Page 21 of Duke of Moonstone
He gave a brief nod, said something to Graves in a low voice, and walked away. Frances stood in the hall of her new home on her wedding day and watched her husband disappear toward his study, keeping her expression entirely neutral and her chin level.
“Shall I show Your Grace to your chambers?” Mrs. Wells asked. Her voice was gentle which Frances noted with a gratitude she was not going to examine too closely in present company.
Frances turned to the housekeeper and made herself smile. “Please.”
Her rooms were on the first floor, connected to the Duke’s by a shared sitting room that currently had all the warmth of a room that had been prepared for someone rather than lived in.
Everything was fresh and clean and correct and utterly impersonal, and Frances stood in the center of her new bedchamber and looked at the unfamiliar. Then she thought about her room at Evermere, which was smaller but entirely hers, and felt something in her chest pull in a direction she could not afford to follow just now.
“The Dowager Duchess favored these rooms,” Mrs. Wells offered, from somewhere behind her. “We have done what we could to refresh them. If there is anything Your Grace would like changed?—”
“It is lovely,” Frances said. “Thank you, Mrs. Wells. You have been very thorough.”
The housekeeper seemed pleased by this and began a gentle, efficient tour of the rooms—where things were kept, how to ring for what, which maid would be assigned to her. Frances listened, nodded, filed things away, and tried to feel like a person wholived here, a feat that would require considerably more time than one afternoon.
When Mrs. Wells left her, she did what she always did when she was uncertain—she moved. She explored.
The one introduction that had not yet been made was the Dowager Duchess, and Frances found herself thinking about this as she made her way back towards her own rooms.
Alexander had told her, briefly and without elaboration, that his mother was unwell and that he preferred to wait a few days before the introduction. Frances had agreed because it seemed the right thing to do, and also because she was slightly nervous about it and an extra few days were not entirely unwelcome.
She is his mother,Frances thought.She may not be pleased about any of this. She may take one look at me and wonder what her son has done.
She changed for dinner with the help of Miss Ripley, her lady’s maid—a quiet, competent young woman who had come with her from Evermere and whose familiar presence was, Frances discovered, considerably more steadying than she would have predicted.
“Will His Grace be joining you for dinner?” Miss Ripley asked with the careful neutrality of someone who was not entirely certain of the answer herself.
“I expect so,” Frances said because it was her wedding day, and what else was one supposed to say?
He did not come to dinner.
She sat at one end of a dining table that was quite too long for a single person and ate a meal that was expertly prepared and entirely wasted on someone who was too distracted to taste it, attended by two footmen who were professionally emotionless and therefore no company at all. Graves appeared once to ask if everything was to her satisfaction, and Frances told him it was excellent and that she needed nothing further, and she meant it, and she also meant the second part more than the first.
By the time she returned to her rooms, she had made peace, more or less, with the evening.He is busy, she told herself.He has things to attend to. He did say so this afternoon.
She told herself all that in the calm and rational way of a woman who was not, absolutely not, sitting in her bedchamber on her wedding night feeling foolish about the fact that her husband had not come to dinner.
Miss Ripley helped her out of her dress and into her nightdress then took down her hair and brushed it in silence. Frances sat at the dressing table, looked at herself, and thought that she looked much less like a duchess than her title required at the moment. She figured that was probably fine since no one was here to notice.
“Will you need anything else, Your Grace?” Miss Ripley asked.
“I rang for tea earlier, I think it is still coming. You may go; I will manage.”
When she was alone, she sat for a moment in the quiet of the room and listened to the house—the distant sounds of it settling around her, unfamiliar and large and nothing at all like Evermere—and she told herself firmly that she was not disappointed and that tomorrow would be easier and that she was going to be perfectly all right.
Then she heard the knock.
She looked up. The tea at last—she had almost forgotten about it. She pushed back the stool, crossed to the door, and pulled it open, already turning back toward the dressing table, then she stopped.
Because it was not the tea.
Alexander stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, his coat gone, his cravat loosened at the throat, looking more like a regular person and less like a duke than she had ever seen him.
Frances froze.
CHAPTER 10
Frances’ heart would not stop slamming against her ribs.
