Page 19 of A Highly Unlikely Duchess
“She was twenty years old when she left,” Emily stubbornly continued. “She was in love.”
“She was foolish,” Charles said.
“She was young,” Emily said. “There is a difference.”
The newspaper came down. Charles looked at his daughter across the room with the eyes that Emily had inherited, and that looked considerably less warm on him than they did on her. “She disgraced this family,” he said. “What about that do you not understand. Are you living under a rock? Do you know the repercussions of her actions on us? Are you blind to the consequences of having that boy living under our roof? She chose a man with no title, no fortune, and no standing, and she ran off with him in the middle of the night without a word to anyone, and she did not look back. I have nothing further to say about it.”
Emily opened her mouth.
“Emily.” Sarah’s voice came again. “Retire for the night. Now.”
“Mama —”
“Now,” she said and looked away.
Reluctantly, she rose to her feet and made to leave the room.
“Emily,” Charles said, stopping her in her tracks. “One month. I will not be changing my mind.”
She stood in the corridor for a moment. The house was quiet around her. The anger sat in her chest, hot, tight, and old in the way that only family anger was old, the kind that had been building long before the thing that set it off. She was angry at her father for his demeanor and the way he spoke about Anne as though she had been a problem to be managed rather than a person to be grieved. She was angry at her mother for her inaction and the way she looked at the fireplace when Anne's name came up.
She was angry that Anne had been dead for two months and neither of them had cried. Not once. Not in front of her.
Anne had deserved better than that.
Frederick deserved better than that.
Emily reached the door at the end of the corridor and stopped. She pressed her hand flat against the wood, just for a moment, and took a slow breath.
Then she pushed it open and went inside.
“I think he is asleep now, My Lady.”
Emily did not move immediately. She stayed where she was, perched on the edge of the bed, her hand resting lightly on Frederick's back, rising and falling with the slow, even rhythm of a child finally, fully under. She watched him for another moment. The dark lashes against his cheek. The small fist curled loosely near his chin. The way sleep smoothed everything out of his face, all the wariness, all the stillness he carried when he was awake, until what remained was simply a little boy.
“He fought it tonight,” Emily whispered to Peggy, who was seated on the other side of the bed.
“He always fights it,” Peggy said softly. “But he always goes down for you.”
Emily looked back at him. At the scar that ran along his left cheek, pale and thin in the low light of the single candle Peggy held, following the line of his cheekbone from just below his eye to the corner of his mouth.
“He barely made a sound when I came in,” Emily said. “Just watched me.”
“I like that he trusts you,” Peggy said. “You are the only one he does.”
Emily said nothing to that. She pulled the blanket up slightly over Frederick's shoulder and then sat back.
“He was so good tonight,” Peggy said. “He sat with his supper, and he did not complain once.” She stopped. Pressed her lips together briefly. “But it still concerns me that he is not running and making noise and causing all manner of trouble around the house like little boys do.”
Emily looked at the scar again.
She had been told about the accident by the solicitor who had handled Anne's affairs. A dry, efficient man who had delivered the details of it with the same tone he might use for a property inventory. A carriage on a muddy road. A rainy evening. The wheels had gone on a bend, and the carriage had come down hard and fast.
She imagined Frederick, only six years old, huddled in the corner of that carriage as it tumbled into the ravine. She imagined him reaching out for Anne, for a father who was already gone, his small hands slick with mud and rain. Even after the locals had pulled him from the wreckage, he had sat by the roadside, clutching a small wooden horse, the only thing he had saved from the debris. He had bitten his lip so hard it bled,his eyes wide and vacant as he watched the only world he knew get covered in coarse grey blankets.
She wondered what went through the mind of a child in that moment? To lose both parents in a single heartbeat, in the middle of a storm, with nothing but the smell of wet earth and iron in the air?
“I cannot even imagine it,” Emily breathed, a single tear escaping to trace a path down her cheek. “To be so young and realize the voices that tucked you in every night are suddenly... silent. I think of my own parents, and for all their coldness, all their talk of propriety... I cannot fathom losing them both at once. I don't think I would have survived it at six years old.”
