Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
“Good morning, Your Grace.” The housekeeper curtsied. “His Grace left at dawn. A business meeting in the village. He expects to be gone most of the day.”
Alice descended the staircase at half past eight to find the breakfast room occupied by no one but Mrs. Finch, who stood beside the sideboard arranging the silver.
She pulled out her chair and sat down. The table had been set for five. Kenneth’s place lay undisturbed, his napkin still folded into its crisp peak, his coffee cup inverted on its saucer. She looked at it for a long moment.
“Did he leave word for the boys?”
“Only that they should continue their lessons as scheduled.” Mrs. Finch poured the tea without being asked. “And that Lord Nortley is welcome to make use of the library and the grounds.”
Alice nodded slowly.
Her husband had chosen to leave before dawn rather than face her across a breakfast table.
She was buttering a slice of toast when footsteps announced the arrival of her stepsons. Freddie entered at his customary velocity, Charlie three paces behind.
“Where’s Papa?” Freddie surveyed the empty chair while reaching for a bread roll.
“Your father has business in the village.” Alice kept her voice level. “He will return this evening.”
Freddie shrugged and bit into the roll.
Charlie sat down, unfolded his napkin across his lap, and reached for the butter dish without comment. His face betrayed nothing, but Alice noticed the way his eyes moved to his father’s empty seat and lingered there before he turned to his plate.
Jonathan appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, dressed for the country in a brown coat and riding boots, his fair hair slightly mussed from sleep.
“Good morning, everyone.” He dropped into the chair beside her and accepted coffee from the footman. “I trust I have not missed the excitement. Where is our fearless Duke?”
“Gone,” Freddie said. “Business.”
“Business.” Jonathan’s tone carried the faintest edge. He glanced at Alice, and she pursed her lips.
“I must apologize for his absence,” she said. “I had hoped we might all spend the morning together.”
“Papa is always busy,” Freddie noted, reaching for a second roll. “He has papers. And meetings. And letters. And more papers. If you stacked all Papa’s papers on top of each other, they would reach the moon.”
Alice set down her teacup. The morning stretched before her, empty and still, and she refused to fill it by sitting in the breakfast room and dwelling on last night.
“I have an idea,” she announced. “The weather is fine. Shall we ride? All of us. Around the estate.”
Freddie looked up from his plate. “Ride? Now? Today? Can we take the bay pony? Can we go past the north meadow? There’s a stream there where I saw a heron last week, and Charlie didn’t believe me, but I swear on my honor that it was a heron, not a stork.
I know the difference because Uncle Jonathan taught me. ”
“I taught you no such thing,” Jonathan said. “I taught you the difference between a heron and a crane. You confused the lesson and have been confidently misidentifying waterbirds ever since.”
Alice looked at Charlie. He had not spoken. His knife rested against the edge of his plate, and he was studying the marmalade jar as though its label contained an argument he needed to consider.
“Charlie?” Alice kept her voice gentle. “Would you like to come?”
He did not answer immediately.
Alice recognized the hesitation. She had performed that calculation a thousand times herself: whether joining in would be worth the risk of being overlooked once the excitement began.
“Charlie is an excellent rider,” Jonathan offered.
He leaned back in his chair and addressed the ceiling as though delivering a verdict to the room at large.
“Better seat than his brother, in fact, though Freddie has more enthusiasm, which he mistakes for skill. Charlie has the hands. Quiet hands are what make a horseman, not volume.”
Charlie’s chin lifted a fraction of an inch. “I am adequate.”
“You are better than adequate,” Jonathan said. “And the bay pony has been stabled for three days, which means she will be fresh and opinionated, and she prefers a rider who listens to her rather than shouts at her. You are that rider, Charlie.”
Charlie looked at Alice, a small smile tugging at his lips. “I will come.”
The stables smelled of hay and warm leather. Mr. Briggs had four horses saddled within twenty minutes: Alice’s chestnut mare, Jonathan’s grey gelding, the bay pony for Charlie, and a stocky dun for Freddie, who had scrambled into the saddle before the girth was fully tightened.
“Heels down, Frederick,” Briggs called. “And stop kicking. She knows where she’s going.”
They rode out through the south gate. The morning had opened into full spring, the hedgerows thick, the air carrying the sweet smell of cut grass from the home farm. The countryside beyond Bearmoor’s formal grounds was rolling and open, dotted with sheep and old oaks.
Alice settled into the mare’s steady rhythm and felt the tension in her shoulders begin to loosen. Though Frederick’s lips did not cease moving for longer than a minute, Charlie rode beside her in companionable quiet. His hands were steady on the reins, his posture upright without stiffness.
Jonathan had been right. The boy had an instinct for the horse beneath him, adjusting his weight through turns and rises without fuss.
“You ride well,” Alice complimented.
Charlie glanced at her. “Mr. Briggs has been teaching me since I was four. He says I have a feel for it.”
“You do.”
A pause. The bay pony flicked an ear back, listening to the conversation above her.
“Papa used to ride with us,” Charlie said. “When we were smaller. He would take us on the lead rein around the south paddock. He stopped when the estate got busier.”
Alice said nothing. There was nothing to say.
They followed the bridle path north. The land rose gently, and the hedgerows gave way to open moorland where bracken curled in bronze spirals and the wind carried the distant sound of running water.
Freddie had slowed, his earlier enthusiasm tempered by the effort of riding uphill, and his dun plodded alongside Jonathan’s grey gelding in amiable resignation.
The stream appeared beyond a stand of birch trees, narrow, clear, running over smooth stones into a pool that caught the light and held it in shifting patterns on the sandy bed. Alice reined in and dismounted, looping the mare’s reins over a low branch.
“Shall we rest?”
Freddie slid down from his saddle with the boneless energy of a child for whom dismounting was merely a different form of motion. Charlie climbed down more carefully, patting the bay pony’s neck before leading her to the water’s edge.
“I’m going to find the heron,” Freddie announced, and set off along the bank before anyone could object.
“Stay where I can see you,” Alice called.
“That’s a very limited definition of exploration,” Freddie called back, but he did not disappear beyond the birches.
Charlie settled on a flat rock near the water and pulled the telescope from his pocket. He trained it on the far bank, where a pair of wagtails were working their way along the mud.
Jonathan tied the horses and came to stand beside Alice, a few yards from where Charlie sat. For a while, neither spoke. The stream filled the silence between them, and Alice let it, grateful for a sound that demanded nothing.
“He will come round, you know,” Jonathan said quietly. “Kenneth is not good at this. He never has been.”
Alice picked at a strip of bark peeling from the birch. “Good at what, precisely?”
“Any of it. Conversation. Apology. The basic mechanics of existing in proximity to a person he cares about.” Jonathan paused.
“He was not raised to it. His father was a cold man. Exacting. The sort who believed that affection was a weakness to be trained out of a son the way one trained a horse not to shy at shadows. Kenneth learned early on that the safest course was to feel nothing, or at least to appear as though he felt nothing, and he has spent thirty-three years perfecting the performance.”
“He is very good at it,” Alice sighed.
“He is excellent at it. The finest emotional fortification I have ever encountered. Walls so high and thick that the man inside them has forgotten there are doors.” Jonathan glanced at her. “You are the first person I have seen make him forget to lock one.”
Alice’s hand stilled on the bark. She did not look at him.
“I want to tell you about Theresa,” he added. “Because he never will. And I believe you deserve to know.”
Alice turned. Jonathan’s face held no trace of its customary humor. He looked tired, and fond, and rather sad. For a few seconds, she considered dissuading him, telling him that it was none of her business.
“Tell me,” she demanded.
He picked up a stone from the bank and turned it over in his fingers.
“Theresa was the daughter of a viscount. Pretty, kind, quiet. A good match by every measure that Society considers relevant: breeding, dowry, temperament. Kenneth’s father had been dead for two years by then, and the duchy needed an heir.
Kenneth did his duty. He proposed. She accepted. They married soon after.”
He tossed the stone into the stream. It broke the surface and vanished.
“He was never in love with her,” he continued.
“He respected her. He was kind to her in his own way. But he married her because the estate needed stability, and she was available and willing and came recommended by people whose judgment he trusted. He chose a wife the way he chose a steward or a solicitor: on credentials. On suitability. On the reasonable assumption that competence and proximity would produce stability, if not happiness.”
Alice pressed her palm flat against the birch trunk. The bark was rough and cool beneath her skin.
“Theresa was ill almost from the start of her confinement.” Jonathan’s voice had dropped further.
“The physicians could not agree on the cause. Some blamed her constitution. Others said the pregnancy itself was the problem, that her body was not suited to carry a child, let alone two. Kenneth brought every doctor he could find. He spent a fortune. He sat outside her chamber for days at a time while she grew weaker, and there was nothing he could do. Nothing any of them could do.”
In the distance, Freddie’s voice rose in triumph. He had found a frog, or a particularly interesting stone, or perhaps the heron he had been hunting since breakfast. The sound carried across the water, bright and untroubled and very young.
“She died in labor,” Jonathan sighed. “The twins survived. Theresa did not. And Kenneth has carried the guilt of that ever since. Not the grief, you understand. The guilt. Because he did not love her, and she died bearing his children. He tends to believe that he is responsible for whatever misery anyone around him suffers.”
Alice’s throat constricted. She swallowed against it and kept her eyes on the stream, on Charlie’s small figure crouched at the water’s edge, on the sunlight catching the brass of the telescope.
“He punishes himself,” Jonathan said. “Every day. Every closed door, every avoided conversation, every time he retreats into his study and his ledgers and his schedules. He has built a life designed to ensure that no one gets close enough to be harmed by proximity to him. He believes he failed Theresa. He is terrified of failing his boys.”
Alice pressed her fingers against the bark until the ridges left white impressions on her skin.
She thought of Kenneth’s face in the candlelight, the door closing on their wedding night, and the distance he maintained across breakfast tables and corridors and the vast, echoing rooms of a castle built to house a family he would not allow himself to have.