Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
The morning dawned quiet.
Alice had not slept poorly, which surprised her.
She had expected to lie awake cataloging the afternoon in the remorseless way her mind had always managed its catastrophes: replaying the weight of his hands on her waist, the sound of the string quartet reduced to nothing, the particular set of his face when he straightened and smoothed his coat as though an ordinary thing had just occurred.
She had expected all of that. Instead, she had fallen asleep before the candle burned low and woken to the birds on the Grosvenor Square sycamores with something in her chest that she refused to name before breakfast.
She dressed without her maid. The navy morning gown required assistance at the back, and the buttons took three attempts before she conceded the point and pulled the bell cord. But dressing herself kept her hands busy, and she needed something to do with her hands before she went downstairs.
The breakfast room smelled of coffee and fresh bread.
Kenneth was already there. He was standing by the sideboard, his back to the door, his coat on and every line of him suggesting that he had been there long enough to arrange his expression before she arrived.
She knew, because she had done the same.
“Good morning,” she greeted.
“Good morning.”
He did not turn immediately. He moved the coffee pot to a different position on the tray, then turned and looked at her. The force of his attention moved through the room the way it always did, direct and close, as though the table between them were a detail rather than a fact.
“The boys are still in the nursery,” he said. “Miss Leyton will bring them down at nine.”
“Yes.” She went to the sideboard.
The plates were arranged in their usual order. She served herself without looking at him, and he crossed to the table. The distance they maintained was the same as it had always been.
At that moment, she could not have said whether that sameness was a relief or a particular form of cruelty.
She sat. He sat. The footman poured, withdrew, and left them alone with the bread and the butter and the sounds of the square beyond the window: a hawker moving along the far pavement with something in a cart, pigeons on the fence rail, the ordinary noise of a city that had no idea what had happened in a garden the previous afternoon.
“The Milton steward sent a letter,” Kenneth said, opening a note beside his plate. “Regarding the drainage on the north pasture. I had hoped the survey would take longer.”
Alice looked at the toast on her plate. She suddenly became aware of her own hands: folded in her lap, very still, in the particular way she had developed in girlhood for sitting in rooms where she was not wanted and could not leave. She unfolded them and picked up her knife.
“Do you have to go back?” she asked.
“Not yet.” He set the note down. “The estate can wait a few days.”
He reached for the marmalade. His hand moved past the butter dish, past the rack of toast, and she was aware of the trajectory of his arm the way she had been since the clearing.
She looked toward the window and watched the hawker disappear around the corner.
“Alice.”
She made herself look at him. He was watching her intently, without performance. The marmalade pot hung in his hand, forgotten. His eyes moved over her face once, deliberate, and then settled.
“Last night,” he said.
“Yesterday,” she corrected. “And I am perfectly well.” She found the word she needed and kept her voice even. “We ought not to—”
The door opened. Freddie entered at full velocity, Charlie three paces behind, the governess in the corridor behind them both, already wearing a tired expression.
“Papa.” Freddie dropped into his chair. “There is a pigeon on the windowsill of the nursery. A large one. Charlie says it is injured, but I think it is merely fat. Can we keep it?”
The moment ended. Whatever had been beginning between them folded itself away, quiet and unremarked.
Alice looked down at her toast and was careful not to feel anything about that.
Her father arrived at half past eleven unannounced.
She was in the morning room with the household accounts and a problem regarding the linen delivery that the housekeeper had placed before her. She had been staring at the same column of figures for twenty minutes and thinking about marmalade when the butler appeared at the door and bowed.
“Lord Peltbury, Your Grace. He did not send word.”
No, he would not have. Sending word would have suggested that her answer might matter.
“Show him to the drawing room,” she said. “I will be there shortly.”
She smoothed the front of her gown and crossed the corridor. The drawing room was warm, sunlit, the long windows open to the sound of Grosvenor Square.
Her father stood before the fireplace with his hat under his arm.
“Alice.” He bent forward into the approximation of an embrace, close enough to satisfy decorum. “You look well. Country air agrees with you.”
“We have been in London for some weeks, Father.”
“Of course, of course.” He settled into the chair nearest the fire and looked around the room with the approval of a man pricing furniture. “Bearmoor House is rather fine. I had heard as much. One does not appreciate the scale of these ducal establishments until one stands inside them.”
“Shall I ring for tea?”
“Please.”
Alice rang for tea. Then she sat and watched her father continue his inventory of the room. He arrived at her eventually, in the manner of a man returning to the least interesting exhibit in a gallery.
“The Duke seems satisfied with the arrangement,” he said. “People say that he walks into his club as though the world has rearranged itself in his honor, which I suppose it has.” He paused. “And you? You have made yourself… useful?”
“I manage the household. I spend time with the twins.”
“Yes.” He turned the hat brim between his fingers. “A ready-made family. Not quite what one hoped for a daughter, but under the circumstances, one takes what presents itself.”
The tea arrived. Alice poured it with steady hands, glad to have something to do.
“I received a letter from Mrs. Hartley,” her father said, accepting a cup.
“Cousin Barbara’s sister. She says the Cheswicks have been making the most extraordinary claims at dinners.
That you were seen at the Pembroke garden party in a state of, shall we say, disarray.
” He lifted the cup. “I trust there is an explanation.”
“The afternoon was warm.”
“Alice.” The social pleasantness dropped half a tone into the one she had grown up inside, the one that meant she had failed to understand something obvious. “You are a duchess. The scrutiny is considerable. You cannot afford behavior that invites gossip.”
“I was at a garden party.”
“You were seen in a state of…” He set the cup down with a click.
“The Cheswick girl said your hair was in disarray and there was grass on your dress. You are a guest in the better drawing rooms of London on the strength of your husband’s name and the very great fortune that accompanies it.
People are looking for any reason to dismiss you. You cannot hand them the ammunition.”
“I appreciate the counsel,” Alice said.
“I am not offering counsel. I am stating a fact.”
He looked at her directly, and the look was the one she had carried since girlhood: the precise and practiced assessment of a man measuring a bolt of cloth and finding it short of the required length.
“You were not made for this life. We both know it,” he continued.
“Rachel would have navigated these rooms with ease. She had the training, the temperament, the… well…” He spread his hand briefly in a gesture that encompassed her figure and dismissed it in the same motion.
“The presence. You will have to work considerably harder than she would have.”
The room had gone very still. Alice was aware of the square outside the window, the creak of the house settling in the mid-morning sun. She was also aware of her own hands, which lay very still in her lap. Not trembling. She was not going to tremble.
“Rachel has not been found,” she said. “Kenneth has engaged—”
“I am aware of what Bearmoor has done,” he cut her off, the pleasantness gone entirely.
“You would do better to focus on what is before you rather than concerning yourself with matters that are well in hand. Your sister’s situation is not your burden.
Your burden is this marriage, and you are not managing it with the distinction I would hope for. ”
“With respect, Father,” Alice said, and she was proud of the steadiness of it, the absence of any tremor, “I am managing it precisely as well as I intend to.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means—”
“It means,” said a voice from the doorway, “that my wife’s management of this household and this marriage is not a subject on which her father’s opinion is required.”
Kenneth stood at the threshold. He stepped into the room without haste.
“Your Grace.” Her father stood up and bowed his head. “I did not realize you were at home.”
“I am. I had to finish some important matters before checking on the reason for my father-in-law’s visit.” Kenneth crossed to Alice and stood beside her chair.
He did not touch her. He simply stood there, close enough that the warmth of him registered against her arm, and looked at her father with the expression of a man who had decided to be patient and was finding that it cost him something.
“I also heard the substance of this conversation,” he added.
Her father’s chin lifted. “A father has the right to speak frankly with his daughter.”
“You may speak with her as frankly as she permits.” Kenneth’s voice was quiet.
“What you may not do, in this house or any other, is use frankness as a vehicle for something that is not frankness. What you have just said to my wife is not counsel, Lord Peltbury. It is a long habit in a new setting, and the setting has changed.”
“I am simply suggesting—”