Page 59 of Duke of Moonstone
The study was quiet. The letter sat unfinished on his desk. The clock ticked on the mantelpiece. Everything in this room was ordered, controlled, predictable—the shelves, the ledgers, the correspondence arranged by urgency, the brandy decanter precisely where he had left it.
He thought of the argument.
Two nights ago, Frances was positioned where the firelight illuminated her face. She told him that he treated duty like other men treat alcohol—that he was selfish and had never truly let go of anything.
She is wrong.
He returned to the window despite himself.
She is wrong because she has never carried what I carry. She has never, at twenty years old, stood in a solicitor’s office and been told that the fortune was gone, the estates mortgaged, the tenants months from eviction. She has never sat across from her father’s creditors and negotiated terms while her mother wept in the room above and his sister asked when Papa was coming home.
She speaks of love as though it were simple. As though one could simply feel and still function. As though the heart and the mind could work in concert rather than at cross purposes.
She does not know what it is to have no choice.
He braced his hands on the windowsill.
Below, Emily was tugging at Frances’ hand. “Come closer! I want to see if it comes back!”
“All right, all right. But quietly. We must not frighten it.”
They moved together beneath the elm, Emily pulling Frances forward. Frances went willingly. More than willingly. She bent down to Emily’s level, tilting her head to hear something the child was whispering—something too quiet to reach the study window—and then she laughed.
Not the laugh she deployed at dinner parties. Not the measured, musical sound that emerged at precisely the right moment in precisely the right volume to charm a table full of strangers.
This was real. Sudden and bright, startled out of her by whatever Emily had said, and it changed her whole face—opened it, softened it, turned her from a duchess into a woman who was simply happy, in this moment, to be exactly where she was.
“Emily Penford, you are the cleverest creature in this garden,” Frances said. “Cleverer than the sparrow, certainly.”
“Cleverer than you?”
“Far cleverer than me. I would never have noticed that.”
Emily beamed. Alexander could see it from the window—the full, uncomplicated joy of a child who had been praised and believed it.
Good.
He straightened. Clasped his hands behind his back.
This is a good thing. A duchess should know how to conduct herself with a ward. My wife ought to be kind to the child. It is entirely appropriate—desirable, even—that Emily should be comfortable with her.
These are the thoughts of a sensible man managing a household. Nothing more.
He watched Frances straighten and brush a strand of hair from Emily’s forehead. The gesture was absent, instinctive—the gesture of a woman who touched the child without thinking about it because touching her had become natural.
Nothing more.
And yet.
There was something in the way Frances laughed. It produced in him a feeling he could not file neatly underapprovalorsatisfaction. It sat in his chest in the space where those things ought to have been, but it was neither of them. It was warmer. More dangerous. Less controlled.
He frowned at the window.
Stop.
“Shall we go to the library now?” Emily asked. Her hand was still in Frances’. “I want to know how many babies sparrows have.”
“We shall go directly. But first... do you see there? I think the mother has come back.”
