Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kenneth had not slept.
That was not in itself remarkable. He had kept functional company with insomnia for the better part of a decade, a professional arrangement that traded rest for balanced accounts and an estate that ran before the household stirred.
What was remarkable was the cause. Not drainage figures. Not the quarterly report from Harcourt’s steward. Not even the twins, whose talent for manufacturing sleepless nights had been, until recently, unrivalled.
It was Alice’s face in the study doorway. The effort of holding herself together in front of him when she had every right to come apart.
He washed. He changed his shirt. He sat at the breakfast table at seven and reviewed the post while the house assembled itself: the clatter of the kitchen, the pump handle in the yard, the tread of the scullery maid on the back stairs. Coffee came. He drank it without tasting it.
Alice arrived at a quarter past the hour. She wore the grey morning dress that buttoned high at the throat, the one she favored when the day required armor, and her hair had been pinned with the efficient severity that meant she had done it herself rather than wait for the maid.
She had not slept well. The evidence was in the pallor of her face, the shadows beneath her eyes, and the careful way she moved, as though distributing a heavy weight across every step.
She sat and reached for the teapot. Her hand was steady, and he watched the steadiness of it and felt something shift behind his ribs that he had no immediate use for and did not pursue.
“Good morning,” she greeted.
“Good morning.”
The silence that followed had substance, the kind built from shared knowledge and the agreement not to examine it before breakfast. He returned to his post. She poured tea.
Footsteps thundered in the corridor.
Freddie entered at the velocity that was his default state of locomotion, Charlie three paces behind, Miss Leyton’s voice trailing after them.
“Papa, Charlie says we have guests, but he won’t say who because he says it’s not his place, which is absurd because everything in this house is his place.
He lives here. And I want to know who is eating our breakfast because Cook made the good rolls, the ones with the currants, and if someone is eating them before me, I need to know who so I can glare at them properly. ”
Kenneth set down his coffee. “Sit, Frederick.”
“But who—”
“Sit.”
Freddie sat.
Charlie took his chair with the measured precision of a boy who had resolved that sitting without instruction was the safest course available. His eyes moved to Alice, then to his father.
“We do have guests,” Kenneth said. He weighed the words once before committing. “Alice’s sister, Lady Rachel. And a gentleman called Mr. Mercer. They arrived early this morning and will be staying with us.”
Freddie’s head came up. His face underwent the rapid calculations that preceded his most penetrating observations. “Lady Rachel? The one who was supposed to marry you?”
“Yes.”
“The one who ran away from the church?”
“Yes, Frederick.”
“The one Alice also ran away from—”
“That will do.”
Freddie considered this for a moment. Then he nodded, satisfied that he had established the salient facts, and returned to the currant rolls with the focus of a child who had determined that breakfast took precedence over genealogy.
Charlie said nothing. He buttered his toast in neat, deliberate strokes and watched the door.
Rachel and George arrived together. Rachel slightly ahead, George’s hand on the small of her back in a gesture that carried the unconscious ease of long habit.
She wore a borrowed dress of Alice’s that sat imperfectly at the shoulders, and she moved with the care of a woman conscious of the eyes upon her.
Her eyes immediately went to Alice, who rose and crossed to meet her.
Alice took her sister’s hand and guided her to the chair beside hers, and the motion was so seamless that Kenneth understood it had been practised between them since childhood.
George bowed. His bow was sincere and unrehearsed, and Kenneth, who had spent two decades receiving the bows of men who calibrated their deference to the nearest degree, noted the difference.
“Good morning, Mr. Mercer.”
“Your Grace.” George took the seat Kenneth indicated. His hands rested on the table, the fingers long and precise. Kenneth noticed Charlie staring at them.
Freddie turned to Rachel with the expression of a child preparing a cross-examination. “Are you having a baby?”
The table went still.
Rachel’s hand moved to the swell of her belly. Her cheeks colored, and she looked at Alice, who looked back with a steadiness that held an entire conversation.
“I am,” she said.
Freddie absorbed this. “Will it live here?”
“No. Mr. Mercer and I will live elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Dorset,” George said. “I have a position at a school.”
“Is it a good school?”
“I believe so.”
“Better than ours? Because our tutor, Mr. Pennworth, is very dull. He smells of ink and cabbage and once fell asleep during fractions.”
The corner of George’s mouth moved. “I teach music, not fractions.”
“Good. Fractions are a swindle. I have said this before, and nobody listens.” Freddie reached for another roll. “Can you play something after breakfast? There is a pianoforte in the drawing room that nobody uses. It may be out of tune. Everything good in this house is.”
Alice’s hand found Rachel’s beneath the table, and Kenneth saw it, the small motion of connection. The warmth that had settled behind his ribs that morning turned over again and did not leave.
Charlie had not spoken. He sat very still, watching George’s hands beside the teacup. Then, without looking up, he asked, “Do you draw?”
George turned to him. “I am afraid I don’t. Music is the extent of my talents.”
“That is all right,” Charlie said. “Music is a kind of drawing. It makes shapes in the air.”
The room held the sentence for a beat longer than it should have. Kenneth, who had spent seven years attempting to understand the workings of his son’s mind and had frequently fallen short, felt something give way in his chest that he did not attempt to name.
He sent the letter at ten. A footman carried it across the square, and Kenneth estimated, based on long acquaintance with Lord Peltbury’s habits and his hunger for ducal summons, that the man would arrive by noon.
He arrived at half past eleven.
Kenneth had spent the intervening hour in his study with George Mercer, who sat upright in the chair opposite and answered questions with the quiet directness of a man who understood he was being assessed and had decided against performing.
“You understand what you are asking of her,” Kenneth said. It was not a question.
“I understand what I am asking her to leave behind, Your Grace. I also understand what I am offering in return. It is not commensurate, in any material sense. I know that.”
“And yet…”
“And yet she chose it.” George met his eyes. “I did not ask her to run. I would not have asked that. She came to me, and I could not send her away.”
Kenneth regarded him for a long moment.
George Mercer was not a man who would command a room or win a seat in Parliament or manage a thousand acres. He was a man who played the pianoforte with skill and loved a woman with a fervor that had survived disgrace and poverty and months of hiding in rented rooms.
Kenneth, who had married his first wife because the duchy required an heir and his second because the church required a bride, found that he had nothing further to say on the subject of insufficient credentials.
“The cottage in Dorset is sound,” he said. “The roof was replaced last year. The school is well-regarded. The headmaster is a fair man.”
George inclined his head. “You have been more generous than I have any right to expect.”
“I have been practical. My wife’s sister will not live in want. The question of generosity does not arise.”
The butler’s knock ended the conversation. “Lord Peltbury, Your Grace.”
The drawing room had been arranged. Kenneth stood at the window.
Alice sat in the chair nearest the hearth, her hands folded in her lap, her spine straight.
Rachel and George occupied the settee opposite, their fingers intertwined.
George wore the expression of a man who understood that his presence in the room was both necessary and secondary to the conversation about to unfold.
Lord Peltbury entered with the brisk gait of a man who had dressed in haste and was pretending otherwise. His waistcoat was buttoned one hole off its proper alignment.
“Bearmoor.” He nodded to Kenneth. His gaze swept across the room, passed over Alice, found Rachel, and stopped.
The silence that followed was not the silence of breakfast, which had been tentative and warm. This was the silence of a man encountering a thing he had searched for and finding it arrived in a form he had not wanted.
“Rachel.” His voice was flat. His eyes moved from her face to her midsection and stayed. “I see.”
“Father.” Rachel’s voice held, though the effort was visible in her jaw.
“I see,” he said again. He looked at George. “And this is the man.”
“George Mercer, My Lord.” George rose. His bow was the same he had given Kenneth: sincere, unpolished, straight-backed. “I am responsible, and I intend to—”
“Sit down.” Peltbury did not raise his voice. The dismissal was carried in the tone of a man who had weighed the person before him and found them unworthy of standing. “I did not come here to hear from the music teacher.”
Kenneth watched from the window. He had made a decision before Peltbury arrived, a decision that required a discipline he rarely had cause to exercise: he would not speak first. Alice had asked to tell her father the truth.
She would tell him. Kenneth would stand at the window and hold his tongue for precisely as long as his judgement held.