Chapter 23 #2
“I was running away that day as well,” Alice admitted.
Rachel stared at her. “What?”
“The morning of your wedding, I had a bag packed at the servants’ entrance. I was going to find work as a governess somewhere no one would think to look.” Alice held her gaze. “I believed no one would notice I had gone.”
Rachel’s face crumpled. “Alice.”
“We were both leaving,” Alice said. “Both of us, on the same morning, from the same house. Neither of us thought the other would care enough to miss us.” She reached for her hand and squeezed it gently. “We were both wrong.”
Rachel pressed her free hand to her mouth and wept. Alice let her, because some things required weeping before they could be set down.
When the worst of it had passed, Rachel turned to Kenneth, who had moved to stand near the window with his arms crossed and his face arranged in the careful neutrality he adopted when giving people the room to be human without his interference.
“Your Grace,” she said. Her voice was steadier now, though only just. “I humiliated you. I left you at the altar and vanished without explanation, and I have no defence for it.”
Kenneth regarded her for a moment. “The circumstances have changed considerably since April, Lady Rachel.” He did not look at Alice, which carried its own weight. “What matters now is what comes next.”
George stepped forward. He stood straight, but Alice could see the tension in his jaw, the containment of a man about to make a case he feared would be insufficient.
“Your Grace, I intend to marry Rachel. I have intended it since before any of this. I earn a good wage, and I will provide for her and our child.” He paused.
“But Lord Peltbury will never consent. He will never release her dowry. And without his support, the situation becomes…”
“Complicated,” Kenneth supplied.
“Difficult,” George said, because he was a man who preferred his own vocabulary.
Kenneth regarded him for a moment with the assessing attention he brought to all practical problems, measured and entirely without sentiment. Alice watched him thinking and felt the awareness that the mind behind that face was formidable in ways that had nothing to do with his title.
“There is a school in Dorset,” he said. “A well-regarded boarding school in need of a music instructor. The headmaster is a former associate. The position comes with a cottage on the grounds.” He pulled a drawer open with the brisk competence of a man who had already made the relevant arrangements.
“I will write to him today. The wedding can take place at Bearmoor Castle, by special license. Alice and I will stand as witnesses.”
Rachel looked at George. George looked at Kenneth.
Alice, watching all three, felt something move in her chest that was not relief and not gratitude, but something larger than either, something that had to do with the man standing at his desk in the pre-dawn candlelight, solving problems that were not his with the quiet authority of someone who had decided at some point that this family and everything in it fell within his jurisdiction.
“I will speak to Father,” she declared.
Kenneth’s eyes moved to hers.
“He will not be reasonable,” she added. “But he ought to know. And I would rather he hear it from me.”
He held her gaze for a moment that carried more than either of them would have attempted to articulate in front of company, and then he nodded and turned to Rachel and George. “You will stay with us. The housekeeper will have rooms prepared within the hour.”
Rachel’s composure, held together with effort and exhaustion, gave way entirely. She put her face in her hands. George’s arm went around her shoulders, instinctive and unself-conscious.
Alice looked at them. At her sister, leaning into the man she had chosen over everything, the evidence of that choice visible beneath her dress. She thought of a morning months ago, when she had stood at a service yard with a bag in her hand and believed she was invisible.
She had not been invisible. She had been seen by a seven-year-old with no regard for propriety, and by a duke who needed a bride and received something he had not expected, and by her sister, who had loved her enough to run rather than let her watch her become someone she was not.
Rachel and George were upstairs, following a sleepy-eyed maid to the guest rooms. Rachel’s hand was still in George’s, her footsteps slow with fatigue. The house was beginning to stir, the first sounds of the kitchen, the distant footfalls on the back stairs.
Alice stood in the study doorway. Kenneth was at his desk, returning papers to their proper places, and the candlelight caught the side of his face.
“Kenneth.”
He looked up.
She had meant to say thank you. She had meant to deliver the words with composure and warmth and the appropriate measure of wifely gratitude for a husband who had fulfilled a promise at considerable expense. She had meant to be articulate.
What came instead was nothing. Her throat closed up.
She pressed her fingers to her mouth and breathed through her nose and felt the full accumulated weight of every night she had lain in the dark wondering if Rachel was cold, or frightened, or alone, and every morning she had risen and carried the wondering beneath whatever the day required, and every conversation in which she had been told by her father or by polite society or by her own relentless inventory that worrying about her sister was an indulgence she could not afford.
Kenneth had brought Rachel back. Without ceremony, without requiring gratitude in return, without making it a gesture from which he expected anything.
He had done it because she had asked, and because he was a man who kept his word, and because somewhere in the previous months her fears had become his.
“You kept your promise.” Her voice was smaller than she had intended.
He set down the papers. He did not cross the room.
He did not reach for her. He stood at his desk and looked at her with the expression she had spent months learning to read, the one that lived beneath the composure.
Then he said, with the quiet certainty of a man who had discovered what he was willing to be and was no longer interested in pretending otherwise, “I will always keep my promises to you.”
The morning light slanted through the study windows, pale and new, the grey giving way to the faint gold of early autumn.
Alice stood in the doorway and looked at him and felt, beneath the relief and the trembling aftermath of a night she would carry for a long time, something steady take root in her chest. It was not happiness, which was a breath she allowed herself in small measures.
It was something with more weight to it, and more permanence, which settled into the foundation of her and stayed.
She simply nodded. She did not trust her voice.
He held her gaze for another moment. Then he returned to his papers.
She turned and went upstairs to wash her face and dress, because the house was waking and Rachel was here and there was still a great deal to be done, and she had always been, for better and worse, a woman who managed what was in front of her.
The orrery was on the bedside table where she had left it, Charlie’s drawing lying beside it. The morning light caught the brass rings, and Mercury glinted, smallest and closest to the sun.