where the conversation at least confined itself to horticulture.
The dinner gong rang at half past seven.
Alice took Kenneth’s arm for the procession into the dining room. His hand covered hers on his sleeve, and the warmth of his palm steadied her more than she cared to admit.
“You survived,” he said, low enough that only she could hear.
“Barely.” She kept facing ahead. “Your neighbors are charming. Several of them believe I orchestrated my sister’s abduction to secure the title.”
His hand pressed harder against hers. “Who said this?”
“It does not matter.”
“It matters to me.”
She did not answer.
The dining room opened before them. Place cards directed the guests to their seats. Alice found hers midway down the table. Harcourt had seated her between the retired naval captain and Mrs. Forsythe.
The irony was not lost on her.
“Your Grace! Capital.” The naval captain turned to her with the full force of his attention, which was considerable. “Tell me, does Bearmoor still keep the coverts along the east boundary? I spent a weekend there in his father’s time. Bagged fourteen pheasant before luncheon.”
“The coverts remain, yes.” Alice unfolded her napkin across her lap. “Though I understand the head keeper has shifted the main drives further north since your visit. The lower woods flooded two winters ago, and the birds never fully returned.”
“Flooded! Criminal neglect of drainage, no doubt. In my day, we maintained the ditches quarterly. Quarterly! None of this modern business of letting nature take its course. Nature’s course is chaos, Your Grace. Always has been.”
“I rather think the pheasant prefer it,” Alice said. “Our keeper at Peltbury used to say that a bird raised in tidy woodland has no instinct left. He let the bracken grow wild along the south hedgerow, and his coveys were the strongest in the county.”
The captain frowned, as though the notion of a woman holding opinions on game management required recalibration of his entire worldview. “Your father’s keeper permitted you on his rounds?”
“When my sister was otherwise engaged.” Alice took a sip of wine. “Which was frequently.”
The first course arrived. Consommé, followed by turbot in a cream sauce, followed by roast partridge and a dressed salad. Alice served herself quietly. She was hungry. The ratafia had done nothing to settle the evening’s accumulated tension, and the food smelled of butter and rosemary and comfort.
The commentary started before the second bite.
“Your Grace.” Mrs. Forsythe’s voice cut across the table during a pause in the naval captain’s monologue.
She gestured toward Alice’s plate with her fork.
“Goodness, you have been generous with yourself.” Her gaze traveled from Alice’s plate to her neckline, lingered, and returned.
“Perhaps a touch less partridge and a touch more salad might be advisable. The green suits you, but the cut is ambitious for your figure as it stands. One would hate to see it strained further by a third course.”
The table fell silent. Not the comfortable silence of a conversational lull, but the airless quiet that descended when someone had said the unsayable and every person present was calculating the cost of responding.
Alice’s fork hovered above her plate. She looked at her food. At the portions she had taken without thinking, because she was a grown woman eating dinner, and it had not occurred to her that filling her plate required justification.
It occurred to her now. Every face at the table told her so.
Heat climbed from her chest to her throat. She reached for her wine glass.
Kenneth’s voice carried from four seats away, low and precise, accustomed to rooms far larger than this one.
“Mrs. Forsythe.” He did not raise his voice.
He did not need to. Every head at the table turned toward him.
“My wife will eat as much or as little as she pleases. She will take the partridge, and the turbot, and the salad, and the pudding, and whatever else this table has to offer, in any quantity she desires, at any meal, on any day, for the rest of her life. I will never allow my wife to go hungry. And if anyone at this table or any other presumes to comment on what she consumes, or how she looks while consuming it, they will answer to me. Personally.”
The silence held. Mrs. Forsythe’s hand had frozen midway between her plate and her mouth. Harcourt, at the head of the table, stared at his partridge as though it contained instructions for managing the crisis.
“Is that understood?” Kenneth’s gaze swept across the table. His voice had not risen above conversational volume, and that restraint made the words land harder. “I trust I will not need to repeat myself.”
Mrs. Forsythe set her fork down. “I meant no offence, Your Grace. I was merely—”
“You were merely nothing.” Kenneth turned back to his plate. “Mind your own plate, Mrs. Forsythe. And let my wife mind hers.”
Alice stared at the candle flame near her plate until the blur of heat and light resolved into a steady point.
She looked up. Four seats away, Kenneth had returned to his meal. His hand rested on the stem of his wine glass, his profile carved in sharp, unyielding lines against the candlelight.
As if sensing her gaze, Kenneth turned his head. Their eyes met across the silent table. His dark eyes held no lingering anger, only a quiet, grounded intensity that made her chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with Mrs. Forsythe.
There was no smug triumph in his gaze. Just a silent, immovable promise that had been spoken aloud and meant to its absolute core.
For a breathless second, the tension in Alice’s shoulders unspooled. She offered him the smallest, most fragile smile, an unspoken thank you that barely parted her lips.
Kenneth’s thumb caressed the crystal stem of his glass, his eyes softening by a fraction in answer, before he inclined his head and picked up his fork.
The meal continued. Conversation resumed in cautious fragments, steered by Harcourt toward the safe harbors of crop yields and the construction of a new bridge over the river Derwent.
Alice spoke when spoken to. She answered the naval captain’s questions about Bearmoor’s coverts. She complimented Lady Harcourt on the turbot.
She did not look at Kenneth again until the pudding arrived.
When she did, she found him watching her. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes held hers across the length of the table, across the silver and the crystal and the candle flames.
She shivered.
This man, who had married her for convenience and closed a door in her face on their wedding night, had just laid siege to a dining room on her behalf without a moment’s hesitation.
And in that moment, she felt more like the Duchess of Bearmoor than she ever had.