Page 85 of Duke of Moonstone
“Where are you from?” the boy asked. He had not moved from beside their table. His mother was calling him back, but he ignored her with the selective deafness of all eight-year-olds. “You talk like a London lady.”
“I am from London,” Frances said. “More or less.”
“What’s it like?”
“Noisy. Crowded. Rather a lot of carriages.”
“I should like to see it. Pa says it’s too big.”
“It is very big. But the parks are lovely.”
The boy’s mother appeared behind him, one hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, ma’am. He’ll talk the ear off anyone who’ll listen.”
“Please, do not apologize.” Frances turned to the woman with that particular openness Alexander had seen her give Emily. “He is delightful. And he has excellent taste in balls.”
The woman laughed. “That one’s his pride and joy. Won it off a sailor down in Northampton.”
“A sailor in Northampton?” Frances tilted her head. “That seems rather far from the sea.”
“My brother,” the father called from the next table. He had a broad, weathered face and the ease of a man comfortable in any company. “Sailed merchant ships for ten years. Just come home this spring. He’s the one who gave Tommy the ball. Said he got it in Madras.”
“Madras!” Frances leaned forward. “How extraordinary.”
The man grinned. “He’ll tell you all about it if you let him. Won’t shut up about it, truth be told. Oi, Will!”
A third man appeared from the bar—younger than the father, thinner, with a deep tan that spoke of years under a foreign sun. He carried two tankards and a grin that was missing the same tooth as his nephew’s.
“Someone’s asking about Madras,” the father said.
“Are they now?” The sailor—Will—set down his tankards and looked at Frances with the pleased surprise of a man who had found an audience. “What would you like to know?”
“Everything,” Frances said.
Alexander watched her turn fully in her chair to face the sailor. Watched her ask questions—Was it very hot? What did the markets look like? Were the spices truly as vivid as she’d read?—with an eagerness that had nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with genuine curiosity. He watched the sailor settle into his tale with the confidence of a born storyteller, his hands moving through the air to describe the size of the trading vessels, the color of the water, the monkeys that stole fruit from the dock workers.
He watched the mother pull her chair closer. Watched the eldest daughter lean in. Watched the boy with the ball sit cross-legged on the floor beside Frances’ chair as though he had known her all his life.
She is entirely at ease. How does she do that?
It was not a skill he possessed. The ability to enter a room and simply belong. To take the measure of the people around her and match herself to them without diminishing either party.
“—and the water was so clear you could see straight down to the coral,” Will was saying. “Pink and white like a lady’s garden, only underwater.”
“That sounds beautiful,” Frances said.
“It was. Nearly made up for the seasickness.”
“Were you very ill?”
“First month, I thought I’d die. Second month, I wished I would.” He grinned. “Third month, I got my sea legs and never lost ‘em.”
Frances laughed again. The sound drew something loose in Alexander’s chest—something he had been holding tight for hours, for days, since the morning he had left the house before breakfast and spent the day with his bailiff rather than face her across the toast.
“And you, sir?” The father had turned to Alexander. “You’re a quiet one. Does she do all the talking for both of you?”
The question was friendly and teasing, the kind of thing one man said to another about his wife in a room full of strangers. It carried no weight of formality or deference because this man had no idea who was sitting three feet from him.
“Generally, yes,” he said.
