Page 52 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“I do not.”
The butler didn't move. He remained by the door, his hands clasped behind his back. “If I may be so bold, Your Grace, I believe I might be overstepping, but it seems you are stressing yourself to avoid a different kind of transition entirely.”
Theodore’s hand stilled. “And what would that be?”
“The Duchess, sir. She has set the table for luncheon two days in a row. It has not gone unnoticed by the staff that you seem to be treating this study as a fortress.”
A flicker of guilt pricked at Theodore’s chest, but he masked it with a wave of his hand. “I have simply been lost in work. She is a woman of sense, I’m sure she understands that the management of an estate of this magnitude takes time.”
“I wondered,” Harrison continued. “Whether Your Grace was perhaps finding reasons to be elsewhere, and whether that was intentional.”
The study was very quiet. The fire had burned low. “You may close up for the night, Harrison,” Theodore said.
“Of course, Your Grace.” Harrison moved toward the door. He reached the door and paused, one hand on the frame.
“The Duchess has been making changes to the household,” he said. “Small ones, thus far. She has reorganized the morning schedule for the upstairs staff, which Mrs. Holt says is considerably more efficient than what we had before. She has been corresponding with the estate manager about the two tenant disputes that have been unresolved since spring. I must say that she looks tired lately. Not well rested.” He paused. “She met the last of the indoor staff this afternoon. All fifty-three of them. They all whisper that she is very pleasant. Very nice.” He inclined his head once more. “Goodnight, Your Grace.”
With that, Harrison closed the door quietly behind him.
Theodore was still. He sat in his study for a long moment. The ledger was still in front of him, but he was not reading it. He was looking at the fire, which had burned down to almost nothing.
He thought about Emily on the staircase that night, with her hair half down and her dressing gown, and the particular expression she had worn when she said they needed to talk. He thought about his gaze dropping to her mouth and the fact that he had not been able to stop it.
How — even up to that very moment — he had not figured out why he did that, and he was troubled by the fact that Emily might have noticed too.
Had she eaten?
The thought arrived before he had decided to think it. He looked at the door. He looked at the letter. He looked back at the door.
Had she eaten dinner? Had she taken any time to rest? Why had Harrison said she looked tired? How tired? Tired in the way everyone was tired at the end of a long day, or tired in the way that meant something had been going on that nobody had told him about, because he had been in this study for two days and had made it quite clear that he did not want to be disturbed?
He had told Harrison he did not want to know what the duchess had been up to.
He was now very much wanting to know what the duchess had been up to.
He pushed back from the desk.
There was no point trying to work. The ledger in front of him had been the same one for the last forty minutes, which meant he had not actually been reading it, and that the last forty minutes had been an elaborate performance of working for an audience of nobody. He was alone in his study, and he had not absorbed a single word since Harrison had mentioned Emily.
He stood. He rolled down his sleeves. He looked at the stack of correspondence on his desk, acknowledging that it would still be there in the morning and that this was, in fact, fine.
He snuffed the remaining candles, plunging the room into a velvet darkness, and made his way to the door.
The hallway was silent, lit only by the faint, silver glow of the moon spilling through the high windows. He was halfway to the master wing when a movement near the shadow of the nursery door caught his eye. It was the small, stumbling figure of a child.
Theodore slowed his pace, his brow furrowed. His eyes widened when he saw that it was Frederick, roaming the hallway all alone.
He was in his nightshirt, barefoot, moving along the wall with one hand trailing it as though he needed the support, his head down and his shoulders rounded. Even from this distance, Theodore could see the slight unsteadiness of him, the small hitching breaths that meant he had been crying for long enough that the crying had gone quiet.
Theodore crossed the corridor.
“Frederick?” Theodore called out softly, his voice echoing in the stillness.
The boy jumped, spinning around. “What is it?” he asked. Not loudly. Just for the two of them in the dark corridor. “What has happened?”
Frederick looked at him. His mouth pressed together. He shook his head once.
“Frederick?”
