Page 27 of Duke of Moonstone
“Good.”
They looked at each other across the breakfast table, and Alexander became aware, with a clarity he did not want, of how the morning light highlighted the side of her face. The curve of her jaw. The small, stubborn line between her brows that appeared when she was holding something back.
He looked away and applied butter to his toast.
“There is one more thing,” the Duchess said.
He glanced up.
“I wish to continue my charity work at St. Thomas’, the school where Eleanor and I taught,” she said it with the air of someone stating a fact rather than making a reques, which he recognized as a strategy she employed when she expected resistance. “The children depend upon our visits. I will not abandon them simply because my circumstances have changed.”
Alexander set down his knife. The school. Malcolm Fraser’s school. The place where Eleanor had met the man she eloped with, where she had spent her afternoons teaching letters to children of the working poor and falling in love with a man who had nothing to offer her except principles and good intentions.
“No,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“That school is the reason that my sister...” He stopped himself. He pressed his lips together and regathered the sentence. “I am not inclined to encourage a continued association with that establishment.”
“The school did not cause Eleanor to elope. This was her personal decision. The school is a place where children learn to read, nothing more.”
“It is also a place where young women of rank find themselves in compromising associations with unsuitable men.”
“I am already married,” she said. “To a duke. Whom precisely do you imagine I might find there who could compromise me further?”
Alexander opened his mouth and closed it again.
A handsome young teacher. A man of letters, idealistic and warm, the kind of man who speaks of poetry and justice and the betterment of mankind. The kind of man who looks at a woman and sees her rather than her title.
The way Malcolm Fraser looked at Eleanor.
He pushed the thought away with considerable force.
“If you must go,” he said, and the words came out more tightly than he had intended, “then I will accompany you.”
“You?”
“It would be proper. A duchess does not travel unescorted to the East End of London.”
“I have been traveling there unescorted for two years.”
“You were not a duchess then.”
She looked at him with an expression that suggested she was weighing the value of continuing the argument against thevalue of securing the thing she actually wanted. He watched the calculation happen behind her eyes and found it, despite everything, slightly impressive.
“Fine,” she said. “You may accompany me.”
“I was not asking for your permission.”
“And yet here we are.”
Their eyes met, and something passed between them that was neither agreement nor hostility and was far more dangerous than either—a current beneath the surface of the conversation that Alexander felt in his chest and deliberately chose not to acknowledge.
He looked down at his plate.
This is manageable. We have established terms. We will keep our distance. We will fulfill our public obligations and otherwise occupy ourselves separately. It is a perfectly rational arrangement, and it will serve us both well.
He picked up his coffee and drank. When he set it down, his wife was watching him again, and her expression was one he could not read, one that was neither cold nor warm but something between the two that he could not locate on any map he possessed.
