Page 33 of Duke of Moonstone
He knelt. The floor was hard,; the position was uncomfortable, and his coat was going to be ruined. The girl set her slate on the desk beside them and pointed at a crooked letter that was meant to be a B but was not succeeding.
“Like this,” Alexander said, and took the chalk from her small fingers and drew a B and then guided her hand as she traced over it.
“Again,” she said.
He drew another.
“Again.”
Fifteen minutes passed. The teacher stood at the blackboard, his expression suggesting he was witnessing something unexpected and not entirely certain how to categorize. The Duke of Whitestone, on his knees on a dusty floor, was helping a five-year-old girl learn her letters.
Alexander did not notice the teacher’s expression. He did not notice the time. He noticed only the girl’s small hand under his and the fierce concentration on her face and the way she said, “I made a B!” with a triumph that was, pound for pound, more genuine than anything he had heard in a ballroom in the last ten years.
It drew Eleanor into his thoughts, and he wondered if this place had the same effect on her as it did on his wife. He recalled howeager she always was to leave the house, and when she would return, Eleanor’s spirits were as high as the clouds.
When he finally looked up, Frances was watching him from across the room.
Their eyes met. She did not look away. Neither did he. And something passed between them that was not argument and was not tension and was not any of the things that had lived in the space between them since the night of the masquerade.
It was something quieter. Something that did not yet have a name.
Alexander looked away first.
CHAPTER 14
Alexander stole a glance at his wife.
She was leaning against the carriage window and looking out, seemingly lost in her own world.
On the way to the school, the quiet had been sharp-edged, deliberate, the silence of two people making a point of not speaking. This was something else. It was softer and uncertain. The kind of silence that exists between two people who have just seen something they are not yet sure what to do with.
Alexander sat with his hands on his knees, looking out the window, and he was aware, with the particular awareness that had become his constant companion since the wedding, of the Duchess sitting across from him. She was still. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her gaze was directed somewhere toward the middle distance, and there was a small, private smile on her face that she did not seem to know she was wearing.
Then she turned to him, and the stillness broke like a dam.
“Did you notice how well Mary has improved with her numbers?” Her whole face was alight. “She could barely count to twenty when I first began working with her, and today, she was adding sums on her slate without any help at all. And Timothy... He could barely recognize his letters last month!”
“I noticed Timothy,” Alexander said. “He seemed quite pleased with himself.”
“He should be. He has worked terribly hard.” She leaned forward slightly, her hands moving as she spoke, and there was a quality to her that he had not seen before, or rather, that he had seen only in the schoolroom and was now seeing again, stripped of all the careful restraint she wore in his house. “The teacher tells me he comes early every morning to practice before the other children arrive. Every morning without fail.”
“Admirable.”
“It is more than admirable. It is extraordinary. A boy of eight, with no one at home to help him, deciding for himself that he will learn to read.” She sat back, and her eyes were bright. “That is the kind of determination that changes a life.”
Alexander said nothing for a moment. He was watching her face and thinking about the way she had knelt on that floor without a thought for the silk, the way the children had pressed against her as though she were the center of something they needed, the wayshe had guided Timothy’s finger along each word with a patience that did not falter or thin.
“The girl,” he said. “The one with the red hair. She brought you the slate with her sums.”
“Sarah.” The Duchess smiled. “She is very proud of her arithmetic. She informed me last month that she intends to keep a shop one day.”
“A shop.”
“A very fine one, she assures me.”
Something tugged at the corner of his mouth. He suppressed it. “And the small one who attached herself to my coat?”
“Ah.” Her smile widened. “That would be Nell. She is new. She has only been coming for a few weeks.”
