Chapter Two
“You are pacing again, Your Grace.”
Dominic Vane, sixth Duke of Ravenswood, halted mid-stride and turned to find Graves standing in the doorway of his study, his expression one of studied neutrality—the surest sign that the butler was restraining comment.
It was not yet six o’clock. The fire had burned low, and the whisky decanter upon the sideboard was appreciably emptier than it had been at midnight.
“I am not pacing,” Dominic said. “I am… considering.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Graves’s tone suggested he knew precisely how much considering had taken place, and how much of it had consisted in wearing a path into the Turkish carpet. “The new governess has arrived. Mrs Potter settled her in the blue room last night.”
The new governess. Dominic’s jaw tightened before he could prevent it.
The fifth in as many months—though, in fairness, two had departed of their own accord, citing the isolation, the gloom, and the child’s unsettling silences, while only two had been dismissed: one for incompetence, the other for asking too many questions about the war.
This one came with excellent references. A Mrs Whitmore had written effusively of Miss Weston’s skill with difficult children, her intelligence, her discretion. A treasure, the woman had called her. You shall not find better.
Dominic did not want a treasure. He wanted someone competent enough to keep the boy fed, educated, and out of his sight until the Hardings arrived to collect him. Was that so much to require?
“I shall see her at nine,” he said. “Here. Inform her.”
“Very good, Your Grace.” Graves paused. “Shall I have breakfast sent up, or will you—”
“I am not hungry.”
Another pause. Graves had served the Vane family for forty years and had known Dominic since he was a boy in short coats, terrorising nursery maids and trailing mud through the gallery. He had earned the right to certain liberties—though he seldom exercised them directly.
“Mrs Potter mentioned,” the butler said carefully, “that Miss Weston made a favourable impression upon Master Thomas last evening.”
Dominic’s hand, reaching for the whisky decanter, stilled. “Did she?”
“The boy spoke to her, apparently. Unprompted.”
Spoke. Thomas had not spoken unprompted to anyone in this household since his arrival.
He answered when directly addressed—brief, colourless replies that revealed nothing—but he did not initiate.
Did not volunteer. Did not, so far as Dominic could discern, exist as anything more than a small, silent ghost drifting through the upper floors of a house that had ghosts enough already.
“How fortunate,” Dominic heard himself say. “Perhaps this one will last longer than a fortnight.”
He poured the whisky. Graves withdrew. And Dominic stood alone in his study as the grey October dawn crept through the windows, watching the amber liquid catch the light and endeavouring very hard not to think of brown eyes in a small, solemn face.
William’s eyes.
He drank.
He had watched her arrive.
Not from courtesy, not from duty, but by the accident of standing at the study window at the precise moment the hired carriage failed to deliver her to his door.
Dominic had seen the driver’s argument with the groom—arms flung, gestures sharp with refusal—and had watched, with the detached curiosity of a man for whom nothing had felt novel in years, as a small figure in a dark cloak emerged from the coach and set out on foot up the drive, a handcart bumping behind her.
She had walked the full two miles in the rain.
He should have sent someone. Graves should have sent someone.
Instead, he had stood at his window watching a woman he had never met push a handcart through the October mud, and when she had at last passed out of his sightline—her hood drawn, her back unbent—he had turned away with a feeling he did not care to name.
He did not go to greet her. He did not attend the small commotion at the door, the murmured exchange with Mrs Potter, the careful footsteps up the servants’ stairs. He poured a second whisky, and then a third, and did not admit—even to himself—that he was listening.
At midnight, he gave up and went to bed.
The dream came in fragments.
He was walking the corridors of Rovewood—not the Rovewood he knew, which was cold and empty and smelled of damp stone, but some other version of it, lamp-lit and warm, the kind of house he dimly remembered from childhood.
He was searching for something. He did not know what.
The corridors unfolded with the dream’s peculiar logic, one opening into another, and at the end of each he glimpsed, always, the edge of a grey skirt vanishing around a corner.
He turned into a room he had never seen. A library, perhaps. Firelight. A woman stood before the hearth with her back to him.
“You were walking in the rain,” he said—or dreamed he said, his voice distant even to himself. “You should have let someone meet you.”
“I managed.” Her voice was warm and low, pitched for an intimacy he had not earned. “I always manage.”
Turn around, he thought. Let me see you.
She did not turn. But she spoke again, and her voice was nearer now, as though the room itself had brought her to him. "Your Grace."
The word undid him. Not Your Grace as the servants said it—crisp, respectful, a barrier of rank—but Your Grace the way a woman says a man's name when she has taken it apart and put it back together and made it belong to her.
His hand closed on her waist.
The dream compressed. He was not aware of deciding anything—was not aware of moving—but his palm was flat against the curve of her hip through the governess grey, and her back was against his chest, and she had tipped her head so that her hair—auburn, damp from rain, loosening from its pins—brushed against his jaw.
She smelled of lavender and of something beneath it that was warmer, unfamiliar, and difficult to name.
He bent his head. His mouth found the line of her throat.
Stop, some distant part of him said, with the reflexive horror of four years of discipline. Stop. You don't know her. You haven't even—
The dream did not stop.
He was aware, in the way of dreams, of her dress giving way beneath his hands—not torn, not wrestled, simply yielding, as though the fabric itself had decided that he had waited long enough.
Of her breath catching. Of her turning, at last, in the circle of his arms, so that her hands came up to rest against his chest—not pushing him back, not pulling him closer, simply there, trembling faintly, as though she too could not quite believe it and did not want it to end.
He never saw her face. The dream denied him that. He saw her mouth—only her mouth, reddened and parted—and then her hand rising to his jaw, her thumb tracing the scar on his eyebrow with a tenderness that cracked his chest open like a struck bell.
"You're bleeding, Dominic."
No one had called him Dominic in four years.
His whole body surged toward her—hips, hands, mouth—and the dream broke over him in a hot white wave, and he came awake with a shout caught in his throat, sheets tangled, his body aching and shamed and furiously alive.
For a long moment he could not move. The whisky in his blood. The sweat on his skin. The damp warmth he had not felt since before Spain—since before he had decided, deliberately and with full malice of forethought, that he did not deserve to feel it again.
A woman he had never met.
A woman he had not even seen, not properly—only the back of a cloak in the rain.
And his sleeping mind had already taken her apart and given her back to him as a benediction.
He sat up. Pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The fire had burned to embers. The room was cold. Somewhere above him, a door closed softly, but Dominic did not register it; Dominic was registering only the hot pulse of something in his chest that he had thought long dead.
He rose. Stripped the damp sheet with furious efficiency and bundled it into the laundry basket, where Mrs Potter's morning girl would find it and, Dominic devoutly hoped, draw no conclusions.
He built up the fire with hands that were not entirely steady.
Poured another whisky and did not drink it, merely held the glass as though the weight might anchor him.
She is a governess, he told himself. She is under your roof. She will leave within three months, like the rest. You will not—you will not—
He sat in the chair by the fire, wrapped in his dressing gown, and waited for morning.
When at last he slept again, it was not of auburn hair and firelight. It was Spain. The ravine. The war all over again.
The nightmare had been a bad one.
They were always bad, of course—no man dreamt of Badajoz and woke refreshed—but some nights were worse than others.
Some nights he was back in the ravine, musket fire cracking through the darkness, men screaming, the smell of powder and blood thick in his throat.
Some nights he made different choices, and the dream showed him what might have been: more men saved, or fewer, or none at all.
Last night, William had died in his arms again. But this time, when Dominic looked down, it was not William’s face he saw.
It was the boy’s.
He had woken gasping, drenched in sweat, and had not attempted sleep again.
The whisky helped—it always helped, though he was not fool enough to suppose it led him anywhere good.
It dulled the edges. Quieted the noise. Allowed him to function through another day of estate management and correspondence and carefully rationed interaction with a household that had long since ceased to expect warmth from its master.