Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
By the second morning after Andrew’s departure, Sinclair House had become unbearable.
Frances had not expected that. She had expected anger to sustain her.
Anger was clean, useful, and far more dignified than sorrow.
It gave one something to do with one’s hands, something to set in the spine, something sharp enough to stand behind.
She had left Andrew’s study with anger holding her upright like whalebone.
But anger, she discovered, was a poor companion in an empty house. It had a habit of tiring before grief did.
The nursery was the worst of it. Frances had not meant to go there.
Indeed, she had told herself there was no reason to pass that corridor at all.
The baby was gone. Nurse Ellis was gone.
The little cradle had been sent down with them to Sinclair, along with the soft blankets, the small gowns, the rattles, and all the absurdly tiny articles which had once seemed to multiply of their own accord.
Yet her feet carried her there shortly after breakfast. The room looked indecently neat.
The curtains had been drawn back. The hearth had been swept.
A chair sat by the window, exactly where Frances had once sat with the baby sleeping against her shoulder while London rain tapped lightly at the glass.
A small white ribbon lay half-hidden beneath the edge of the rug, missed by whoever had packed the child’s things.
Frances crossed the room and picked it up. It was only a ribbon. No rational woman should be undone by a ribbon. But Frances closed her fingers around it and stood in the middle of the empty nursery while the silence pressed against her from every wall.
She had thought she was prepared for Andrew’s absence.
She had not considered that the baby’s absence would have its own sound: no small restless cry from the cradle, no soft sigh against her neck, no little fist curling into the lace of her morning gown with astonishing determination.
Even the air seemed altered without that warm, milky sweetness which had clung to the nursery.
Frances swallowed.
“This is foolish,” she spoke aloud to herself.
No one argued. That made it worse.
She left the nursery and went to the sitting room, where her manuscript waited upon the writing table.
Writing, she decided, was the proper remedy.
Writing demanded thought, discipline, structure.
It did not ask questions one could not answer.
It did not look at one with blue eyes and say nothing when truth was required.
She sat, took up her pen, and attempted to return to the troubles of her heroine, who had been left in a ruined abbey with a missing letter, a suspicious aunt, and a villain whose motives had grown regrettably complicated.
Frances read the last page twice, found it entirely unfamiliar, and dipped her pen.
For several minutes, she wrote nothing. Then she wrote one sentence.
The house felt empty without him.
Frances stared at it. Her face warmed with immediate indignation.
“That,” she told the page, “is not at all relevant to the abbey.”
She crossed it out. Beneath it, she tried again.
The child’s absence was felt most acutely in the rooms where her presence had once seemed smallest.
Frances set the pen down.
“Oh, very well,” she whispered.
There it was: not fiction at all.
She leaned back in the chair and pressed one hand over her eyes.
She missed them. The admission came not in one grand, tragic sweep, but in a hundred small betrayals.
She missed the baby’s weight in her arms. She missed the way Andrew’s voice softened when he asked after her.
She missed the sound of his step in the corridor, the low murmur of him in his study, the steadiness of him across the breakfast table, even when silence sat between them like a reproach.
She missed him so much that it frightened her. For it was one thing to be angry with a man one did not love. It was quite another to be angry with a man whose absence had taken all the warmth from the house.
At that moment, she heard a knock at the door. Frances got startled, then hastily gathered several loose pages as though a servant might care that her heroine had been abandoned in emotional disorder.
“Come in.”
The footman bowed. “The Duchess of Thorne and Miss Norton, Your Grace.”
Frances stood at once. Emma entered first, lovely and composed beneath a bonnet trimmed in dark blue ribbon, though her eyes went over Frances with the swift tenderness of an elder sister who had never believed in waiting to be invited into distress.
Sophia followed close behind, pale and anxious, clutching her reticule as if it contained courage.
“Frances,” Emma greeted
That was all. It was enough.
Frances lifted her chin. “You have come very early.”
“It is nearly noon,” Sophia pointed out softly.
“Then you have come with very little warning.”
Emma removed her gloves. “Yes.”
Frances looked from one sister to the other. “How delightfully direct.”
“We were worried,” Sophia admitted.
Frances attempted a smile. “How unnecessary.”
Emma’s gaze moved to the crossed-out page upon the writing table, then to Frances’s face. “Is it?”
Frances turned away to ring for tea, though she had no desire for it. “I am perfectly well.”
“Of course,” Emma agreed. “That is why you look as though you have slept badly, eaten worse, and quarreled with every pen in the house.”
Sophia glanced at the manuscript. “Have you?”
“The pens began it.”
That won a small, unwilling smile from Sophia, but Emma did not soften.
“Frances.”
Frances hated the gentleness in her sister’s voice. Gentleness was far more dangerous than accusation. It allowed no graceful defense.
She returned to her chair but did not sit. “Andrew has gone to the countryside.”
“We know,” Emma echoed.
“Of course you know. Philip told you.”
“Philip told me enough.”
“How generous of him to be selectively informative.”
Emma came farther into the room. “And you are here alone?”
“I am not alone. There are at least thirty servants in this house, unless Andrew took them all too in some act of domestic conquest.”
Sophia’s eyes filled with concern. “Frances.”
The word was so soft that Frances’s composure wavered. She looked away. Emma drew out the chair opposite the desk and sat, as though settling in for a siege. Sophia perched on the edge of the settee.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Emma voiced herself. “Tell us the truth.”
Frances gave a faint laugh. “That seems to be a fashionable demand lately.”
“And rarely an easy one.”
“No,” Frances replied. “It is not.”
She looked down at the ribbon still lying in her palm.
“Lady Ravenshaw gave me a letter.”
Emma’s expression sharpened. “What letter?”
Frances hesitated. “One supposedly written by Mary before she died. It was addressed to Andrew, and it made it seem as though the child was his, or at least that Mary believed he owed the child some claim.”
Sophia’s hand rose to her mouth. “Goodness…”
“I took it to him,” Frances continued. “He said it was a lie. But he wouldn’t tell me anything more.”
Only then did she realize that she had carried it from the nursery. Sophia saw it, and her expression changed with painful understanding. Frances closed her hand around it.
Emma’s voice softened. “You miss the baby.”
Frances said nothing.
“And Andrew,” Emma added.
Frances’s head lifted at once. “That is not the same thing.”
“I did not say it was.”
“It is entirely different.”
“I believe you.”
“You sound as though you do not.”
Emma’s mouth curved sadly. “I sound as though I know you.”
That, unfortunately, was difficult to refute.
Frances sat at last, because standing had begun to feel theatrical. “I cannot stop thinking about them,” she admitted, and the words came out more quietly than she intended. “Either of them.”
Sophia’s face softened. “That is not a crime.”
“It feels like one.” Frances looked down at the ribbon. “I told myself I was right to stay. I told myself truth mattered more than comfort, and trust mattered more than affection. I still believe that. I do.”
Emma watched her carefully. “But?”
Frances swallowed. “But the house is so quiet.”
Sophia looked close to tears. Frances hated that, too. It was much easier to be wounded when no one else looked wounded on one’s behalf.
Emma leaned forward. “Are you certain you made the right choice?”
“Yes,” Frances said at once, but she said it too quickly.
Emma noticed but she didn’t speak.
Frances drew a breath and tried again. “I couldn’t stay in a marriage without truth. I couldn’t stand before him and beg for honesty only to be told it was not mine to have. What was I to do? Smile? Accept silence because he delivered it nobly?”
“No,” Emma agreed. “You were right to ask.”
“Then why do you look at me as though I have made some terrible mistake?”
“Because two things may be true at once.”
Frances frowned. “That is a very inconvenient habit of truth.”
“Yes,” Emma chuckled. “It often is.”
Sophia twisted her fingers in her lap. “Perhaps he wanted to tell you.”
Frances looked at her. “Then he might have done so.”
“Perhaps he could not.”
“That is what he said.”
“And perhaps,” Sophia continued, gaining courage with every word, “he meant it.”
Frances looked away.
Emma’s voice was careful. “Sometimes people keep things hidden for reasons that are not selfish.”
The words found their mark before Frances could guard against them. Emma did not press immediately. She let the silence sit, as she had always been better at patience than Frances.
Then she said, “Do you remember what happened before Philip and I married?”
Frances’s fingers tightened around the ribbon. “That is unkind.”
“It is relevant.”
“It is also unkind.”
Emma’s eyes gentled. “You wrote something that caused me pain.”
Frances closed her eyes briefly. “Yes.”
“And afterward, when everything seemed impossible, you tried to repair what you had done.”
“I tried very badly.”
“You tried fiercely,” Emma corrected. “And not all of it could be explained at once. Not to Mama, not to Father, not even to me. You acted from guilt, yes, but also from love and from protection.”
Frances opened her eyes.
Emma held her gaze. “If someone had judged only the secrecy, they might have thought the worst of you.”
Frances had no answer. The room seemed suddenly full of old ghosts: printed words, careless wit, Emma’s distress, the awful knowledge that harm once done could not be gathered back.
She had known then what it was to be misunderstood and yet guilty, protective and yet wrong, silent because explanation would only wound others further.
Sophia spoke softly. “I am not saying His Grace is right to keep things from you. Only… perhaps do not give up too quickly.”
Frances turned the ribbon between her fingers. “And if the letter was true?”
Emma’s expression sharpened. “Do you believe it was?”
“I don’t know.”
“That isn’t the same as yes.”
“No,” Frances admitted.
“Did you trust Lady Ravenshaw?”
Frances gave a short, humorless laugh. “I have more trust in damp gunpowder.”
Sophia blinked. “Then why–”
“Because she had proof,” Frances interrupted. “Or something that looked enough like proof when placed in one’s hand at the proper moment.”
Emma’s gaze did not leave her. “And Andrew?”
Frances’s throat tightened. Andrew had looked at the letter and said at once that it was a lie. And then he had refused her the rest.
“I don’t know how to trust half a truth,” Frances whispered.
Emma rose and came around the writing table, crouching a little beside her chair in a manner entirely unsuited to a duchess and entirely like a sister.
“Then don’t. Ask for the whole of it. Demand it, if you must. But be certain you are walking away from him, Frances, and not only from the hurt.”
That was the cruelest advice yet, because it was the truest. Frances looked down at the little ribbon in her hand, soft and useless and impossibly dear.
“I thought I knew what I could bear,” she confessed.
Sophia came to her other side and touched her shoulder. “And now?”
Frances’s eyes burned.
She would not cry, not when crying would make everything feel decided, and nothing was decided. She was still angry, still hurt, still convinced that trust could not be built upon locked doors and noble silences.
But she missed the baby. She missed Andrew. And beneath all the anger, quiet and stubborn as a heartbeat, there remained the terrible fear that Emma was right. Perhaps she had not left because she had stopped loving them.
Perhaps she had left because she had begun.