Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Frances had not expected happiness from dinner. Still, she had expected him to be there.
The dining room was already lit when she entered it. The room was grand in that grave, Sinclair manner, with its high-ceilings, pale walls and portraits observing from gilt frames as though every meal were a matter of ancestral judgment.
Frances paused just inside the doorway. Only one place had been set.
The china shone. The wine caught ruby-red in the glass.
A silver tureen sent up a delicate curl of steam, rich with the scent of roasted meat, herbs, butter, and something faintly sweet beneath it.
Under other circumstances, Frances might have admired the household’s efficiency.
At present, she could only look at the solitary plate.
“His Grace is delayed?” she asked.
It was absurd, how calm she sounded.
Carter inclined his head. “His Grace has gone out on business, Your Grace.”
Frances turned toward him. “Gone out?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“For the evening?”
“I believe so, Your Grace.”
She waited, certain that more had to follow. A message, perhaps, an apology, or any explanation that would transform the insult into mere inconvenience.
Carter offered none. Frances looked again at the place set for one.
“Would Your Grace care to dine?” he asked gently.
No. She would care to take the gleaming silver knife beside her plate and use it to carve the Duke of Sinclair’s manners into something less offensive.
Instead, she crossed the room and sat. A duchess, she thought, ought to be capable of dining alone without making a tragedy of it. Widows did so. Spinsters did so. Heroines trapped in gothic abbeys did so, though admittedly with more thunder and a higher likelihood of secret passages.
She had a bit of dinner, purely for appearance sake. She had eaten precisely three spoonfuls and her pride. The latter sat very badly.
Frances left the dining room with measured steps, because one did not flee from an empty table.
One withdrew. She passed through the corridor with its faint scent of beeswax and extinguished daylight, up the stairs where shadows gathered along the carved banister, and toward the chamber that had been prepared for her.
A maid waited for her, a young woman called Alice, with soft brown eyes and quick hands.
Frances allowed herself to be undressed in near silence.
Her travelling gown was removed, then her stays, then the long layers of her day.
Piece by piece, the woman she had been taught to present to the world was unfastened and folded away.
At last, she stood in a clean nightgown of fine white lawn, a robe drawn around her shoulders. The fabric was thin and cool against her skin. The air in the room smelled faintly of lavender water, fresh linen, and the fire burning low in the grate.
Her hair fell loose down her back, heavier than usual after being pinned all day. Alice brushed it until it shone in the candlelight, then asked whether Her Grace required anything more.
“No, thank you,” Frances said. “You may go.”
When the maid left, the room seemed to expand around her. She went to the window and drew the curtain aside.
“This is just an arrangement,” she told the room.
The room, being better bred than most of society, did not answer.
She turned down the coverlet herself. The bed was enormous, carved, and draped in pale hangings that seemed designed to make any single occupant feel especially unmarried. Frances looked at it, then laughed once under her breath, though there was no amusement in the sound.
Her first night as Duchess of Sinclair, with a cold dinner, an absent husband, and a bed so large it might require correspondence between its two sides.
She had one hand upon the coverlet when a knock sounded at the door. For a moment, she thought she had imagined it. Then it came again.
“Alice?” she called, as she went to open the door, only to find Andrew standing in the corridor.
Frances clutched the robe closed at her throat. It was an instinctive movement, foolish and immediate, and the moment she did it she felt color rise hotly from her chest to her cheeks.
His gaze had fallen upon her as any man’s might have done when a door opened unexpectedly. But then he saw her and something in his face went very still. His eyes moved, not rudely, but helplessly, from the loose dark spill of her hair to the hand clenched at her throat, then back to her face.
Frances felt the glance everywhere. She pulled the robe tighter.
“Your Grace,” she said.
It came out far too breathless.
He blinked, as though recovering himself. “Forgive me. I did not mean to disturb you.”
He was still dressed for the evening, though not as formally as he had been earlier.
His coat was dark, damp at the shoulders from the night air.
A trace of wind clung to him, cold and clean, carrying the scents of leather, rain, and the faint smoke of some distant hearth.
His hair was slightly disturbed, one pale lock fallen near his brow.
He looked less like a duke than a man… that was much worse.
“I was told you had gone out on business,” she said instead o a greeting.
“I had.”
Frances became suddenly conscious of the looseness of her hair over one shoulder, of the soft lawn against her skin, of the fact that beneath the robe and nightgown she wore nothing of the armor daytime provided.
“I came,” he informed her, “to bid you good night.”
The corridor was dim behind him, lit by two sconces that made shadow and gold of his face.
The candlelight from her chamber spilled across his boots and the lower edge of his coat.
Between them lay the threshold, narrow and charged, as if some invisible line had been drawn there by law, propriety, fear, and the very faint scent of lavender from her room.
Frances became intensely aware that they were married, that he had the right to cross that threshold… also, that he was not crossing it.
“I also wished to remind you that your duties as duchess will commence soon.”
“All duties?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.
Andrew frowned. “I beg your pardon?”
She did not wish to say it, not while heat still lingered in her cheeks and his nearness had made her too aware of every inch of herself. Yet the question had risen at once, sharp with dread and shame and the memory of every warning she had ever heard spoken in whispers between married women.
Frances forced herself to meet his eyes.
“Am I expected to give you an heir as well?”
For one awful heartbeat, Frances thought she had made a grave mistake.
That she had stepped too boldly into a subject decent women did not name, even when it shaped the whole course of their lives.
Her cheeks burned hotter. She wanted to retreat and could not.
Pride held her in place when courage nearly failed.
Then Andrew moved. He stepped closer. It should not have altered the world, but it did.
He was suddenly much nearer, tall enough that she had to tip her face up to keep his gaze.
The air between them changed at once. She felt his presence like warmth from a fire, though no fire burned in the corridor.
He did not touch her. He did not even lift his hand. Still, everything in her body reacted as though he had.
Then his expression hardened. “I will never demand an heir from you,” he told her.
The words were calm, each one placed carefully enough to cut.
She ought to have been relieved. She was relieved. And yet something in his tone made relief feel indistinguishable from rejection.
Andrew’s eyes remained fixed on hers. “I told you this marriage was for appearances.”
“Yes,” she said, though the word scarcely reached beyond her lips.
“I do not want children.”
The statement was not merely practical. It had come from somewhere deeper and darker. She heard it at once, though she did not understand it. His face gave nothing away, but the words themselves seemed to carry a shadow.
“It would be for the best if you came to terms with that,” she heard him conclude.
His face remained impassive. “About this.”
She searched his expression, but whatever lived behind it had retreated behind stone.
The man who had nearly smiled at her beneath the nursery firelight was gone.
The man who had stepped nearer and made the very air feel warm was gone too.
In his place, stood the Duke of Sinclair, all command, distance, and impenetrable reserve.
“I see,” she said.
He inclined his head. “Good night, Frances.”
There it was again. Her name, not as punctuation now, but dismissal.
He stepped back. The loss of his nearness was immediate and absurdly physical. The corridor seemed colder. Frances hated that she noticed.
“Good night, Your Grace,” she replied.
She watched him go until the shadows took him. Only then did she shut the door.
The Duke of Sinclair did not intend to want her… and that, unfortunately, did nothing at all to prevent her from wanting him.