Page 32 of Duke of Moonstone
She left. The door closed behind her with a soft click that should not have sounded like a victory, and yet somehow did.
Alexander looked at his half-finished letter and decided that the drainage on the south field could wait.
The carriage ride was silent.
This was not the comfortable silence shared by two people at ease with each other but rather a deliberate, weighty silence of two individuals fully aware of each other’s breathing yet choosing not to acknowledge it. His wife sat opposite him, her hands resting in her lap, her gaze fixed out the window, observing the streets constrict and the buildings draw closer as they traveled east.
Alexander expected the visit to be quick. A brief appearance, a few words with whoever had replaced Fraser, a survey of the premises to ensure nothing objectionable was occurring, and then the carriage home. Thirty minutes, perhaps forty. A duty discharged.
They arrived. The building was modest with the quiet dignity of a place cared for by people who could not afford to care for much else. Alexander helped the Duchess down from the carriage and followed her inside.
What happened next was not what he had prepared for.
The Duchess crossed the threshold of the schoolroom and became someone else entirely.
Not someone else. Someone more. The careful composure she wore through every room of Whitestone House fell away like a coat being shrugged off, and what was underneath it was—he did not have a word for it immediately. Light. The kind of light that drew things toward it.
A small boy was hunched over a battered primer at a desk near the window, his brow furrowed with the effort of someone fighting a losing battle. The Duchess went to him at once. She knelt. Her silk dress—pale blue, the same one she had worn to his study not an hour ago—pooled around her on the dusty floor, and she did not so much as glance at it.
“Try again, Timothy.” She leaned close to the book. “Sound it by parts.”
The boy looked up at her then back at the page. “Th—the. The c-c?—”
“Take your time.”
“The c-cat. The cat s-sat?—”
“Yes. Go on.”
“The cat sat on the—the m-mat!”
His face broke open. The grin was enormous, gap-toothed, incandescent. “I did it, My Lady!”
The Duchess laughed, and it was not the polished laugh she had deployed at their wedding which was polished and well-timed. This was real. It filled the room and changed it, and Alexander stood in the doorway and watched it happen, feeling something shift beneath his feet that he could not immediately identify.
She is kneeling on a dirty floor in a silk dress, and she does not care.
The other children descended upon her like a flock of sparrows spotting breadcrumbs. A girl with red hair thrust a slate under her nose. A boy of about seven tugged at her sleeve and demanded she listen to him count. Two smaller children simply pressed against her sides, as though proximity alone was sufficient, and the Duchess accommodated all of them with an ease that suggested she had done this many times before.
Her laughter came again, repeatedly, each time catching Alexander off guard.
This is not my world.
He stood at the doorway with his hands clasped behind his back and felt, for the first time he could remember, completely unnecessary. The schoolroom was modest—wooden desks, chalkdust, a small stove in the corner—and it was warmer and livelier than any room in his house. The young man who had taken Fraser’s place watched from beside the blackboard with the quiet satisfaction of someone who understood exactly what was happening and was content to let it.
Then something tugged at Alexander’s coat.
He looked down. A girl of perhaps five or six was standing beside him, small and serious, with dark eyes that were studying him with the unblinking directness that only children possessed.
“Do you know how to read, too?” she asked.
Alexander opened his mouth. Closed it again. He was aware, from a distance, that this was the first time in recent memory a question had left him completely without a prepared response.
“I do,” he said.
“Will you help me?” She held up her slate. “I cannot make the letters come out right.”
He looked at the slate then at the child. His eyes shifted across the room to the Duchess, who was helping Timothy with another sentence and had not noticed him. Finally, he returned his gaze to the girl’s upturned face and realized that his knees were bending before his mind had given the command.
