Page 76 of Duke of Moonstone
“I should hope they are real. Painted fish would be rather disappointing.”
“She said her father lets her feed them sometimes. With bread. Do fish like bread?”
“I believe they are not particular.”
“Could we bring a book? Sophia said she has not read the one about Captain. I told her she must. I told her the part about the hat, and she said it sounded wonderful. I must take her to the library.”
The library.
The thought arrived without permission. Not the library as it was now—the shelves, the books, the armchair by the fire where she read to Emily each evening. The library as it had been last night. The storm against the glass. The lamp burning low. Alexander’s hand at her waist, warm and firm through the muslin, and his fingers sliding into her hair, and his lips...
Frances reached for her teacup.
“Frances? Are you listening?”
“Of course, I am. Painted fish. Captain’s hat.”
“I said Sophia has a kitten. His name is Whisper. Is that not the best name you have ever heard?”
“It is an excellent name.”
“Better than Captain?”
“Different. One cannot compare a kitten and a dog. They are entirely separate categories of creature.”
Emily considered this with the gravity it apparently deserved. “I suppose that is fair.”
Frances took a sip of tea. It was too hot. She set it down and picked up her knife again, and the toast sat before her, half-buttered. Her hands were steady, her face was composed, and none of it was stopping her mind from returning to the thing she had told it, firmly and repeatedly, to leave alone.
He kissed me. And then he left.
She had not allowed herself to hope for a declaration. She was not a fool. She knew Alexander well enough by now to understand that declarations were not in his vocabulary—that the distance between what he felt and what he was willing to say was vast enough to lose a person in. She had not expected him to take her hands and tell her he loved her. She had not expected poetry or promises or any of the things that happened in the novels.
But she had hoped for something.
A word. A look. Some small acknowledgment over the morning table that what had happened between them was not a door to be shut but a door that had, at last, been opened. That the careful distance they had maintained for weeks had shifted. That the kiss had meant something beyond the storm and the lamplightand the particular weakness of a moment that could be blamed on proximity and nothing more.
Instead, he stepped back, said goodnight, and left the room with the composure of a man closing a ledger at the end of a long day’s accounting.
Goodnight.
As though it were simple. As though a person could kiss someone like that and then walk away and sleep soundly and rise the next morning with everything neatly in its place.
Frances glanced at the breakfast room door. The corridor beyond was empty and silent. A footman stood at his post near the sideboard, and the clock on the mantel indicated it was a quarter past. The chair at the head of the table—Alexander’s chair—sat exactly where it always did, pulled out at the right angle, its cushion smooth and undisturbed.
He was not coming.
She looked back at her plate. The toast had gone cold.
“Do you think Sophia would like to see Grandmama?” Emily was saying. “Grandmama tells the best stories. Better than books, even. She told me one yesterday about a horse that escaped from a stable and ran all the way to Bath. Can you imagine?”
“That is a very determined horse.”
“Grandmama said it took three days. And when they found it, it was eating roses in someone’s garden.”
“Naturally. One does not travel to Bath without stopping for roses.”
Emily giggled. Frances smiled at the sound and glanced again at the door.
