Page 60 of Duke of Moonstone
“Where?”
“On the lower branch. Just there.”
“I see her! Oh, she is small.”
“She is. But very brave, I think. Sparrows are braver than they look.”
“Like me?”
Frances’ face changed—not dramatically but in the way that Alexander had learned to watch for. A softening around the eyes. A warmth that went deeper than a smile.
“Exactly like you,” she said.
Alexander’s hands tightened on the windowsill.
Two months.
The number passed through his mind with the mechanical rhythm of a clock striking the hour. Two months. That was the agreement. Two months of marriage performed in public, of domestic life conducted in private, and then—separation. Separate lives. Separate residences. A marriage that existed on paper and in the eyes of the law and nowhere else.
It had been sensible. It had been rational. It had been the only possible arrangement for two people bound by circumstance rather than choice, and he had proposed it because it was fair, and she had accepted it because she understood that fairness was all either of them could offer.
Two months. Ticking down. Every day is a day closer to the end of this... whatever this is.
He watched Frances take Emily’s hand and turn toward the house, and the child went with her without looking back, chattering about sparrows and nests and babies, and her thinshoulders were loose, and her step was light, and she looked, from this distance, like a child who belonged somewhere.
She is happy.
The thought was simple. And underneath it, something harder pressed upward.
He had not considered this.
When he had agreed—reluctantly, under considerable pressure—to bring Emily to Whitestone House, he had been thinking of practicality. Of his mother’s wishes. Of the Duchess’ arguments which had been passionate and pointed and, he could admit in the privacy of his own mind, not entirely wrong.
He had not thought about what would happen after.
Emily had lost her parents. A carriage accident, swift and brutal, that had taken everything from her in the space of a single afternoon. She had been moved to the countryside. Given a governess. Provided for in every material sense. And then she had been brought here, to this house, and introduced to a woman who knelt on marble floors and talked about dragons and offered her Christian name over sparrows.
A woman who would leave.
In a matter of weeks, Frances will no longer be a daily presence in this child’s life.
The thought sat in his chest like a stone swallowed whole.
Emily would wake one morning and find that Frances was not at breakfast. Would not be in the garden. Would not be bending down to hear whispered secrets or laughing at clever observations about birds. The woman who had taught her to ask for potatoes and told her she was brave—that woman would simply be gone. And Emily, who had already learned that people left and did not come back, would learn it again.
Alexander stepped back from the window.
I am still right. About duty. About obligation. About the necessity of structure, order, and control.
I am still right.
But perhaps... perhaps being right is not the same as being wise.
Their voices had faded. They were inside now, heading for the library, and the garden below was empty except for the sparrow which had returned to its branch and sat there, small and brown and entirely unconcerned with the complications of the household beneath it.
He wondered, with unwelcome discomfort, whether he should have considered that earlier.
CHAPTER 23
