Page 48 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
That thought arrived with the particular discomfort of something she had pushed to the edges of her mind. She had never considered them actually honeymooning. But it was expected. She had never allowed herself to think about it properly, not the word or the implication of it, because thinking about it properly would have required thinking about Theodore, and thinking about Theodore in that context required a kind of honesty she could not possibly bring herself to feel. It was too vulnerable.
She was still not entirely ready for it.
What she kept returning to instead. At different times... different moments of each day. While she was between staff introductions or helping Frederick adjust to a house ten times the size of anything he had ever known... she thought about it, thought about Theodore and what he was doing.
What was in this for him?
She had asked herself this before, in the library at the masquerade, and he had told her plainly that he had his own reasons. She had accepted that and not looked into it further. But his reasons had been about Julia, about dismantling a plan he had not wanted, and that plan had been dismantled in a way neither of them had anticipated. Now here they were, two people who had stumbled into a marriage through a curtain and a scandal and a declaration made in front of witnesses.
Yet, she was the one who had walked away from it with everything she had come into the season for.
Frederick was safe. She was a duchess. She had the name, the standing, and the protection she had needed. She had all of it.
Theodore had a wife he had not chosen, a ward he had not planned for, and a honeymoon that was currently being spent learning about the price of grain and the opinions of a head gardener.
She could not give him back the choice. That was done.
What she could do was this. She could learn every room in this house, every name in this household, and every account in the ledger. She could meet all members of staff and remember all of them. She could correspond with the estate manager and manage the household. She could be, if nothing else, a duchess worth having.
It was a small thing to offer in exchange for a life.
“What about the duke?” Emily asked, turning her attention to Peggy.
“Did you know that his father, the late duke, was considered one of the most severe men in the county?” Peggy said, lowering her voice.
Emily tilted her head sideways. “Really?”
“I spent the better part of this afternoon in the kitchen and the servants' hall and I will tell you, Your Grace, that not one person in this house had a kind word to say about the late duke. Not one.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I hear he was cold. Exacting. Everything done to a precise standard and heaven help whoever fell short of it.”
Emily said nothing. She was thinking about Theodore at the Pembourne's dinner table, making everyone laugh before the soup had been cleared. About Theodore walking into a ballroom as though the whole evening had been arranged for his personal entertainment... Theodore was leaning against a reading table in a library with his coat undone and his hair slightly out of order, and that particular ease about him, the ease of a man who had never once in his life been afraid of taking up space.
“That...” she said slowly. “...is very difficult to imagine.”
“Is it not,” Peggy agreed, with the satisfied expression of someone whose information had landed exactly where intended. “I heard that the housekeeper, Mrs. Holt, has been here since His Grace was a boy. Apparently, the late duke ran this house the way a general runs a regiment. Schedules. Rules. Standards for every conceivable thing. His Grace was held to all of it. His studies, his conduct, his posture at the dining table. Nothing was ever done well enough.” She paused and scanned the room. “The late duke was very strict. People were wary of him; they couldn’t even look him in the eye.”
“Well, His Grace is definitely everything his father was not,” Emily said. “But I wonder what changed if he was raised so...rigidly. How can someone with such an upbringing be so good at making jokes and brightening up a room with his mere presence?”
“Everyone in this house loves him, Your Grace. Every single one of the staff. So I heard. You can feel it when they speak about him. It is not the loyalty of people who are afraid of losing their positions. It is something else entirely.”
Emily looked at the window for a long moment.
She thought about the freedom Theodore moved through the world with, the lightness of him, the way he found humor in everything and took nothing so seriously that it could wound him. She thought perhaps that none of it was effortless. None of it had simply arrived. Perhaps, he had worked hard to build that personality over the years, deliberately. Perhaps, he had decided that although he grew up in a cold house, he had decided, somewhere along the way, that he would rather be in the warmth.
She thought about the freedom Theodore moved through the world with, the lightness of him, the way he found humor in everything and took nothing so seriously that it could wound him. She thought perhaps that none of it was effortless. None of it had simply arrived. Perhaps he had worked hard to build that over the years, deliberately. Perhaps he had decided that although he grew up in a cold house, he would rather be in the warmth.
She sat with that for a moment.
She had judged him for it. That was the honest truth of it, and she was honest enough to admit it, at least to herself. She had looked at his ease, his charm, his complete refusal to take anything seriously, and she had decided, very early and very confidently, that it was shallowness. That a man who laughed that readily and moved through the world that lightly must not be carrying anything of substance underneath it. She had found him exhausting precisely because he seemed unbothered by things she considered important, and she had taken that as evidence of a character that had never been required to develop any real depth.
She had been — she now suspected — spectacularly wrong about that. She was going to have to revisit that opinion.
There was something moving in her chest that felt odd. Not quite guilt, though guilt was part of it. Something more like an unsettling feeling of looking at something familiar and realizing you have been seeing it wrong the whole time.
She wanted to know more. That was the simplest way to put it. She wanted to know how a boy in a cold house with a strict, joyless father had become the man who made every room warmer simply by walking into it. She wanted to know what it had cost him. She wanted to know which parts were real and which were armor, and whether he even knew the difference anymore.
She was curious about Theodore Merrick in a way she had not allowed herself to be before, and that, she thought, was perhapsthe most surprising thing that had happened to her since she arrived at Carrowell.
“He has been like this since this afternoon,” Emily said, pressing the back of her hand to Frederick's forehead for the third time in as many minutes. She sat at the edge of Frederick’s bed, her eyes fixed on the boy’s flushed face.
