Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
“You know what she came here for,” Andrew heard Frances say.
He turned from the window slowly. The carriage had not yet rolled away from the front steps, but Lady Ashford was gone from the room, and still the air held the shape of her visit. Her questions lingered like perfume too sweet to be harmless.
Frances stood beside the abandoned tea tray, pale with anger and confusion.
“Do not tell me you do not know,” she demanded. “You understood everything the moment you entered.”
Andrew’s jaw tightened. “She was merely prying, as such women tend to do.”
“Yes, I had gathered that much for myself.”
He frowned. “Then there is nothing else to say.”
Frances stared at him. “Nothing else?”
“No.”
She gave a small, incredulous laugh. “How impressive. You have reduced intrusion, gossip, scandal, and a woman asking pointed questions about a child in our care to nothing else.”
“Our care,” he repeated before he could stop himself.
Her eyes sharpened. “Yes. Our care. Unless you have forgotten the marriage you insisted was necessary.”
He had not forgotten. God help him, he had not forgotten for a moment. How could he, when he saw her seated at the head of his table, when he passed a room and heard the low murmur of her voice, when the servants called her Her Grace and the words stirred something in him he had no right to feel?
But the child was different. The child was the line he could not allow her to cross.
Andrew drew himself straighter. “The matter remains as we agreed.”
Frances’ expression changed at once. “As we agreed?”
“You were told from the beginning. There are to be no questions about the child.”
“Yes, I was told,” she said, with each word clipped. “I did not agree to it.”
“You accepted it.”
“I accepted very little,” she shot back. “I was married into it.”
His hand closed behind his back. “This is not a subject for discussion.”
“It becomes one when strange women enter my drawing room and ask whether the baby is hidden, nameless, and tied to my marriage.”
A flicker of anger moved through him, colder than before. “Lady Ashford had no right to say any such thing.”
“No, she did not. But she did say it.” Frances stepped toward him. “Not to you… to me.”
Andrew said nothing.
Her voice lowered, but it did not soften.
“You may close doors, Your Grace. You may dismiss visitors, command servants, silence scandal sheets, and stand in thresholds looking as though one more question might bring the ceiling down. But I am the one being asked. I am the one expected to smile and answer. I am the one everyone believes has become mother, accomplice, fool, or all three.”
His chest tightened.
“Frances–”
“No.” Her eyes flashed. “Do not use my name as though that will settle me. I am your wife now. Your duchess, as you’ve already said. That was the solution you chose. And if I am to bear the consequences of this secret, then I have the right to know what it is.”
Andrew looked at her across the small distance between them, and for one dangerous moment he almost told her.
It wouldn’t have been all of it. Perhaps not Mary’s name, not Carrington, not the fear in that dying woman’s eyes.
But it would have been enough to soften the suspicion in Frances’ face, enough to make her understand why he kept silent, and hopefully, enough to stop her from looking at him as though he had built a wall simply to keep her out.
Then he heard Mary’s voice again, thin and desperate in the dim cottage room.
Protect the child… never say the baby is mine… let no one know.
His answer settled before tenderness could weaken it.
“No,” he said instead, unable to control the urge to keep denying until denial was no longer possible.
Frances went still.
Andrew forced himself to hold her gaze. “I… cannot explain.”
“Cannot,” she repeated. “Or will not?”
“Both,” he frowned, “if that satisfies you.”
“It does not,” she replied in that infuriating manner that both infuriated him and thrilled him in equal measure.
“I did not expect it would.”
Her face flushed. “Then what do you expect? Obedience?”
“I expect discretion.”
“Oh, how generous.”
Right now, he was leaning toward infuriating.
“I expect you to understand that silence may be the only shield I have left,” he told her, though even as the words left him, he knew they wouldn’t be enough, because she didn’t want another locked door. She wanted the key.
“Silence,” she echoed sharply.
“Yes.”
“Mine, I suppose.”
“Mine, and yours… for now.”
She frowned. “With no explanation?”
“Yes.”
“With strangers circling the house and gossip gathering at every window?”
His voice hardened. “The child is not mine.”
“I know you have said so.”
“It is the truth,” he repeated over and over again, though with little effect.
“Then whose is she?” she demanded.
Andrew’s silence answered as firmly as speech. Frances looked at him as though he had struck the last thread of patience from her.
“I cannot tell you,” he echoed. “You have to trust me.”
“No.” Her reply came at once, fierce and bright. “No, Your Grace. Silence is not a cloak you may throw over my shoulders and call it protection.”
He drew back slightly, not in movement, but in feeling. For the first time since Lady Ashford had left, something in her anger burned clean through his own.
Frances stood before him with her hands curled at her sides, and with her green eyes alive with hurt she would have rather died than name.
She was not merely offended or inconvenienced by this.
She was furious because he had asked her to stand beside him while refusing to let her know what shadow she stood in.
And perhaps, in some merciless corner of himself, Andrew knew she was right.
Her voice trembled, though not with weakness. “Trust must be earned.”
Andrew said nothing. Of course, he said nothing.
Silence seemed to be his preferred fortress, the place to which he retreated whenever the truth came too near.
Frances saw it happen before her very eyes: the closing of his expression, the tightening of his mouth, the stillness that settled over him like armor.
A moment ago, he had been angry. Now he was something worse… untouchable.
“Not demanded,” she continued, because if she stopped speaking, she feared she might choke on all the words he refused to give her. “Not assumed, not hidden behind a title, or a marriage contract, or some noble silence you have decided must excuse everything.”
His eyes remained on hers, blue, cold and unreadable.
Perhaps not entirely unreadable, for Frances had begun, against her better judgment, to learn the small betrayals in his face.
She knew the difference between indifference and restraint.
She knew when his temper sharpened and when some older pain moved beneath it.
She knew now that his silence was not empty. It was crowded with things he would not say. That only made it worse.
“You ask me to stand beside you,” she told him.
“You ask me to bear the name, the looks, the questions, the whispers. You ask me to smile at women like Lady Ashford while they prod at this house as though it were a sealed box they mean to pry open. And still, when I ask what danger I am facing, what secret I am meant to protect, you give me nothing.”
“I am trying to protect–”
“Whom?” she demanded. “The child? Yourself? Me? Or the secret?”
He went still.
There. She had struck something. Frances felt it with a sudden, almost dreadful certainty.
The air between them changed. It was a small thing, nothing another person might have noticed, but she did.
She saw the way his eyes sharpened, the way the careful control of his shoulders became too deliberate.
It was a secret with edges sharp enough to make even Andrew recoil from naming it.
“You see?” she said more softly. “This is precisely why I cannot simply trust you.”
He looked at her for one long moment. For a breath, Frances thought he might answer. She had not expected miracles from him, but perhaps he might give her one true thing, one solid piece of ground beneath her feet.
Instead, Andrew bowed. It was not the bow he offered in drawing rooms, smooth and charming enough to disarm even the most determined dowager. It was not the polite inclination he gave her when he was amused and wished to irritate her by appearing perfectly composed.
This bow was formal and distant. It placed an entire ballroom between them though they stood only a few feet apart.
Frances hated it immediately.
“This conversation is finished,” he told her.
For a moment, she could only stare.
Finished.
The word landed like a lock turning. She had been dismissed before in her life, by her father, by society, by men who mistook wit for impertinence and intelligence for inconvenience.
She knew the sensation well: that polite, suffocating closure that told a woman she had spoken too far and must now be returned to the proper boundaries of obedience.
But she had not expected it to feel like this from Andrew. That was the most humiliating part.
“You cannot simply end it because it no longer suits you,” she urged, fighting the onslaught of tears.
“I can when nothing more may be said.”
Her temper flared so swiftly it nearly steadied her. “Nothing more may be said by you, perhaps.”
His hand tightened once at his side. She saw it. She saw the anger, the restraint, the cost of whatever he was holding back. But he did not yield. He did not soften. He did not even have the decency to look uncertain.
“Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
The title struck harder than her name would have.
A moment ago, she had been Frances; now she was Her Grace, returned to rank, formality, distance. She was not a wife, not even an ally. She was his duchess, when he wished to defend her. She was Her Grace, when he wished to leave her.
Andrew turned and walked out. The door closed behind him with a quiet click.
Frances remained where she was. For several seconds, she did not move at all.
She listened until the last echo of him had vanished.
But the silence he left behind was not empty.
It contained Lady Ashford’s careful questions, Andrew’s cold refusal, and her own voice saying trust must be earned as though she had not already wanted, foolishly, dangerously, to give him some part of it.